Academic Magic: Performance and the Communication of Fundamental Ideas.

This paper advances the case for how performance magic can be used as a larger medium for communicating fundamental ideas and addressing enduring questions. The paper begins with a stylized definition of performance magic as having a role for ‘disruption’ and ‘subversion’ in terms of audience perception of reality as well as an audience’s set of beliefs, predispositions, and ‘lifeworlds’. The section also engages with performance magicians as well as luminaries from the occult and Western esoteric traditions to illustrate the disruptive function of magicians broadly understood. The second part provides an overview of mentalism and mystery entertainment as a sub-genre within performance magic that is highly amenable to a more academic frame and mode of delivery. The third part outlines how key principles and effects from this sub-genre of performance magic can be applied to two broad areas of academic concern: (1) epistemology and the human condition, and (2) larger political and philosophical questions of morality, justice, rights, agency, and the power of the state. The paper concludes with a short summary and implications for the future of performance magic that moves beyond mere entertainment

Democracy and human rights: concepts, measures, and relationships

The empirical literature on democracy and human rights has made great strides over the last 30 years in explaining (1) the variation in the transition to, consolidation of, and quality of democracy; (2) the proliferation and effectiveness of human rights law; and (3) the causes and consequences of human rights across many of their categories and dimensions. This work has in many ways overcome the ‘essentially contested’ nature of the concepts of democracy and human rights conceptually, established different measures of both empirically, and developed increasingly sophisticated statistical and other analytical techniques to provide stronger inferences for the academic and policy community. This article argues that despite these many achievements, there remain tensions between conceptualisations of democracy and human rights over the degree to which one includes the other, the temporal and spatial empirical relationships between them, and the measures that have been developed to operationalize them. These tensions, in turn, affect the kinds of analyses that are carried out, including model specification, methods of estimation, and findings. Drawing on extant theories and measures of both, the article argues that there must be greater specificity in the conceptualisation and operationalization of democracy and human rights, greater care in the development and use of measures, and greater attention to the kinds of inferences that are made possible by them

Sound evidence on Human Rights – podcast exploring new perspectives on advocacy and cutting-edge research.

On International Human Rights Day, Todd Landman describes the launch of a new podcast series. The podcast has a simple aim: to provide sound evidence on human rights in an accessible format. Human rights scholarship has advanced tremendously in the late 20th and early 21st century. The podcast format allows the listener to engage with human rights research differently. You will learn about why people are doing this research, what the find, and why this really matters for the world

Rigorous morality: norms, values, and the comparative politics of human rights

This paper argues that there is a strong role for empirical analysis to be used to address fundamental normative questions. Using human rights as an example, the article shows that the evolution of the international regime of human rights provides a standard against which country level performance can be both judged and explained through the application of empirical approaches in comparative politics. It argues further that different kinds of human rights measures (events, standards, surveys, and official statistics) and comparative methods (large-N, small-N and single-country studies) offer systematic ways in which to map, explain, and understand the variation in human rights abuse around the world. In this way, the comparative politics of human rights is prime example of how the ‘is’ of the world can be used to address the ‘ought’ of international human rights theory, philosophy, and law. The example of human rights analysis in comparative politics shows a strong role for value- based and problem-based research that remains systematic in its approach while at the same producing outputs that are of public value

Publish Not Punish: The Contested Truth of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

A review of: After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver, Editors. Athens: Ohio University Press and Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2000. 228pp. and Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, Editors. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press and London: Zed Books, 2000. 322pp

The Responsibility to Protect and the Failure to Respond

Commentators on global politics frequently observe the abject failure of states and global institutions to respond to local, regional, and global crises ranging from dramatic climatic events, humanitarian crises, warfare and violence, to the continuation of unsavoury rights-abusive regimes. In my own work in the field of the comparative politics of human rights, the types of observations that Abramowitz and Pickering make in this piece are all too common, and have led many in the past to make similar such observations that powerful states constantly engage in a grand human rights “double standard.

All Politics Are Suboptimal

Despite its intentions and founding principles, the United Nations is fundamentally a political organization and therefore subject to the machinations of states as they seek to maximize their self interest, protect their reputations, and advance their power. The UN Security Council itself is a product of World War II and reflects a settlement from the end of the war that many perceive as highly inappropriate to the balance of power and global realities of the world today