Human Rights and Culture!!

• Treaty bodies monitor, oversee, and enforce the implementation of treaty provisions by state parties.
• The UDHR says everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security.
• The UDHR says we are all born free and equal.
• Modern liberalism/liberal democracy aligns with the international human rights regime and promotes freedom from oppression.
• Sovereignty refers to a government's authority and power to make and enforce its own laws without outside interference.
• Neoliberalism is a socioeconomic ideology that promotes free markets and limited government intervention.
• Settler colonialism involves settlers populating a territory, eradicating indigenous populations through forced displacement, violence, genocide, and disease, resulting in depopulation and cultural genocide.
• Extractive colonialism involves forced labor with the goal of generating wealth by bringing back materials, without necessarily requiring permanent occupation.
• Ethnocentrism is the act of judging another group of people based on uncritical ideas or beliefs established by one's own cultural, national, and/or ethnic group.
• Universalism says all people should have a set of rights that are innate to us just because we are humans, existing within a legal realm.
• Universalism roots of rights are based in "natural law," rationality, individualism, and universality.
• Cultural relativism suggests that what is deemed right or wrong is relative to local practices and ways of thinking.
• Cultural essentialism is the belief that a particular culture has a fixed and unchanging set of characteristics that define them, oversimplifying and creating cultural stereotypes.
• Victimhood is the moral economies of what it means to be a legitimate victim and is socially constructed and not universal.
• The gray zone in mass violence blurs the line between victim and perpetrator, with examples of victims compromising and collaborating with their oppressors.
• The banality of evil questions the inherent evilness of clueless participants and explores the nature of human guilt and innocence.
• Global imaginaries are the ways activists conceptualize and perceive the international community's role in advocacy efforts.
• The pendulum between universalism and relativism requires a constant need of reevaluation  
• The SVS metaphor highlights the power dynamics rooted in European and Western ethnocentrism, categorizing individuals as saviors, savages, or victims.
• Vernacularization is the process of cultural translation of principles, language, and social practices to ensure understanding and applicability.
• Dichotomy of abortion politics obscures experiences of pregnant people, creating a rigid separation between women's autonomy and fetal value.
• When discussing reparations, there is a struggle to conceptualize equivalency between monetary compensation and the value of human life.
• A universalist conceptualization of culture in the international human rights regime assumes that all cultures should adhere to a single set of human rights standards, which can perpetuate colonial hierarchies.
• Colonization projects have often been framed and justified as civilizing missions, leading to detrimental effects for colonized peoples such as cultural erasure and loss of autonomy.
• The UDHR is rooted in modern liberalism
• Cultural Relativism is bound or essentialized notions of culture (the sense that cultures don't change)
• Genocide is a crime committed with intent to destroy a national, ethic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part by

  • killing
  • physical or mental harm
  • inflicting conditions that cause physical destruction
  • preventing reproduction
  • transferring children from that group to another group
• A promotional regime focuses on encouraging states to adopt to the human rights regime, creating a foundation of norms and a global consensus 
• When an issue or movement is framed around human rights there is a global or universal acceptance of the principles, the language is already defined and the legal enforcement can lead to a more significant change for people
• advantages of framing an issue or movement around include that it is often framed more organically and likely affect multiple subjectivities of people affected and demands are never limited 
• Transitional justice aims to move a country from internal war to peace and includes measures such as

  • truth,
  • memory,
  • reparative justice,
  • reform, and
  • reparations.
• Human rights reporting basic tenets involves

  • witnessing,
  • documenting,
  • identifying patterns of violence,
  • publicly denouncing,
  • naming responsible parties,
  • publishing findings, and
  • campaigning for support
  • grassroots movements
  • diplomatic pressure
• Genocide is a crime committed with intent to destroy a national, ethic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part
• Neocolonialism is where the colonized country maintains political and economic control.
• Statelessness is a condition where an individual is not a citizen of any country.
• Patriarchy, as a set of power relations, can take on different iterations and forms in different places, spaces, and times.
• Purity vs impurity creates and maintains social divisions as if they are natural or unchangeable.
• Race is a social construct, institutionalized, and systematic.
• Race is an embodied, lived experience.
• Intersectionality, as described in Ortner's article, is the idea that we can't look at one form of oppression without looking at the various vectors of oppression (feminism and racism)