In-Depth Archive

In July, a group of prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison went on a hunger strike to protest their conditions of confinement. Central to the prisoners’ complaints was the fact that for years and, in some cases, for decades, they have been held in prolonged and indeterminate solitary confinement with few privileges and opportunities to engage in productive programming and activities. Importantly, as one prisoner put it in a letter to the informational website Solitary Watch, they were asking for “human justice, . . . fairness, compassion, positive reform, dignity . . . […]

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that universal human rights begin “in small places, close to home.” It might be more accurate to say that they begin in the home, as the most intimate expression of whether human rights are respected within a society occurs between husbands and wives. Too often, however, the circumstances under which men and women come together to form households fall short of meeting basic standards of human rights. In Yemen, Sudan, Nigeria, Colombia and a number of other countries, it is legal for girls to be married younger than age 16. In many nations where child marriage […]

Sixty-three years ago, the United Nations’ labor agency, the International Labor Organization (ILO), adopted its most basic treaty, Convention No. 87 on the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize, to advance the human rights of workers. The following year, it added Convention No. 98 on the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining. These two conventions, neither of which the United States has ratified, form the bedrock of human rights for workers, and in 2011 the rights they protect are the most abused in the world of labor. Many human rights abuses confront workers today, from slave […]

Religion is widely understood to be a powerful force in domestic and international politics in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Asian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. It is used by multinational groupings — the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), for instance — to justify international cooperation and by both political figures and terrorists to justify violence. Since the 1990s, religion has become so pervasive in international politics that it is almost impossible to imagine that it has not always attracted the attention that it now commands. In fact, however, the salient role of religion in contemporary international political […]

From revelations about illegal arms sales to leaks to the media about military misconduct in Iraq, whistleblowing by both private and public sector employees has increasingly become a powerful, if often controversial, form of dissent. The United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and other intergovernmental bodies have recognized that there is indeed a right to expose corruption, wrongdoing by public bodies, serious threats to health, safety or the environment, and breaches of human rights or humanitarian law. Whistleblowing is protected by both the individual’s right to freedom of expression as well as the public’s right to […]

Successive British governments have stressed strategic continuity, and there appears to be general political support for this among the electorate. But over the past 10 years, and particularly over the past two years, the U.K. has struggled to find the resources necessary to maintain the capabilities that would ensure strategic continuity. It has also found itself forced to reassess its position on a number of key international issues that determine how other powers respond to the U.K. as a global power. As a result, the United Kingdom’s position in the current international system is generally ambiguous. When the Conservative-Liberal coalition […]

How do different-sized powers establish order among themselves? And how do larger powers compel smaller and weaker ones to do their bidding? Though abstract, these two questions have concrete applications in the real world and are among the oldest in international relations. Differential power relationships have been around since the first polities, later called states, came into existence, and over the course of history, various systems have arisen to manage them. Among the best-known examples from the classical world are the Greek alliances, also called leagues, which at times kept the peace, but also, when that failed, made wars far […]

Power is the ability to affect others to obtain preferred outcomes, and that can be done through coercion and payment or attraction and persuasion. Generally, people associate coercion with military power resources, but that is too reductive. After all, economic power resources can also be used for coercion. Even in terms of what is considered “normal” economic behavior, the boundaries are not always so clear. As Thomas Schelling has argued, “The difference between a threat and a promise, between coercion and compensation, sometimes depends on where the baseline is located.” After all, once compensation becomes an expectation, withholding it for […]

For the past eight months, Western nations at the United Nations Security Council have unsuccessfully sought to impose sanctions on the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for its violent repression of a pro-reform revolt across the country. The effort follows their success last February in getting the council to impose muscular penalties on the now-defunct government of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Meanwhile, U.N. sanctions are currently in place against North Korea and Iran as a response to these countries’ violations of international nonproliferation obligations. Despite the diverging motivations behind each of these efforts to penalize the targeted countries, […]