In the 21st century, the world is faced with threats of global scale that cannot be confronted without collective action. Although global government as such does not exist, formal and informal ...institutions, practices, and initiatives-together forming "global governance"-bring a greater measure of predictability, stability, and order to trans-border issues than might be expected. Yet, there are significant gaps between many current global problems and available solutions. Thomas G. Weiss and Ramesh Thakur analyze the UN's role in addressing such knowledge, normative, policy, institutional, and compliance lapses. The UN's relationship to these five global governance gaps is explored through case studies of some of the most burning problems of our age, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian crises, development aid, climate change, human rights, and HIV/AIDS.
Ideas and concepts have been a driving force in human progress, and they
may be the most important legacy of the United Nations. UN ideas have set past,
present, and future international agendas in ...many global economic and social arenas
and have also led to initiatives and actions that have improved the quality of human
life. This capstone volume draws upon findings of the other 14 books in the
acclaimed United Nations Intellectual History Project Series. The authors not only
assess the development and implementation of UN ideas regarding sustainable economic
development and human security, but also apply lessons learned to suggest ways in
which the United Nations can play a fuller role in confronting the challenges of
human survival with dignity in the 21st century.
International commissions, academics, practitioners, and the media have long been critical of the UN’s development efforts as disjointed and not fit for purpose; yet the organization has been an ...essential contributor to progress and peacebuilding. This handbook explores the activities of the UN development system (UNDS), the largest operational pillar of the organization and arguably the arena in which its ideational endeavors have made the biggest contribution to thinking and standards. Contributions focus on the role of the UNDS in sustainable social, economic, and environmental development, describing how the UNDS interacts with the other major functions of the UN system, and how it performs operationally in the context of the new 2030 development agenda focused on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The volume is divided into three sections: Realizing the SDGs: opportunities and challenges;Resources, partnerships, and management; andImagining the future of the UN in development.Comprised of chapters by knowledgeable and authoritative UN experts, this book provides cutting-edge and up-to-date research on the strengths and weaknesses of the UNDS, with each chapter focusing on different operational and ideational aspects.
A pathbreaking call to halt the intertwined crises of
cultural heritage attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize
international efforts to protect people and cultures.
Intentional destruction of ...cultural heritage has a long history.
Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan,
mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman
remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably
accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks
impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to
eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify.
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by
thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science,
humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on
immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume's
guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United
Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit
international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based
on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers
today's policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms
that can and-as this book argues- must be extended to the
protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global
value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people
and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and
Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable
populations as well as the role of international law and the
military offer readers critical insights and point toward research,
policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural
heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in
Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust,
global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this
pathbreaking call to action. The free online edition of this
publication is available at
getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities. Also
available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the
book.
UN Voices Weiss, Thomas G; Carayannis, Tatiana; Emmerij, Louis
2005, 20050101
eBook
The authors have cajoled, intrigued, or reassured their 73 'voices'
into telling a fascinating story of the UN and its institutions, which is also a
story of 73 individual lives, of women and men... ...with their own complicated
histories of emigration and education, family relationships and professional
choices, hopes and successes. -- from the Foreword by Emma
Rothschild Far from being a distant bureaucracy, the UN is
composed of individuals who are reshaped by vital experiences. UN Voices gives
international civil servants human faces and shows how ideas drive the grand
experiment. It is a fascinating book. -- Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr. UN Voices presents the human and moving stories of an
extraordinary group of individuals who contributed to the economic and social record
of the UN's life and activities. Drawing from extensive interviews, the book
presents in their own words the experiences of 73 individuals from around the globe
who have spent much of their professional lives engaged in United Nations affairs.
We hear from secretaries-general and presidents, ministers and professors, social
workers and field workers, as well as diplomats and executive heads of UN agencies.
Among those interviewed are noted figures such as Kofi Annan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
Alister McIntyre, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, and Kurt
Waldheim, as well as many less well known UN professional men and women who have
made significant contributions to the international struggle for a better world.
