Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Civil Rights

The need to rethink the issue of...

The book's various perspectives provide guidelines for action...

Leaders around the globe have long turned to the armed forces as a "school for the nation." Debates over who serves continue to arouse passion today because the military's participation policies are seen as shaping politics beyond the military, specifically the politics of identity and citizenship. Yet how and when do these policies transform patterns of citizenship? Military service, Ronald R. Krebs argues, can play a critical role in bolstering minorities' efforts to grasp full and unfettered rights. Minority groups have at times effectively contrasted their people's battlefield...

Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources--from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides--Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well. Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their...

In his introduction to this collection of essays by constitutional experts, Philip Bryden says that Canadians can be proud of their commitment to the protection of rights and liberties in the Charter. Canada, he believes, is a better place to live then it would be otherwise. Nevertheless, as the essays in this book reveal, the case in favour of the Charter is not simple or one-sided. For instance, Kim Campbell, minister of justice at the time of writing, and Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail express concern that the Charter promotes a rights discourse that threatens to overwhelm the...

It has been part of the liberal tradition to decry censorship in all its forms, and to attempt to separate censorship from democratic forms of government. There has been as yet no real attempt to integrate censorship into political theory.

The twenty-three contributors to this book view censorship pragmatically. They aim to treat it as a constituent feature of any system of social control or practice. By capturing and analyzing the social, political, cultural and economic components of restriction of freedom of expression and access to information, they go beyond the merely...

"Restraining Equality" addresses the contemporary financial, social, legal, and policy pressures currently experienced by human rights commissions across Canada. Through a combination of public policy analysis, historical research, and legal analysis, R.Brian Howe and David Johnson trace the evolution of human rights policy within this country and explore the stresses placed on human rights commissions resulting from greater fiscal restraints and society's rising expectations for equality rights over the past two decades.

The authors analyse sources of these tensions in relation to...

How can we balance new information technology practices with human rights? In Human Rights in an Information Age, Gregory Walters analyses Canadian and global information highway policy and practices regarding the Internet, e-commerce, public health and safety, privacy and security, and information warfare from a philosophical, human rights framework that views freedom and well-being as the necessary conditions of human action. Walters situates the information age revolution within the broader historical and technological situation of modernity. Drawing on the action-based philosophical...

Contemporary debates about the concept of human rights are characterized, at their core, by difficulty negotiating the tension between the universal and the particular. One of the central challenges of an increasingly global society is to determine how we can affirm universal human rights while respecting the distinctive traditions of individual cultures.

To address this challenge, Clinton Timoth Curle turns to John Humphrey, an oft-ignored Canadian who is chiefly responsible for the United Naitons' Declaration of Human Rights. Using Humphry's journals as a starting point, Curle...