UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Archives in the Attic: Exile, Activism, and Memory in the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina(2019) Pyle, Perri; Rosemblatt, Karin; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Spurred by the human rights violations committed by the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), exiled Argentines in Washington, D.C. formed the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina (WCHRA) to facilitate the transnational exchange of information between those under threat in Argentina and political actors in the United States. This thesis outlines the story of the WCHRA through the records they created - kept for nearly forty years in an attic - and oral interviews with former members. The collection consists of letters, testimonies, petitions, and notes that reflect the group’s extensive network and provide insight into how Argentine exile groups inserted themselves into the larger human rights movement. By critically examining how one small group of activists came together, I explore how archival records enhance, challenge, and reveal new insights into the politics of exile, activism, and memory, as seen through the lens of the records they kept.Item ANOTHER EMPTY PROMISE? STATES’ COMMITMENT TO THE OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE AND OTHER CRUEL, INHUMAN OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT(2018) Chang, Hyo Joon; Kastner, Scott L.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) was established in 2002 to facilitate implementation of the Convention against Torture. Due to its regular visitations and national preventive mechanisms (NPMs), as well as increasing ratifications, the OPCAT has been regarded as a paradigm shift in the human rights arena. This dissertation study attempts to discover if states’ commitment to the OPCAT is a sign of increased commitment to human rights or another empty promise. Empirical analyses of states’ ratification of and compliance with the OPCAT provide evidence questioning the high expectations surrounding the treaty’s ratification. First of all, the treaty terms of the OPCAT do not incur as high costs of commitment as expected. Human rights-violating countries have not been deterred from ratifying the treaty, indicating that they are not particularly concerned with potential costs of international and domestic monitoring. Neither has states’ commitment to the OPCAT functioned as a costly signaling. The cost-based theories are further challenged by empirical findings for regional clustering of commitment. Moreover, states’ compliant behavior suggests that the treaty ratification does not guarantee compliance. Regarding the NPMs, about one-third of states parties have not complied with their obligation to designate or establish NPMs. Although most states parties have allowed the international monitoring body unhindered access to places of detention, institutional loopholes in the OPCAT permit states parties to offset the negative consequences of the international visiting program. About the half of states parties have not requested their reports by the international monitoring body to be publicly released, nor have they responded to their reports. The case of the Philippines illustrates that states’ selective compliance or non-compliance with the OPCAT could undermine its effectiveness in preventing states’ practice of torture. Overall, the treaty’s innovative measures make states’ commitment to the OPCAT more than another empty promise. However, ratification is not automatic proof of states’ increased commitment to human rights. Therefore, the international community is strongly recommended to develop effective strategies encouraging states parties to implement the OPCAT rather than simply praise its increasing membership.Item The Democratic Self: Gender, Memory, and Human Rights under the Augusto Pinochet Dictatorship and Transition to Democracy in Chile, 1973-2010(2015) Townsend, Brandi Ann; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Democratic Self asks how ideas about gender shaped the ways that Chileans reconstructed the affective, social, and political bonds the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) sought to destroy. It intervenes in debates about the degree to which right-wing military regimes in Latin America eroded social ties during the Cold War. Torture targeted gendered and sexual identities and compelled victims to re-assess their roles as men, women, militants, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers. This dissertation argues that to reconnect the individual to collective struggles for democracy, survivors and their allies drew on longstanding, heteronormative gender ideologies within the left. Those ideologies gradually changed over the course of the dictatorship, and in turn, influenced memories during the subsequent transition to democracy (1990-2010). The dissertation draws on government and non-governmental documents and oral interviews with survivors, their families, and human rights workers. Between 1978 and 1990, mental health professionals working within human rights organizations provided psychological therapy to approximately 32,000-42,000 Chileans to help them work through their traumatic experiences as part of a collective project to repair the social connections that state violence ripped apart. These professionals translated psychoanalytic concepts of “the self” into the language of pre-1973 frameworks of citizenship grounded in the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. By the mid-1980s, Chile’s feminist movement changed the terms of the debate by showing how gendered forms of everyday violence that pre-dated the dictatorship shaped political violence under the dictatorship, as well as the opposition’s response. Slowly, mental health professionals began to change how they deployed ideas about gender when helping survivors and their families talk about state violence. However, the narratives of violence that emerged with the end of the dictatorship in 1990 and that were enshrined in three separate truth commissions (1990, 2004, and 2010) only partially reflected that transformation. The democratic governments’ attempts to heal Chile’s painful past and move forward did not always recognize, much less dislodge, entrenched ideas that privileged men’s experiences of political militancy. This dissertation shows how Chileans grappled with their memories of state violence, which were refracted through gendered discourses in the human rights movement.Item A Dialogue on Human Rights: America's Policy Makers and the Soviet Dissident Movements, 1956-1976(2012) Finch, Robert James; Lampe, John R.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through the 1950s and 1960s, American news correspondents working in Moscow had come to befriend many of the Soviet dissidents. This friendship was realized in the American press, where there was an explosion of news coverage on the dissidents. Through this news coverage, American interest groups and politicians became interested in the plight of the Soviet dissidents and began to demand that their government make human rights an essential part of its foreign policy. American politicians challenged the Nixon administration's policy of détente by seeking to link trade with the Soviet Union to its human rights practices. By 1976, the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe were established to monitor the Soviet government's compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act. This represented the first time Soviet dissidents and American politicians directly communicated on issues related to human rights.Item Essays in Human Rights and Education: Accommodating Vulnerable Minorities(2012) Kosko, Stacy Jeanne; Crocker, David A.