Fulfilling the Sacred Trust explores the implementation of international accountability for dependent territories under the United Nations during the early Cold War era. Although the Western nations ...that drafted the UN Charter saw the organization as a means of maintaining the international status quo they controlled, newly independent nations saw the UN as an instrument of decolonization and an agent of change disrupting global political norms. Mary Ann Heiss documents the unprecedented process through which these new nations came to wrest control of the United Nations from the World War II victors that founded it, allowing the UN to become a vehicle for global reform. Heiss examines the consequences of these early changes on the global political landscape in the midst of heightened international tensions playing out in Europe, the developing world, and the UN General Assembly. She puts this anti- colonial advocacy for accountability into perspective by making connections between the campaign for international accountability in the United Nations and other postwar international reform efforts such as the anti-apartheid movement, Pan-Africanism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the drive for global human rights. Chronicling the combative history of this campaign, Fulfilling the Sacred Trust details the global impact of the larger UN reformist effort. Heiss demonstrates the unintended impact of decolonization on the United Nations and its agenda, as well as the shift in global influence from the developed to the developing world.
Paradoxically, many governments that persistently violate human rights have also ratified international human rights treaties that empower their citizens to file grievances against them at the United ...Nations. Therefore, citizens in rights-repressing regimes find themselves with the potentially invaluable opportunity to challenge their government's abuses. Why would rights-violating governments ratify these treaties and thus afford their citizens this right? Can the mechanisms provided in these treaties actually help promote positive changes in human rights?Insincere Commitmentsuses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the factors contributing to commitment and compliance among post-Soviet states such as Slovakia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Heather Smith-Cannoy argues that governments ratify these treaties insincerely in response to domestic economic pressures. Signing the treaties is a way to at least temporarily keep critics of their human rights record at bay while they secure international economic assistance or more favorable trade terms. However, she finds that through the specific protocols in the treaties that grant individuals the right to petition the UN, even the most insincere state commitments to human rights can give previously powerless individuals-and the nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations that partner with them-an important opportunity that they would otherwise not have to challenge patterns of government repression on the global stage.This insightful book will be of interest to human rights scholars, students, and practitioners, as well as anyone interested in the UN, international relations, treaties, and governance.
Geopolitics, Aid, and Growth Dreher, Axel; Eichenauer, Vera Z.; Gehring, Kai
The World Bank economic review,
06/2018, Letnik:
32, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Specifically, we test whether the effect of aid on economic growth is reduced by the share of years ...a country served on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the period the aid is committed, which provides quasi-random variation in aid. Our results show that the effect of aid on growth is significantly lower when aid was committed during a country’s tenure on the UNSC. This holds when we restrict the sample to Africa, which follows the strictest norm of rotation on the UNSC and thus where UNSC membership can most reliably be regarded as exogenous. We derive two conclusions from this. First, short-term political favoritism reduces the effectiveness of aid. Second, results of studies using political interest variables as instruments for overall aid arguably estimate the effect of politically motivated aid and thus a lower bound for the effect of all aid.
When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, President Vladimir Putin gave a video address to the world. In his address, Putin justified his use of force by claiming it was in ...accord with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter: the right of self-defense. The right of self-defense, however, is influenced by the "Purposes and Principles" outlined in the first Chapter of the 'U.N. Charter' ("the Charter"). Chiefly, the Charter states that members of the United Nations must refrain from infringing on the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. For the first time in four decades, the U.N. Security Council, deadlocked by its five permanent members, passed a resolution calling for an "emergency special session" of the General Assembly to recommend collective action on Ukraine.
This book fundamentally reinterprets the history of international human rights in the post-1945 era by documenting how pivotal the Global South was for their breakthrough. In stark contrast to other ...contemporary human rights historians who have focused almost exclusively on the 1940s and the 1970s - heavily privileging Western agency - Steven L. B. Jensen convincingly argues that it was in the 1960s that universal human rights had their breakthrough. This is a ground-breaking work that places race and religion at the center of these developments and focuses on a core group of states who led the human rights breakthrough, namely Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines. They transformed the norms upon which the international community today is built. Their efforts in the 1960s post-colonial moment laid the foundation - in profound and surprising ways - for the so-called human rights revolution in the 1970s, when Western activists and states began to embrace human rights.
