Law and Social Sciences Research Network: 5/9/08

5/9/08

call for paper - Sur Journal

Call for Papers – Sur Journal Special Issue:

Perspectives on the future of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Challenges ahead
New deadline 15 June, 2008

Sur – Human Rights University Network and the International Service for Human Rights invite contributions to be published in a Special Issue on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of Sur – International Journal on Human Rights (n. 9, second semester 2008).

The Sur Journal is published twice a year, distributed free of charge to approximately 2,700 readers in over 100 countries. It is edited in three languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish and can also be accessed online at http://www.surjournal.org.

The Journal aims at disseminating a Global Southern perspective on human rights and to facilitate exchange among professors and activists from the Global South without disregarding contributions from other regions.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948 was the first comprehensive and universal human rights instrument in the international arena. It is a milestone in mankind's struggle for freedom and human dignity. Since the adoption of the UDHR, a complex human rights system has been created at the international, regional and national levels, new treaties have been adopted, and new mechanisms for protection created. Furthermore, a large number of States have become, at least in formal terms, democratic. At the same time a number of challenges are facing the full realization of human rights. The vision of human rights as a "Northern and Western ideal" still persists along with other divisions among States, communities, groups and individuals regarding how to take a global human rights agenda forward.

This special issue will focus on the challenges ahead as a way to commemorate the adoption of the UDHR. We will therefore prioritize articles which, preferably but not exclusively, address the following topics about the future of the UDHR:

Human rights theory
§ The creation of the UDHR: How did the state of the world at the time of the adoption of the UDHR influence its development? What was the particular relevance of the UDHR to that time, and its continued relevance today.
§ UDHR as customary international law: Most authors agree that the prohibition of torture is one of the clauses of the UDHR that have become customary international law. Besides the right not to be tortured, would there be other rights recognized by the UDHR that have become customary international law? Why would it be relevant to recognize the UDHR as customary law?
§ Human rights in the private sphere: International human rights law developed after the adoption of the UDHR has had a preeminent focus on the relation between governments and individuals, often leaving the relation between individuals outside its realm. The feminist movement in particular has questioned this division, because, among other issues, it discriminates against women by accepting or reinforcing an unequal distribution of power. Are we facing an extension of international human rights law to private relations? What are the consequences of this change?
§ Human Rights and Poverty: Some authors maintain that poverty itself is a violation of numerous basic human rights; others consider poverty a cause and/or consequence of the violation of several human rights. Despite efforts to clarify this issue, there is still a lack of conceptual precision regarding poverty and human rights. What would be the consequences of considering poverty a human rights violation? Who would be the duty-bearers? How do human rights contribute to reduce inequality?
§ Multinational corporations: Much of the human rights debate was initially focused on the role of the State as the main violator and the main protector of human rights. However, the growing political and economic power of multinational corporations has changed such a focus. How will the human rights discourse adapt itself to the new role multinational corporations have nowadays?
§ Emerging issues: What human rights issues have emerged since the drafting of the UDHR (including collective rights discourse, responsibilities of non-state actors, etc.) and how is the UDHR relevant for addressing these issues.

International mechanisms
§ Human Rights Council: The creation of the Council aimed at improving the machinery of human rights protection. Is it possible to identify positive outcomes in the transition from the UN Human Rights Commission to the Council? How can the UDHR become more relevant to the work of the Council? The Council has established a new universal periodic review (UPR) mechanism that will review the human rights record of all UN member States. How do you evaluate the UPR so far?
§ Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR): The principle for the progressive realization of economic, social and cultural rights brings a special challenge for the evaluation of States' performance. The indivisibility and interrelatedness of human rights were reflected in the UDHR and recognized at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. How has the divisions in the human rights system between civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights affected the understanding of human rights as universal and indivisible. Will the adoption of the new Optional Protocol to the ICESCR bring greater coherence to the human rights system?
§ OHCHR: One of the most important outcomes of the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights was the creation of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, an Office that has received a unique mandate from the international community to promote and protect all human rights. Has the role of the OHCHR changed since its creation? How? What are the main challenges faced by the Office today? What should be the role of the Office in the protection of human rights?

These issues are mere suggestions of some of the challenging issues related to the UDHR and to the international human rights system. Other innovative related questions and discussions will also be welcome.

Format
Contributions should be sent in electronic form (MS Word format) to surjournal@surjournal.org and should follow these guidelines:
-Between 7,000 and 10,000 words.
-Concise footnotes. (Please find at the end of this text the rules for citation.)
-Short biography of author (maximum of 50 words).
-Abstract (no more than 150 words), including keywords for the required bibliographical classification.
-Date when the paper was written.