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Numerous questions arise in the effort adequately to accommodate and serve minority students in public education, not the least of which are questions concerning how education decisions are made, by individuals, groups, or the state itself. This dissertation begins with the broadest, most far-reaching kinds of decisions, those made by groups (or representatives of groups) during the process of education policy formation. It then moves closer to home (and school), to the narrower kinds of decisions made by individual parents, school officials, and school-age children. The first essay engages in a broad theoretical discussion, applicable beyond education policy, and then applies this perspective to indigenous education. It asks: How might we evaluate the degree of self-determination that indigenous peoples exercise in decisions that affect them? In order to answer this question, this chapter suggests a theoretical framework for evaluating public participation and applies it to Sámi education policy-making in Norway. The second essay engages in a similarly broad theoretical discussion, though in this case it is motivated by an education policy problem. It asks: What ought to be the role of parental consent in education decisions that affect their children? It takes as its jumping-off point three European Court of Human Rights cases of educational discrimination against members of the Roma population, Europe's largest, poorest, and fastest-growing minority group. The final, and most applied, essay proceeds in the reverse order, beginning with an empirical question, and concluding with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the results. This essay uses quantitative methods to test whether Roma students do, in fact, have a higher drop-out rate than similarly situated non-Roma students and, finding that they do, asks why. This chapter goes on to investigate the labor market for Roma and subsequently to delve into the role of adaptive preference formation in schooling decisions (Do Roma really not "value" education, as is so often suggested?). The work closes with a short discussion of areas for future research.Item Education, civil society, and social change: A case study of a Brazilian social movement(2006-04-24) Thapliyal, Nisha; Klees, Steven J.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For the last twenty-five years, the Landless Worker's Movement (MST) has organized some 1.5 million landless rural workers to claim and occupy unutilized cultivable land to which they are legally entitled under the 1988 Constitution. The movement has been instrumental in the redistribution of unused cultivable land to thousands of landless rural families and the creation of a new positive identity for rural people that values their culture, knowledge, and autonomy. In doing so, the movement has become a global exemplar for a more equitable, just, and sustainable approach to development. A philosophy and practice of education that is democratic and responsive to the social and economic contexts of rural learners has played a key role in the expansion and longevity of this popular movement. My dissertation looks at the ways in which the MST has contributed to improving the quality of education policy and programming for rural children, youth, and adults. My dissertation begins with an examination of the ideologies and institutional arrangements that have historically shaped the formulation and implementation of policies for rural basic education in Brazil. I discuss relationships between the state, market, and society and, in particular, the construction of alternative policy arenas and discourses by organized civil society that have shaped current efforts by the federal government to develop a national rural education policy. I go on to examine the micro-interactions between the state and the MST in the context of literacy programs for rural youth and adults in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In this context, I discuss the possibilities for expanded participation in policy formulation and implementation for basic education for a) organized civil society, b) rural communities, c) educators, and d) learners. This study has implications for the ways in which we understand and theorize about the role of progressive social movements in opening up new educational, political, and social possibilities for a democratic society.Item Being Human, Being Good: The Source and Summit of Universal Human Rights(2004-07-26) Madigan, Janet Holl; Butterworth, Charles E.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation uses the concept of universal human rights to explore the relationship between the individual, society and truth. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in the wake of World War II, was meant to provide a moral standard for judging the state's treatment of the individual. Yet to this day some contend that the principles expressed therein are not universal, but culturally relative. The dominant arguments for universality, however, are themselves relativistic because they are not grounded in the idea of a natural order that supplies objective standards of value. The result is not a morally neutral explanation of human dignity, but a new moral philosophy altogether that upholds personal autonomy as its highest good. But this position ultimately undermines human rights, for it entails that what is understood to be human is not fixed, but determined by the most powerful elements of society. How did we arrive at this point of wishing to say something universally true about human beings even while lacking the philosophical means to do so coherently? To answer this, I explore the changing relationship between truth and politics from Plato to Locke. Plato and Aristotle saw truth as essential to the proper ordering of individual and political life. Christianity concurred, but held that knowing truth was no longer the sole province of philosophers. Machiavelli rejected transcendent standards as inadequate for politics. Modern political philosophy actually begins with Grotius, who, in reaction to Machiavelli's political realism, constructs a natural law philosophy divorced from the idea of objective good. This leads inevitably to Locke's non-theistic natural law and the elevation of human will to the level of the sacred, thus resulting in the current crisis of understanding in universal human rights. The only logical ground for the concept of universal human rights is Thomistic natural law. An investigation of Aquinas's notion of being and goodness reveals that the only truly universal human rights are to life and free will. Applying this principle yields the conclusion that if human rights are to have any meaning whatsoever, there can never be a "human right" to abortion.