Their personal accounts also engage their contributions in dealing with such events
and issues as the UN's founding, decolonization, the rise and fall of the Berlin
Wall, human rights, the environment, and September 11, 2001.
Global governance remains notoriously slippery. While the term arose to describe change in the late twentieth century, its association with that specific moment has frozen it in time and deprived it ...of analytical utility. It has become an alternative moniker for international organizations, a descriptor for an increasingly crowded world stage, a call to arms, an attempt to control the pernicious aspects of globalization, and a synonym for world government. This article aims not to advance a theory of global governance but to highlight where core questions encourage us to go. A more rigorous conception should help us understand the nature of the contemporary phenomenon as well as look "backwards" and "forwards." Such an investigation should provide historical insights as well as prescriptive elements to understand the kind of world order that we ought to be seeking and encourage us to investigate how that global governance could be realized.
Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict Zones addresses the connection between cultural heritage and cultural cleansing, mass atrocities, and the ...destruction of cultural heritage. Pulling together various threads of discourse and research, Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities outlines the issues, challenges, and options effecting change.
Responsibility to Protect Mani, Rama; Weiss, Thomas G
2013, 2011, 20130301, 2011-01-01, 2013-03-01, 20110101, Letnik:
54
eBook
This volume explores in a novel and challenging way the emerging norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), initially adopted by the United Nations World Summit in 2005 following significant debate ...throughout the preceding decade.
This work seeks to uncover whether this norm and its founding values have resonance and grounding within diverse cultures and within the experiences of societies that have directly been torn apart by mass atrocity crimes. The contributors to this collection analyze the responsibility to protect through multiple disciplines-philosophy, religion and spirituality, anthropology, and aesthetics in addition to international relations and law-to explore what light alternative perspectives outside of political science and international relations shed upon this emerging norm.
In each case, the disciplinary analysis emanates from the global South and from scholars located within countries that experienced violent political upheaval. Hence, they draw upon not only theory but also the first-hand experience with conscience-shocking crimes. Their retrospective and prospective analyses could and should help shape the future implementation of R2P in accordance with insights from vastly different contexts.
Offering a cutting edge contribution to thinking in the area, this is essential reading for all those with an interest in humanitarian intervention, peace and conflict studies, critical security studies and peacebuilding.
When gene regulatory networks diverge between species, their dysfunctional expression in inter-species hybrid individuals can create genetic incompatibilities that generate the developmental defects ...responsible for intrinsic post-zygotic reproductive isolation. Both cis- and trans-acting regulatory divergence can be hastened by directional selection through adaptation, sexual selection, and inter-sexual conflict, in addition to cryptic evolution under stabilizing selection. Dysfunctional sex-biased gene expression, in particular, may provide an important source of sexually-dimorphic genetic incompatibilities. Here, we characterize and compare male and female/hermaphrodite transcriptome profiles for sibling nematode species Caenorhabditis briggsae and C. nigoni, along with allele-specific expression in their F1 hybrids, to deconvolve features of expression divergence and regulatory dysfunction. Despite evidence of widespread stabilizing selection on gene expression, misexpression of sex-biased genes pervades F1 hybrids of both sexes. This finding implicates greater fragility of male genetic networks to produce dysfunctional organismal phenotypes. Spermatogenesis genes are especially prone to high divergence in both expression and coding sequences, consistent with a "faster male" model for Haldane's rule and elevated sterility of hybrid males. Moreover, underdominant expression pervades male-biased genes compared to female-biased and sex-neutral genes and an excess of cis-trans compensatory regulatory divergence for X-linked genes underscores a "large-X effect" for hybrid male expression dysfunction. Extensive regulatory divergence in sex determination pathway genes likely contributes to demasculinization of XX hybrids. The evolution of genetic incompatibilities due to regulatory versus coding sequence divergence, however, are expected to arise in an uncorrelated fashion. This study identifies important differences between the sexes in how regulatory networks diverge to contribute to sex-biases in how genetic incompatibilities manifest during the speciation process.
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