Only submissions received by June 15, 2008 will be considered for issue No. 9 (second semester 2008). Articles received after that date will be considered for subsequent issues.

Ideally, articles should be original and unpublished. Exceptionally, however, relevant contributions already published elsewhere may be accepted, provided that the required authorizations are granted. Please inform if, where and when the paper has been published before.
As the Journal is distributed free of charge, we are unfortunately unable to remunerate our contributors. Sur Journal uses Creative Commons license 2.5.

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Rules of Citation/Regras de Citação/Reglas para notas al pie de página
Please include all references in footnotes. We do not publish bibliographies.
Books/Livros/Libros:
Habermas, J. Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt: Editora Suhrkamp,120 p., 1985, p. 1.
Papers published in books/Artigos publicados em livros/Artículos publicados en libros:
Dalari Bucci, M. P. Buscando um conceito de políticas públicas para a concretização dos direitos humanos. In: Bucci et al (org.). Direitos humanos e políticas públicas. São Paulo: Pólis, 120 p., 2001, p. 5-13.
Howse, R. The legitimacy of the World Trade Organization. In: Coicaud, J. and Heiskanen, V. (org.). The legitimacy of international organizations. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 120 p., 2001, p. 355.
Papers published in journals/Artigos publicados em periódicos/Artículos publicados en revistas:
Piovesan, F. Direitos econômicos, sociais e culturais e direitos políticos. Sur: Revista Internacional de Direitos Humanos, São Paulo, v. 1, n. 1, p. 21-47, 2005, p. 23.
Charnovitz, S. & Wickham, J. Non-governmental organizations and the original international trade regime. Journal of World Trade, v. 29, n. 5, p. 111-22, 1995, p. 115.
Eletronic resources/Documentos retirados da internet/Documentos extraídos de internet:
Dunoff, J. Mission impossible: resolving the WTO's trilemma, 2003, p. 3. Available at: <http://www.law.berkeley.edu>. Access on: 23 Jan. 2005.
Dunoff, J. Mission impossible: resolving the WTO's trilemma, 2003, p. 3. Disponível em: <http://www.law.berkeley.edu>. Acesso em: 23 de jan. de 2005.
Dunoff, J. Mission impossible: resolving the WTO's trilemma, 2003, p. 3. Disponible en: <http://www.law.berkeley.edu>. Acceso en: 23 de enero de 2005.
Governmental resources/Documentos governamentais/Documentos governamentales:
Brasil. Secretaria de Direitos Humanos. Relatório sobre Educação em Direitos Humanos. Brasília: SEFOR, 1995, p. 3.
United States of America. Bureau of African Affairs. Niger: Background notes. Available at: <http://www.state.gov/p/af/ci/ng/>. Access on: 23 Mar. 2006.
Thesis/Teses/Teses:
Ikawa, D. Concepção de ser humano e direito à redistribuição: O caso da ação afirmativa (Tese de Doutorado). São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 2006, 203 p.
Laws/Leis/Leyes:
Brasil. Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 5 de out. de 1988. São Paulo: Saraiva, 1990, art. 5º.
Brasil. Lei n. 7716, de 5 de jan.de 1989. Disponível em: <https://legislacao.planalto.gov.br>. Acesso em: 21 de mar. de 2006.
Brazil. Act n. 7716, 5 Jan. 1989. Available at: <https://legislacao.planalto.gov.br>. Access on: 21 Mar. 2006.
Judicial cases/decisões judiciais/Decisiones judiciales:
Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras. Sentence, 29 July 1998, par. 7.
Brasil. Superior Tribunal de Justiça, Acórdão em ação recisória n. 12. José Silva v. Estado de São Paulo. DJ, 20 de nov. de 2004, par. 10.
Newspaper/Jornal/Diario:
Schwartz, J. Big, maybe ugly, but their role heroic. New York Times, 23 Mar. 2006, National, p. 3.
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THE IDEA OF LASSnet

The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi initiated the establishment of the "Law and Social Sciences Research Network" in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in research and teaching of issues of law across social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. We believed that the critical work that has emerged from different institutional locations and theoretical frameworks has yet to find a common forum which can act as a medium for exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and aspirations for the way law, regulation and society as objects of research as well as sites of praxis have been envisaged variously. The attempt of this network is to create a forum for academics, researchers, and lawyers to interact with each other to find productive conversations and enhance these into future directions that law and social sciences scholarship in India might mature into.

