Search

This paper investigates the politics of refugee arrival and integration at urban level in Germany following the migration influx in summer 2015. How have cities redefined themselves? How have newcomers and residents with different subjectivities constructed their identity, social belonging, and justified their rights-claiming? What kind of changes can be observed in city's social spaces? Supported by critical geography, securitization, ethnographic approaches, the paper aims to identify the grey areas of the urban social spaces and presents two accounts centred on: (1) city as sites of bureaucratic politics, austerity urbanism and surveillance; (2) city as sites of sanctuary/solidarity practices. It argues that the refugees' arrival offers the chance for German cities to envision a social project through engaging a politics of 'bounding' which involves the re-framing of refugee displacement in relation to urban development by covering both the lived (camp) experiences of those on the move and local population's needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans' imaginaries toward nature have profound implications for environmental governance and natural resource management strategies. Driven by relentless technological advancement, such imaginaries have undergone a series of transformations. Through a phenomenological and social constructivist perspective, this article aims to explore and explain the dynamics of transcultural sociotechnical imaginaries found in the connection between Western posthumanism's relational perspective on humans, nonhuman entities, and agency, on the one hand, and the emphasis on human–nature unity in the Chinese Daoist tradition, on the other hand. We argue that, by displacing an anthropocentric and Eurocentric frame, such transnational deliberation efforts grounded in a relational, geo-centered, and mediated frame offer planetary viewpoints to tackle the vast challenges currently faced by humanity. This discourse provides an alternative way of thinking to approach current environmental governance and natural resource management practices in the context of the increasing interconnectedness and cultural plurality of globalization. Hence, this article suggests exploring the potentials of the ideas of dwelling, landscapes, new ecologies, and mutual embeddedness suggested by Daoism and critical more-than-human geography at a local scale, which will pave the way for pragmatic pluralism and cultivate new attitudinal dispositions and capacity for systemic change. Key Words: Daoism, environmental governance, human–nature relationship, postenlightenment, sociotechnical imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal for Human Rights / Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte is the property of Wochenschau Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A critical response to the article “Relativismus und Menschenrechte” by Marie-Luisa Frick, published in this issue of the journal, is presented. The author addresses several issues, including the philosophy of human rights from the perspectives of cultural relativism and universalism, postcolonial criticism of Western models of democracy, modernity, and progress, and the connection between human rights and international law.

This article uses an institutional network governance approach to explore the overlapping dimension of the policy fields between security, development, and human rights, reflected in the US and German provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. The past two decades have witnessed a gradually changing paradigm in academic and policy debates regarding the questions of the normative basis of world order and possibilities for tackling imminent threats to security and peace (i.e. intra-state armed conflicts, failed states, terrorism, poverty, and deepening inequality). The introduction of concepts such as "human security" and "the right to humanitarian intervention/responsibility to protect (R2P)" as well as critical examinations of peace-, nation-, and state-building missions (PNSB) have led to a relativist tendency of state sovereignty and a changing attitude regarding how to address the intersection of security, development, and human rights. Despite this shift, the policy commitments to integrating these policy considerations remain puzzling. How have they been redefined, conceptualized, and put into practice? I argue that an integrated conceptual approach has facilitated the redefinition of common policy goals, principles, and the mobilization of resources. At the same time, civil and military cooperation, as demonstrated in the multifunctional work of PRTs, has been Janus-headed-permanently caught in an ongoing tension between the war on terror and short-term stability operation on the one hand and long-term durable peace and development on the other. The misunderstanding of its interim character, the dynamics of Afghan environment, the blurring of policy lines, and the differences between national PRT models have made it difficult to systematically assess the efficiency and legitimacy of each policy frame and program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]