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2019 Feb 25
Towards Life 3.0 - Ethics and Technology in the 21st Century: Human Rights & AI: The Long (Worrisome?) View
5:30pm to 6:45pm
Location: 
Wexner Room 102, 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA, 02138
Towards Life 3.0: Ethics and Technology in the 21^st Century is a new talk series organized and facilitated by Mathias Risse, Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration. Drawing inspiration from the...
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Mathias Risse. 2/12/2019. Human Rights, Artificial Intelligence and Heideggerian Technoskepticism: The Long (Worrisome?) View. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2019002nd ed. Cambridge: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. See full text.Abstract

Mathias Risse's explores the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights in his latest discussion paper. 

My concern is with the impact of Artificial Intelligence on human rights. I first identify two presumptions about ethics-and-AI we should make only with appropriate qualifications. These presumptions are that (a) for the time being investigating the impact of AI, especially in the human-rights domain, is a matter of investigating impact of certain tools, and that (b) the crucial danger is that some such tools – the artificially intelligent ones – might eventually become like their creators and conceivably turn against them.  We turn to Heidegger’s influential philosophy of technology to argue these presumptions require qualifications of a sort that should inform our discussion of AI. Next I argue that one major challenge is how human rights will prevail in an era that quite possibly is shaped by an enormous increase in economic inequality. Currently the human-rights movement is rather unprepared to deal with the resulting challenges. What is needed is greater focus on social justice/distributive justice, both domestically and globally, to make sure societies do not fall apart. I also ague that, in the long run, we must be prepared to deal with more types of moral status than we currently do and that quite plausibly some machines will have some type of moral status, which may or may not fall short of the moral status of human beings (a point also emerging from the Heidegger discussion). Machines may have to be integrated into human social and political lives.



John Ruggie. 2/10/2019. The Social Construction of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. CCDP 2019-001, February 2/10/2019. See full text.Abstract

 

The Social Construction of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights by John Ruggie: 

 

The United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) unanimously endorsed the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Guiding Principles) in June 2011. To date, they constitute the only official guidance the HRC and its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, have issued for states and business enterprises in relation to business and human rights. And it was the first time that either body had “endorsed” a normative text on any subject that governments did not negotiate themselves. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, describes the Guiding Principles as “the global authoritative standard, providing a blueprint for the steps all states and businesses should take to uphold human rights.” According to Arvind Ganesan, who directs business and human rights at Human Rights Watch, as recently as the late 1990s “there was no recognition that companies had human rights responsibilities.” Needless to say, many factors contributed to this shift, particularly escalating pressure from civil society and adversely affected populations. But in terms of putting a global standard in place, The Economist Intelligence Unit has judged HRC endorsement of the Guiding Principles to be the “watershed event.”

2019 Feb 28
Psychiatric Diagnosis: The First Cause of Everything Bad in the Mental Health System
12:00pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Wexner Room 102, 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA, 02138
Description:
Psychiatric diagnosis is completely unregulated and is widely — and unjustifiably — believed to be solidly grounded in science, to help reduce human suffering, and to expose psychiatrically labeled people to no harm. Dr. Paula J. Caplan resigned from two committees...
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2019 Mar 28
Human Rights in Hard Places Speaker Series: China & Human Rights: The Future of the Uyghur Community
11:45am to 1:00pm
Location: 
Taubman Room 520, 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA, 02138
 The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy is excited to announce its 2019 Speaker Series: Human Rights in Hard Places.
The Human Rights in Hard Places Speaker Series was formed to underscore that despite the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, vast human rights abuses are still occurring 7 decades later. 
We hope for this to serve as a platform for individuals to hear from the world's leading practitioners and academics in the human rights field, and to listen, question and engage.  
Dolkun Isa...
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Announcing 2019 Cohort of Technology and Human Rights Fellows

February 11, 2019

The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy announced 15 new resident and visiting fellows an inaugural cohort that will conduct focused research projects on the intersection of new technologies, artificial intelligence, and human rights.

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Nonviolent Resistance Proves Potent Weapon

February 5, 2019

Harvard Gazette article featuring "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict", by Erica Chenoweth.... Read more about Nonviolent Resistance Proves Potent Weapon



Erica Chenoweth. 1/21/2019. “Introducing the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) dataset.” Journal of Peace Research. See full text.Abstract

Introducing the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) dataset article by Erica Chenoweth 

Scholarship on civil war is overwhelmingly preoccupied with armed activity. Data collection efforts on actors in civil wars tend to reflect this emphasis, with most studies focusing on the identities, attributes, and violent behavior of armed actors. Yet various actors also use nonviolent methods to shape the intensity and variation of violence as well as the duration of peace in the aftermath. Existing datasets on mobilization by non-state actors – such as the Armed Conflict Events and Location (ACLED), Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS), and Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD) – tend to include data on manifest contentious acts, such as protests, strikes, and demonstrations, and exclude activities like organizing, planning, training, negotiations, communications, and capacity-building that may be critical to the actors’ ultimate success. To provide a more comprehensive and reliable view of the landscape of possible nonviolent behaviors involved in civil wars, we present the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) dataset, which identifies 3,662 nonviolent actions during civil wars in Africa between 1990 and 2012, across 124 conflict-years in 17 countries. In this article, we describe the data collection process, discuss the information contained therein, and offer descriptive statistics and discuss spatial patterns. The framework we develop provides a powerful tool for future researchers to use to categorize various types of nonviolent action, and the data we collect provide important evidence that such efforts are worthwhile.



Erica Chenoweth. 1/5/2018. The Politics of Terror, Pp. 528. Oxford University Press. See full text.Abstract

The Politics of Terror by Erica Chenoweth: 

Bringing together both classic and contemporary research, The Politics of Terror  provides a systematic introduction to the theory, politics, and practice of terrorism. In addition to offering a comprehensive, evidence-based overview of the subject, Chenoweth and Moore challenge readers to think critically. The book is oriented around a set of empirical, theoretical, and methodological puzzles that arise in the study of terrorism. By encouraging students to engage with these puzzles, and equipping them with the resources to do so thoughtfully, the authors present a nuanced introduction to a complex and crucially important field.



Harvard Kennedy School Names Five Fellows to Study Nonviolent Solutions to Political Conflict

January 30, 2019

Harvard Crimson article announcing the Carr Center's new student research fellows.... Read more about Harvard Kennedy School Names Five Fellows to Study Nonviolent Solutions to Political Conflict

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