LASSnet seeks to organise a network conference every 2-3 years to collaborate on specific themes with institutions in South Asia. So far we have organised 4 network conferences in Delhi and Pune in India and one conference in Sri Lanka. Here at LASSnet, we hope to take the idea of publishing a series of volumes on these themes seriously as well as initiating reading groups/work in progress meetings. We also wish to disseminate teaching materials, design syllabi and share pedagogic experiences.

Since 2021, LASSnet anchored at CSLG, JNU, in collaboration with the Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS) SOAS, and Centre for Law and Humanities, JGLS has been organizing a regular webinar series involving book discussions, panel discussions and guest lectures. We hope to continue our interactions and engagements as we work to bring together ideas and activities for the future.

We would be delighted if you were to send us names and emails of those you think might want to join this network. We hope that people will also share their work, ideas or relevant announcements, if any, on the network. If you would like to be part of LASSnet, please send your contact details and short bio to lassnet@gmail.com

Watch this space for more!

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA

Inaugural Conference

was held on

January 9-11, 2009

at

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

We began by noting that law is conventionally taught and practiced, in South Asia (though not only there) by treating it as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon. The doctrinal researchers regard law as autonomous and believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. The law also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police ‘do’ – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies, as well as by the law and literature movement, and by activists who constantly challenge the positivist image of law. Broadly conceived, these scholars seek to explain law as a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artefact which should be understood and studied as such. This implies also that we trace the genealogies of categories which inform law, and the images and imaginings of law in contemporary social science theory. All this suggests that the law is not confined to state law or the appellate judiciary. Not only it remains a fact that state law remains inherently plural; it interacts with plural regimes of customariness. We wish to understand how forms of state and non-state law mutually constitute each other and how they relate to different structures of power and techniques of violence.

Methods and techniques drawn from the social sciences are central to understanding the market, legal structures, regulation and statecraft in the era of globalisation. In mapping the field of law and social sciences, we interrogate the place of law and economics in the larger context of the scripting of the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes. We recognise that while regulation has emerged as a field in conversation with the discipline of economics, there is very little work which details the intersection of regulation with law. Moreover, the conversations between regulators and lawyers do not seem to be informed by social science frameworks and methodologies. The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) reflects the interests of those scholars who wish to engage with interdisciplinary research on the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes from varying empirical and theoretical viewpoints.

LASS recognises that much scholarship informed by the social sciences in South Asia has been engaged with social movements and forms of activism which have challenged law’s power to deny, censor, hurt, humiliate and kill. The engagement with this politics of hurt has led to many passionate debates about the place of law in our work and in our politics. Yet in South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins, and radical activist engagement with law devalued by official discourses of judicial reform. LASS invites reflexive engagements from scholars and activists about the relationship between law and social movements.

The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) was constituted to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia. Its objective is to bring together academics, lawyers and researchers engaged in innovative legal research in South Asia which employs social science methodologies. Building on existing conversations, LASS hopes to stimulate the development of further research into the links between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming interdependencies of power, law, and resistance. LASS promotes an examination of how law and/or regulation is constituted as an object of study, and an interrogation of the conditions of its truth claims.

LASS may or may not necessarily inhabit the intellectual and political zones of comfort or of distress created by the habitus of postmodern jurisprudence. We invite critical engagement with the global travels of mainstream networks of Law and Economics, Law and Society or Critical Legal Studies, by providing a sustained critique of the fascination of progressive Eurocentric scholarship for South Asian law, economy and society studies.

LASS may equally turn its attention to the precious and precocious critiques of the “dark side of [European] modernity” which rarely attend to the histories of colonization and the Cold War as these have affected South Asia

We remain sensitive to the fact that the very expression ‘South Asia’ embodies forms of epistemic geopolitical imperialism. LASS remains particularly anxious concerning this essentialization of identity and by the same token resists its translation into an “area studies”. Further, it needs saying that some new geopolitics is now in the making. LASS thus calls for an appreciation of the histories of diversity and plurality, within which inescapably new traditions of law/society/humanities tradition of discourse may be further re-imagined. What purchase this may constitute for the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies tradition is an important thematic inviting further dialogical/discursive fellowships of juristic learning.

These methodological challenges are suggested with a view to inviting their further elaboration. Contributors should be mindful of these methodological concerns as they address issues in the following more specific settings. In particular, papers, panels, and presentations were invited on:

1. CONSTITUTIONALISM, REFORM AND RESISTANCE

· Constitutionalism, rights and regulation. Has the discourse on constitutionalism met new challenges in relation to changing statecraft, international law, or human rights in South Asia? How does regulation intersect with rights discourses? How do pictures of the written and unwritten scripts of constitutional law circulate in different sites of law and life?

