P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of P. C. Chang (1892-1957), who lived an eventful and cosmopolitan life and was one of the key writers of the ...Universal Declaration of Human Rights, responsible for its defining features of universality and religious ecumenism.
After anarchy Hurd, Ian
2007., 2008, 2007, 2007-01-01, 20070101
eBook
The politics of legitimacy is central to international relations. When states perceive an international organization as legitimate, they defer to it, associate themselves with it, and invoke its ...symbols. Examining the United Nations Security Council, Ian Hurd demonstrates how legitimacy is created, used, and contested in international relations. The Council’s authority depends on its legitimacy, and therefore its legitimation and delegitimation are of the highest importance to states. Through an examination of the politics of the Security Council, including the Iraq invasion and the negotiating history of the United Nations Charter, Hurd shows that when states use the Council’s legitimacy for their own purposes, they reaffirm its stature and find themselves contributing to its authority. Case studies of the Libyan sanctions, peacekeeping efforts, and the symbolic politics of the Council demonstrate how the legitimacy of the Council shapes world politics and how legitimated authority can be transferred from states to international organizations. With authority shared between states and other institutions, the interstate system is not a realm of anarchy. Sovereignty is distributed among institutions that have power because they are perceived as legitimate.
In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers ...science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. InThe Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of "Spaceship Earth"-the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system-exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions.Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the "global"-as in global population, global climate, and global economy-an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO's Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.
Transition to open access is changing how United Nations Depository Libraries are working to serve local communities (researchers and citizens) in accessing United Nations documents and publications. ...This transition, in course since 2015, is gradually changing the System of Depository Libraries into a knowledge network. Already during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was possible to see the first signs of this evolution into what can be called a de facto ‘open community’, gathered around open access instruments like the United Nations Digital Library and the sharing of best practices. Librarians at Depository libraries, who built their own knowledge in spending years in keeping in due order and cataloguing their collection on paper, are now called to improve their skills, to give users new ways to access to documents and publications. The challenge is to keep the paper collection and giving it greater accessibility and discoverability online. In this article we present some projects aiming at making local special collection on paper more “visible” online and more accessible in terms of formats and languages. Following up to seventy-years of accumulated experience Depository Librarians are now not only owners of a cultural heritage, but promoters of it by the advocacy work they are doing inside and on account of the United Nations System of Depository Libraries.
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda is a global framework and policy tool that guides national actions addressing gender inequalities and the drivers of conflict and its impact on women and ...girls. By fostering structural and institutional change, the WPS agenda aims to 1) prevent conflict and all forms of violence against women and girls and 2) ensure the inclusion and participation of women in peace and security decision-making processes to incorporate their specific needs in relief and recovery situations. This volume gathers together student papers from the Joint Women, Peace, and Security Academic Forum's 2021 WPS in PME Writing Award program, a best-of selection of informative and empowering work that intersects with Department of Defense equities supporting global WPS principles. Student participants in the Joint WPS Academic Forum hail from prestigious DOD academic institutions, and this monograph shows how the strategic leaders of tomorrow embrace WPS today, offering a strong indication of how WPS principles will be implemented over time and how they will influence the paradigm of peace and security and our approaches to conflict prevention and resolution.
Mental health has always been a low priority worldwide. Yet more than 650 million people are estimated to meet diagnostic criteria for common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, with ...almost three-quarters of that burden in low- and middle-income countries. Nowhere in the world does mental health enjoy parity with physical health. Notwithstanding astonishing medical advancements in treatments for physical illnesses, mental disorder continues to have a startlingly high mortality rate. However, despite its widespread neglect, there is now an emerging international imperative to improve global mental health and wellbeing. The UN's current international development agenda finalised at the end of 2015 contains 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG3 which seeks to ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages. Although much broader in focus than the previous eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the need for worldwide improvement in mental health has finally been recognised. This Handbook addresses the new UN agenda in the context of mental health and sustainable development, examining its implications for national and international policymakers, decision-makers, researchers and funding agencies. Conceptual, evidence-based and practical discussions crossing a range of disciplines are presented from the world's leading mental health experts. Together, they explore why a commitment to investing in mental health for the fulfilment of SDG3 ought to be an absolute global priority.
You, The People Chesterman, Simon
2005, 2004-03-18, 20040101
eBook
Transitional administrations represent the most complex operations attempted by the United Nations. The missions in Kosovo (1999—) and East Timor (1999–2002) are commonly seen as unique in the ...history of the United Nations. But they may also be seen as the latest in a series of operations that have involved the United Nations in ‘state‐building’ activities, in which it has attempted to develop the institutions of government by assuming some or all of those sovereign powers on a temporary basis. Viewed in light of earlier UN operations, such as those in Namibia (1989–1990), Cambodia (1992–1993), and Eastern Slavonia (1996–1998), the idea that these exceptional circumstances may not recur is somewhat disingenuous. The need for policy research in this area was brought into sharp focus by the weighty but vague responsibilities assigned to the United Nations in Afghanistan (2002—) and its contested role in Iraq (2003—).This book seeks to fill that gap. Aimed at policy‐makers, diplomats, and a wide academic audience (including international relations, political science, international law, war studies, and development studies), the book provides a concise history of transitional administration and a treatment of the five key issues confronting such operations: peace and security, the role of the United Nations as government, establishing the rule of law, economic reconstruction, and exit strategies. Research for the book has been conducted through extensive field research and interviews with key UN staff and local representatives in almost all of the territories under consideration. The unifying theme is that, while the ends of transitional administration may be idealistic, the means cannot be.
Although the concept of credibility has been identified by the United Nations as a significant factor in successful peacekeeping operations, its role has largely been ignored in the literature on ...peacekeeping at the local level. In this book, Newby provides the first detailed examination ofcredibility's essential place in peacekeeping. With empirically rich analysis, Newby explores the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and its navigation of political tensions in one of the world's geopolitical flashpoints, a place where the mission's work is constrained by weak local legitimacy born of a complex political situation. Identifying four types of credibility-technical, material, security, and responsiveness-Newby traces the ways in which building credibility served UNIFIL and has enabled the mission to exercise its mandate despite significant challenges on the ground. Peacekeeping in South Lebanon unpacks the day-to-day business of running a peace mission and argues that credibility should be regarded as an independent construct when considering how a peacekeeping operation functions and survives.