After the Holocaust, the world vowed it would never again stand by and permit such heinous crimes against humanity. Yet many subsequent atrocities have gone unchecked, all over the world: from the ...killing fields of Cambodia, to Rwanda, and to Srebrenica. The bloody list continues to grow, led by the unfolding nightmare in Darfur. How and why were the world's best intentions derailed, and what can be done today to put these efforts back on track? The "responsibility to protect: - R2P for short - was unanimously embraced at the UN World Summit in 2005. The heart of this new international norm is the belief that if sovereign governments fail to protect their own people from mass atrocity crimes, then responsibility shifts to the wider international community to take whatever action is appropriate, including (in extreme cases) the use of force. The world cannot, and will not, just stand by. Evens spells out the steps needed to make R2P work in practice and clarifies the misunderstandings, real or contrived, which persist about its scope and limits. He emphasizes the need for preventive action, and for preferring assistance and persuasion to coercion, but he also makes clear when it is right to fight. The book is enlivened throughout by real world examples, analyses of current events, and assessments drawn from the author's own vast experience.
Purpose
The use of quality management (QM) to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) is a topic of growing interest in academia and industry. The IAQ (International Academy ...for Quality) established Quality Sustainability Award in 2020, a testament to this growing interest. This study aims to investigate how QM philosophies, methodologies and tools can be used to achieve sustainable development in organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
Five large manufacturing organizations – three from India and two from China – who reported their achievements about using QM in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were studied using multiple sources of data collection. A detailed within-case and cross-case analysis were conducted to unearth this linkage's practical and theoretical aspects.
Findings
The study finds that QM methodologies effectively met the five organizations' UNSDGs. These organizations successfully used OPEX (Operational Excellence) methodologies such as Lean, Kaizen and Six Sigma to meet UNSDGs 7, 11, 12 and 13. Moreover, UNSG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) is the most targeted goal across the case studies. A cross-case analysis revealed that the most frequently used quality tools were Design of Experiments (DoE), Measurement Systems Analysis (MSA), C&E analysis and Inferential statistics, among other essential tools.
Research limitations/implications
The study's sample size was limited to large-scale manufacturing organizations in the two most populous countries in the world. This may limit the study's generalizability to other countries, continents, or micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Additionally, the study's conclusions would be strengthened if tested as hypotheses in a follow-up survey.
Practical implications
This practical paper provides case studies on how to use QM to impact SDGs. It offers both descriptive and prescriptive solutions for practitioners. The study highlights the importance of using essential QM tools in a structured and systematic manner, with effective teams, to meet the SDGs of organizations.
Social implications
The study shows how QM can be used to impact UNSDGs, and this is very important because the UNSDGs are a set of global objectives that aim to address a wide range of social and environmental issues. This study could motivate organizations to achieve the UNSDGs using essential QM tools and make the world a better place for the present and future generations.
Originality/value
This case study is the first to investigate at a micro-level how QM can impact UNSDGs using live examples. It uses data from the IAQ to demonstrate how QM can be integrated into UNSDGs to ensure sustainable manufacturing.
Next month in New York, the United Nations' 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development will have its first global progress review. Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, the agenda represents a new ...coherent way of thinking about how issues as diverse as poverty, education and climate change fit together; it entwines economic, social and environmental targets in 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an 'indivisible whole'.
Two decades later, Strong re-emerged to chair the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which created three landmark international agreements: to protect biodiversity, safeguard the climate ...and combat desertification. ...the degradation of nature is putting hard-won gains at risk, argues a report that UNEP commissioned as part of its half-century commemorations. In the past, researchers have proposed that UNEP's member states upgrade its powers so it becomes more of a compliance body - a World Environment Organization that, like the World Trade Organization, has the power to censure countries for failing to keep to agreements.
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