Politics of recognition: what can a human rights perspective contribute to understanding users' experiences of involvement in mental health services?

This historically situated, UK-based review of New Labour's human rights and mental health policy following the 1998 Human Rights Act (HRA) and 2007 Mental Health Act (MHA), draws on Klug's identification of three waves of human rights. These occurred around the American and French Revolutions, after World War II, and following the collapse of state communism in 1989, and the article assesses impacts on mental health policy up to and including the New Labour era. It critiques current equality and rights frameworks in mental health and indicates how they might be brought into closer alignment with third wave principles

Civil Society Legitimacy and Accountability: Issues and Challenges

University education rarely focuses its attention and imagination on teaching students how to turn a vision into reality; how to design, develop, and lead social change organizations. The author co-created the Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory (SE Lab) at Stanford University and then Harvard University as a model educational program designed to achieve this goal. The SE Lab is a Silicon Valley influenced incubator where student teams create and develop innovative pilot projects for US and international social sector initiatives. The lab combines academic theory, frameworks, and traditional research with intensive field work, action research, peer support and learning, and participation of domain experts and social entrepreneurship practitioners. It also provides students an opportunity to collaborate on teams to develop business plans for their initiatives and to compete for awards and recognition in the marketplace of ideas. Students in the SE Lab have created innovative organizations serving many different social causes, including fighting AIDS in Africa, promoting literacy in Mexico, combating the conditions for terrorism using micro-finance in the Palestinian territories, and confronting gender inequality using social venture capital to empower women in Afghanistan

Multilateral security in the Mediterranean post-Cold War: NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue and the EuroMed Partnership. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 7 No. 10 May 2007

[From the introduction]. In this paper I will compare and contrast how the multilateral efforts in terms of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue (“Dialogue”) program, involving i.a. U.S. interests in the Mediterranean, and the European Union’s (“EU”) EuroMed Partnership as the EU’s European Neighborhood Policy’s main approach to its Mediterranean neighbors (3) have affected Mediterranean security post-Cold War. This study takes place at the system level of analysis, exploring both bilateral and regional issues and interactions, including those of institutional and non-governmental actors (NGOs) (Neak 2003, 12). This paper takes a constructivist approach and, although acknowledging aspects of realism inherent in it such as rational actors (4), by contrasting the hard power and soft power approaches in the institutional analysis (in order to understand the history, culture and institutional dynamics post-Cold War) of the EMP and the Dialogue. Klotz and Lynch (2007, 3) write: The end of the Cold War shattered stable antagonisms and alliances… This destabilization widened the political and intellectual spaces - and increased the need – for scholars to ask questions about the cultural bases of conflict, alternative conceptions of national identity, [and] the ethics of intervention… Individuals and groups are not only shaped by their world but can also change it. People can … set into motion new normative, cultural, economic, social, or political practices that alter conventional wisdoms and standard operating procedures

Green of Another Color: Building Effective Relationships Between Foundations and the Environmental Justice Movement

The aim of this report is to help forge more effective partnerships between and within the environmental justice movement and the philanthropic community. In particular, the report should serve as an important educational tool for current and potential funders by: (1) providing information regarding the importance and accomplishments of the environmental justice movement over the last ten years, including those of the strategic networks; (2) demonstrating the gross underfunding the movement by the philanthropic community in general, and the Environmental Grantmakers Association membership in particular, in relation to other segments of the environmental movement; (3) providing recommendations as to which grantmaking practices would be most appropriate given the structure and needs of the movement, (4) discussing the importance of diversity and inclusive practices in foundation settings for improving environmental grantmaking practices and for overcoming the funding barriers currently confronting the environmental justice movement; and (5) evaluating the manner in which grantmakers can better utilize their institutional clout to support the work of the environmental justice movement beyond the disbursement of grants by undertaking mission-related investing strategies and mission-related shareholder actions against socially and ecologically irresponsible companies. We envision this document as being a valuable resource for foundation staff, officers, and board members, as well as individual donors and participants in the environmental justice movement

‘In the name of capability’: a critical discursive evaluation of competency-based management development

This paper illustrates a number of ways in which competency or capability-based management development (CBMD) can work simultaneously both for and against the interests of organizational agents. It does so by demonstrating how CBMD might usefully be understood as both ideological and quasi-religiously faith-based. These features are shown to provide opportunities for resistance and micro-emancipation alongside those for repression and subordination. The study employs a combination of ‘middle range’ discourse analytical techniques. In the first instance, critical discourse analysis is applied to company documentation to distil the ideological stance of an international organization’s CBMD programme. Critical discursive psychology is then used to assess the ways in which employees’ evaluative accounts both support and resist such stance. The analysis builds upon previous insights from Foucauldian studies of CBMD by foregrounding processes of discursive agency. It also renders more visible and discussible the assumptions and dilemmas that CBMD might imply

Managing U.S-EU Trade Relations through Mutual Recognition and Safe Harbor Agreements:"New" and "Global" Approaches to Transatlantic Economic Governance?

governance; regulation; regulations; regulatory competition; directives; implementation; WTO

Constructing inclusive education in a neo-liberal context: promoting inclusion of Arab-Australian students in an Australian context.

School systems are a major social change agent capable of challenging social inequalities and economic disadvantages. Yet, while schools in Australia are being confronted with increasingly culturally diverse populations as well as an increasing focus on student retention, this transformative role is increasingly being played out in a broader educational context that has been found to replicate rather than challenge patterns of social inequality. Successive governments in Australia have responded to this context with a raft of policy initiatives. This paper, based on three-year longitudinal research undertaken in the city of Melbourne, outlines this policy context and introduces the theoretical approach that underpins its innovative approach to managing cultural diversity in educational institutions. It argues for, and presents, a multidimensional model for managing cultural diversity in schools, one that provides the tools for transformative practices to be undertaken to effect positive change in school environments for the benefit of all students

Challenges and opportunities of the China – Gulf Cooperation Council Free Trade Agreement

The free trade agreement between China and the Gulf Cooperation Council (“the GCC”) currently under negotiation is due to become China’s first comprehensive trade and investment agreement with a supranational customs union. The article explores the challenges and opportunities of the proposed China-GCC Free Trade Agreement. It proposes tailor-made recommendations according to the specific interests of both parties

Structural Justice: A critical feminist framework exploring the intersection between justice, equity and structural reconciliation.

Violence against women is a human rights violation (UN, 2006). It affects the health of women globally (UN, 2009) and its elimination is at the heart of many international and national goals. Intimate partner violence (IPV), one of the most common forms of gender-based violence, affects one in three women worldwide (WHO, 2013). The consequences of IPV create negative health outcomes for women that diminish their quality of life and their overall well-being. Abused women access community supports such as shelters to seek safe refuge from the abuse and restore their lives. While shelters play an extensive role in helping women to rebuild their lives they often struggle to navigate inflexible and unjust systemic structures that can be re-victimizing to women and undermine their ability to live violence free. This study describes an emergent narrative of structural justice (SJ) that arose while examining the structural challenges of 6 shelters for abused women in urban and rural Virginia. It details the critical exploration of the intersection between structure and justice by integrating existing literature with qualitative participant narratives (N=36); and constructing an operational definition of structural justice (SJ) through an iterative process. Findings reveal SJ oriented patterns that shape five core tenets at the heart of this narrative. This SJ offers a framework out of which we can create a narrative of hope and a call-to-action. to rectify systemic violence. This framework contributes to the discourse concerning the elimination of VAW as it focuses on creating justice, equity and structural reconciliation