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John Shattuck, Aaron Huang, and Elisabeth Thoreson-Green. 2/28/2019. The War on Voting Rights. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2019003rd ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

Discussion Paper on The War on Voting Rights: 

The 2020 presidential election will be a showdown over the right to vote. The outcome will be determined by an electoral system under attack from both foreign and domestic sources. Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election are being extensively investigated, but the domestic war on voting rights is less well understood.  After more than a century of expanding the voting rights of previously disenfranchised groups, the American electoral system today is confronted by political and legal maneuvers to curtail the hard-won rights of these same groups, ostensibly in the name of combating fraud and regulating voting, but in fact in order to change the outcome of elections. 

 



Joseph Nye. 4/2/2019. Human Rights and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2019005th ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. See full text.Abstract

This working paper is a transcription of a talk given by Joseph Nye for the Carr Center's Fierce Urgency of Now lecture series. 

 



Carr Center Human Rights for Policy. 4/4/2019. “The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court at 20: Looking Back and Looking Forward. ”. See full text.Abstract

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court at 20: Looking Back and Looking Forward. Symposium Report.

 

Matthias Risse, Faculty Director of the Carr Center, and Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, opened the conference with welcoming remarks. Risse noted that 2018 was a year of anniversaries, not only the 20th anniversary of the Rome Statute but also the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of the American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man, an occasion both for celebration and for critical reflection. Sikkink also noted the 20th anniversary of the Rome Statute was a moment to reflect and remember, looking backward to take stock with an eye toward moving justice forward in the future.

 



Luís Roberto Barroso. 4/4/2019. “Countermajoritarian, Representative, and Enlightened: The Roles of Constitutional Courts in Democracies.” The American Journal of Comparitive Law. See full text.Abstract

Justice Luis Roberto Barroso's latest article on Countermajoritarian, Representative, and Enlightened: The Roles of Constitutional Courts in Democracies.

The primary purpose of this article is to examine the roles of constitutional courts in contemporary democracies. It aims to demonstrate that such courts perform, in addition to the countermajoritarian role traditionally recognized in constitutional theory, two other roles: representative and, occasionally, enlightened. In the construction of the argument, the Article analyzes the phenomena of the judicialization of politics and judicial activism, as well as the issue of the difficult demarcation of the border between law and politics in the complex and plural societies of today. Although it presents several examples of the constitutional experience of the United States, the Article’s conclusions are generalizable, looking at the roles of constitutional courts from the perspective of a global constitutionalism whose categories have become common practice in the democracies of the world.

See full text. 



Luís Roberto Barroso and Aline Osorio. 1/2019. “Democracy, Political Crisis, and Constitutional Jurisdiction.” In Judicial Power: How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformation, Pp. 163-182. Cambridge University Press. See full text.Abstract

Read Justice Luis Roberto Barroso's latest chapter on Judicial Power: How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformation. 

 



Mathias Risse. 4/5/2019. Discrimination, Cognitive Biases and Human Rights Violations. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2019006th ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text. Abstract

Mathias Risse outlines his presentation at the First Colloquium on Discrimination, Cognitive Biases and Human Rights at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), on November 15th, 2018. 

 



Mathias Risse. 4/17/2019. Half a Century After Malcolm X Came to Visit: Reflections on the Thin Presence of African Thought in Global Justice Debates.. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2019007th ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

What would it mean for there to be a genuinely and legitimately global discourse on justice that involves Africa in authentic ways?

There are various responses. On the one hand, there is the idea of “philosophical fieldwork” developed by Katrin Flikschuh. African thought that fell by the wayside due to European expansionism must be recuperated and inserted into that discourse. On the other hand, there is the world society approach pioneered by John Meyer and others. The point is that ideas  from elsewhere in the world can be genuinely and legitimately appropriated, which is how ideas have always spread. Once ideas about justice are appropriated by African thinkers, they are associated with Africa as much as with any other region. My goal here is to explore both approaches and support the second, while also making room for the first. In doing so, I articulate a view about how my own ongoing work on global justice can be seen as a contribution to an actual global discourse. There are rather large (and sensitive) issues at stake here: how to think about respectful appropriation of ideas and thus respectful philosophical discourse.  A great deal of nuance is needed.



Sreang Heng. 9/4/2018. “Elections Under Oppression in Cambodia: A Predictable Outcome?” Yale Macmillan Center. See full text.Abstract

Read more on the Cambodian elections by by Sreang Heng, Carr Center fellow.

 

"On July 29, 2018, another parliamentary election was held in Cambodia. When the commune elections had been held on June 4, 2017, they were followed by complaints and recounts, but the official results showed that the two major rival parties had won the majority of votes: the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) received 1,156 communes (out of 1,646) while its opposition party, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) won 489. The Khmer National United Party received only one."

Full publication.



Timothy Patrick McCarthy. 6/24/2019. “Reclaiming Stonewall: Welcome to the Celebration—and the Struggle.” The Nation. See full text.Abstract

As we reckon with the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, it is essential that we ask, “What still needs to be done?”

"Fifty years ago, in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, a motley multitude of queer folks fought back. The stage was the Stonewall Inn, a popular Mafia-owned gay bar on Christopher Street in New York City’s West Village. The spectacle was a police raid, which had become an increasingly routine fact of queer life during the 1960s. It was summer, people were hot, and the nation was pulsing with protest."

Read more.



Desmond Patton. 8/7/2019. “Trump wants to “detect mass shooters before they strike.” It won’t work.” Vox.com. See full text.Abstract

New article on Vox highlights the work of Desmond Patton, Technology and Human Rights Fellow.

Desmond Patton, a Technology and AI fellow at the Carr Center, emphasized that current AI tools tend to identify the language of African American and Latinx people as gang-involved or otherwise threatening, but consistently miss the posts of white mass murderers.

"I think technology is a tool, not the tool," said Patton. "Often we use it as an escape so as to not address critical solutions that need to come through policy. We have to pair tech with gun reform. Any effort that suggests we need to do them separately, I don’t think that would be a successful effort at all.”

Read the full article here

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