· Languages of Power and of Resistance. What literary and visual representations of the law and resistance to law exist in the South Asian region? In what ways, the 'poetics' tend to subvert politics? Herein we signal the problematic of the multiplicity of the official languages and the politics of translation. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”?

· The politics of law and judicial reform. What is the politics of law and judicial reform? How are histories of such reform to be archived and evaluated? How do different forms of representations [such as the media or those emanating from social movements] engage with projects of law reform? Do contemporary engagements with reform and resistance benefit with tracing the genealogy of categories, and discursive shifts which create new forms of subjection and subjectivities?

· Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of the Law: The challenges by legal historians and postcolonial theorists in thinking through law and social forms have led to a rich body of literature on law and society in South Asian contexts. We invite contributions interrogating colonial as well as neo-imperial formations of law, governance, and regulation. This panel retains an interest in the contestations on law’s past as these relate to the constitution of the nation-state, and reflections on the impact of history in the reconstitution of law as an object of study.

2. THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY POWER

· The practices of governance in relation to environment, health and sexuality. What are the processes of govermentality which sanitise, medicalise or pathologise some forms of life? What form of regulatory power inhabits the constitution of waste and how does it participate in the formation of public aesthetics? How is the body encountered in public or administrative law? Is gender/sexual orientation/disability a site of recognition that allows us to critique the manifold elisions in the body of the law?

· Technology, Life and the Law. The relationship between science, technology, the body and resources are mediated by the state-corporation alliances in a globalised era. What are the ways in which we may interrogate the deployment of technology to control bodies and life forms, and the regulation of both life and technology through law?

· Technosciences, Environment, Risk and Regulation: How have human rights and social movement discourses pursued this relationship? What images of a ‘risk society’ remain constitutionally legitimate? Are these ideas revisited in the context of the environmental contemporary discourses, such as the global discourse on climate change?

3. PROPERTY, LABOUR, DISPLACEMENT

· Property in different domains of law and life. What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform? What futures one may envisage for agrarian reforms? What kinds if new property stand invested, particularly in relation to the changing regimes of intellectual property rights in South Asia?

· Labour rights, livelihoods and mass displacement of peoples in contemporary contexts of globalisation. What is the relationship between law and regimes of impoverishment in South Asia? In particular, how may globalization affect constitutionally mandated visions of development as most benefiting the worst-off peoples? As concerns worker’s rights, what legacies may we derive from the histories and narratives of working class movements in South Asia? How may we ‘read’ these alongside with the globalization–induced programs aimed at creation of ‘flexible labour markets’?

4. VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING

· Social suffering and political violence. This has multiple dimensions not fully exhausted by the figure of the detainee, torture and disappearance; forms of collective violence and atrocities in everyday and collective contexts; and the modalities of capital punishment and custodial violence have elicited critical research. How is the everyday conceptualised in these contexts? Beyond, and related to this, remains the question of the reproduction of foundational violence of the law. This emerges of course in the context of India-Pakistan partition; yet it also emerges equally fiercely, for example, in Afghanistan, the erstwhile Tibet, and Burma. This conference invites full attention to the postcolonial ‘nacropolitics’ (to deploy here the phrase-regime of Mbembe).

· Terror, Law and Biopolitics: What is the relation between terror, law and bio-politics? Or what would constitute the jurisprudence of emergency or exception in South Asia today? Put another way, we need to explore fully the law-society relationship between the pre and post 9/11 forms of wars of, and wars against ‘terror.’ How may have the South Asian studies tradition, at all, addressed ‘terror?’

· Movements of autonomy and secession: The South Asian experience remains marked by constitutional and ‘extra’-constitutional insurgencies. How has the construction of the political been conceptualized and narrated in law and society studies tradition in the ‘region?’ How does militarization of protest and of governance proceed to reproduce new forms of ‘bare life?’

Instructions for Submission of Papers

The Steering Group particularly welcomed the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Individual proposals were welcome, as were proposals for full panels. Papers were also considered on any related theme.

500 word abstracts weresubmitted no later than 15th June, 2008. 500 word abstracts were submitted to Pratiksha Baxi at lassnet@gmail.com; abstracts were in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. We got back to you within 8 weeks. If an abstract was accepted for the conference, a full draft paper was submitted to the conference secretariat and distributed to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 01 December 2008.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel was 20 minutes. The abstracts are hosted at http://www.lassnet.org/