Abbreviations Preface and acknowledgements Introduction Part I. International Law, Development and Third World Resistance: 1. Writing Third World resistance into international law 2. International law and the development encounter Part II. International Law, Third World Resistance and the Institutionalization of Development: the Invention of the Apparatus: 3. Laying the groundwork: the Mandate system 4. Radicalizing institutions and/or institutionalizing radicalism? UNCTAD and the NIEO debate 5. From resistance to renewal: Bretton Woods institutions and the emergence of the 'new' development agenda 6. Completing a full circle: democracy and the discontent of development Part III. Decolonizing Resistance: Human Rights and the Challenge of Social Movements: 7. Human rights and the Third World: constituting the discourse of resistance 8. Recoding resistance: social movements and the challenge to international law 9. Markets, gender and identity: a case study of the Working Women's Forum as a social movement Part IV. Epilogue References Index.

International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance

In this article we investigate the hijacking of the Twitter hashtag #myNYPD following the launch of a public relations campaign by the New York City Police Department in April of 2014. Theorizing networked counterpublics, we examine how Twitter was used as a platform to generate and promote counterpublic narratives about racial profiling and police misconduct. Through a combination of large-scale network analysis and qualitative discourse analysis, we detail counterpublic structure and leadership, discursive strategies deployed by crowdsourced elites, and the reception of counterpublic activism in mainstream media. We conclude with implications for understanding the evolving nature of counterpublics, with particular consideration to the roles of new and old media in (re)shaping public debates around marginalization, profiling, and policing.

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Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics

Children’s rights have become a significant field of study during the past decades, largely due to the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989. Today, s...

A Review of Children’s Rights Literature Since the Adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Social Movements and the Social Construction of Human Rights

This article aims to bridge a gap between social movement studies and media and communication studies. A conceptual framework is presented that integrates the political opportunity structure approach and the logics of contentious action with the concept of mediation. The author argues that mediation opportunity structure is a fruitful concept to encompass a wide variety of ways in which media and communication are relevant to protest and social movements. It refers to mainstream media representations of protest and movements, to movements ‘becoming the media’ and counterspinning, as well as to media and communication practices that constitute protest and resistance in their own right. The manifold articulations of mediation illustrate that media and communication are not merely relevant to the symbolic and discursive realms in which social movements operate, but that they are also instrumental and material to realizing their immediate goals. Activists are becoming more aware and conscious of the mediation opportunity structure, through their lay-knowledge of how the mainstream media and technologies operate, partially adapting to them or appropriating them. The nature and degree of mediation opportunities for activists and the structural constraints impeding the opportunities varies according to the type of protest logic that is being used.

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Protest logics and the mediation opportunity structure

Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction 1: Getting Beyond the Hall of Mirrors 2: The 'Sociality' Of Natural Rights 3: The Lost Nineteenth Century 4: The Paradox of Institutionalisation 5: New Movements? Old Wrongs? 6: Expressive and Instrumental Dimensions of Movement Activism 7: Analyses of Globalisation and Human Rights 8: Renewing the Challenge to Power Notes Bibliography Index

Human rights and social movements

Radical political activist movements are growing all the time. Activist politics have come to influence 'mainstream' politics over fundamental issues such as trade, gender relations, the environment and war. This book brings together activists and academics in one volume, to explore the theory and practice of global activism's relation to all forms of media, mainstream and otherwise. The contributors examine how global activism is represented in the mainstream press and explain the strategies that activists adopt to spread their own ideas. Investigating Indymedia and internet activism, they show how transformations in communications technology offer new possibilities, and explain how activists have successfully used and developed their own media. Case studies and topics include the world social forums, an example of a campaign from the NGO Action Aid, a campaign strategy from an internet activist, Greenpeace and the Brent Spar conflict, the World Development Movement and representations in the mainstream press, the Independent Media Centre, transgender activism on the net, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the internet.

Global Activism, Global Media

L'A. montre que les notions de droit naturel et de droit de l'homme jouent un role historique fondamental. Il examine de facon critique les approches marxiste et liberale des droits de l'homme. Il s'efforce de comprendre et d'elaborer une perspective social-democrate en cette affaire. Il affirme que celle-ci peut constituer un defi pour le pouvoir economique et politique car ces deux domaines peuvent se trouver en opposition avec les droits de l'homme. Il considere que les idees et les pratiques en matiere de droits de l'homme sont crees et vecues par les individus dans leur contexte specifique

A Critique of Social Approaches to Human Rights

This paper is an initial attempt to link the concepts of human rights and power from a social constructionist perspective. It looks at aspects of the social history of natural and human rights and the relationship of this history to extant power relations. It suggests that conceptions of human rights have both challenged and sustained particular forms of power, thus playing a highly ambivalent role. The paper also examines and criticises the philosophical underpinnings of liberal and marxist approaches to the concept of human rights. In a concluding section it considers the possibility of constructing a power analysis which might provide a way of anchoring the concept of human rights in social practices.

Neil Stammers

Papers

Social Movements and the Social Construction of Human Rights

Human rights and social movements

Global Activism, Global Media

A Critique of Social Approaches to Human Rights

Human Rights And Power