Spring 2013 Courses

Addresses the vexed issue of economic development in Africa – its many failures, its occasional successes – from the early colonial period to the present. Focuses especially on the transition from the 1960s “modernizing” moment to the millennium projects and humanitarian aid of the present. Will read the works of development experts, World Bank executives, anthropologists and historians, asking why this massively financed project has experienced such failure and exploring what can be done.

Islamic conceptions of human rights, beginning with early formulations of key concepts like freedom and equality during the Arab “awakening” or Nahda and continuing to Islamic conceptions of rights after WWII and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Special attention to how women’s rights and women’s emancipation became key points of dispute between the West and the Islamic world. How ideas of the human and humanity (and its rights) are constructed, especially within the humanities.

Examine the history and experiences of marginalized peoples in Japan from the Ainu to ethnic Koreans, from queer to the Okinawans, to challenge the myth of racial and ethnic homogeneity and sexual heteronormativity. Enhance understanding about cultural and artistic productions by reading a variety of texts, including fiction, oral histories, philosophical treatises, and films.

This course invites us to take a peek through diverse theoretical lenses as we entertain multiple complexities and contradictions in women’s lives. Most of us believe that the cross-border movement of people is the heart of contemporary globalization and of multicultural societies. Not long ago, gender and feminist scholars sounded a clarion call to make gender central to studies of immigration. These scholars began to ask and address important questions like, How are global inequalities beginning with colonialism, immigrants’ decisions to migrate, their new household set-up, men’s and women’s identities, and the second-generation’s fates, gendered? The aim of this course is to introduce students to the various ways diasporic migration as well as formations and experiences are gendered. The course will address both the social, economic and political dimensions of migration and the diasporas as well as issues related to identity construction, cultural productions and imaginations.

“All is fair in love and war,” some say. And yet some heroes, such as Martin Luther King and Ghandi seem to say the opposite: “Nothing is fair in war.” These claims will be discussed along with traditional just war theory and utilitarian ethical views of war. Then we will apply these competing theories to case studies including preventive war (such as the war in Iraq), terrorism, and counterterrorism (including torture and lie detection). Each member of the class will write a book chapter on a chosen topic in this area.

An examination, emphasizing cultural and political trends, of the turning points that have shattered political unity (two world wars, economic depression, protest movements, the Cold War and ethnic strife), as well as forces for unification (modernist literature, film and music, political ideologies, the Common Market, and post-1989 revival)

Examines social and cultural history of human trafficking to North America from the Seventeenth century to the present, beginning with the organization of both the servant trade from Great Britain and the slave trade from Africa in the 1600s to the creation of sex trafficking in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This is a new course that aims to bring graduate students and undergraduates into conversation across public policy, global health, ethics, and law. The course proceeds in three parts: framing, case studies, and a final module to be selected by the class participants based on the particular interests of our class. In the framing section we will learn about “new governance” legal initiatives inspired by the insights of contemporary behavioral economics and ask: what might be the value for development and for human rights of legal arrangements that set out to nudge rather than “command.” We will also explore development practices that emerge from a culturally-competent “asset-based” vision of development and a “soft power” vision of human rights: how have techniques like power mapping, citizen report cards, norm-based self-reporting or public expenditure tracking surveys worked to empower (or not) the least empowered members in a community?

In the second part of the course we will take up three to four real world cases–at least two of which will be grounded in health, in which legal arguments, development problems, and ethical and human rights claims are all in play and policy decisions must be made, in that particular case, about what mix might be best for pro-poor development. Built into the case are different perspectives taken by different stake-holders with different ideologies. In each case, we will ask how law can be viewed both as part of the problem and as part of various prospective solutions. Also what other forms of “nudging” might help us innovate in relation to those problems. And what bearing might “soft” and “hard” power analyses or “asset based” development or any of the techniques we’ve studied earlier have? For each case we will attend to ethical questions (sometimes coded as grounded in human rights and sometimes not) that arise in pursuit of pro-poor development. No expertise in law is expected. We will learn the rudiments of the applicable law as required for each case.

Cases range from the challenges of safeguarding public health in the shadow of bilateral investment treaties; to curbing corruption and empowering citizens to hold government accountable in such areas as health and education; to enabling access to essential medicines for patients who cannot pay; to restraining corporate complicity in human rights violations and promoting positive corporate conduct through devices like “the triple bottom line” or benefit corporations (“b-corps”); to maintaining social and environmental safeguards for World Bank- sponsored development initiatives. In the latter case we will learn the “law-like” institutional review processes like the World Banks Inspection Panel that enables challenges to World Bank development investment decisions.

The strategic policy insights we seek will be of consequence for professional practitioners (eg. health workers, development workers, legal advocates) and government entities, as well as corporations, non-governmental organizations, transnational networks, and citizen-based organizations and communities.

PPS 590S-34 is a research seminar on human rights and is sponsored by The Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute. DHRC-FHI “brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and students to promote new understandings about human rights, with special emphasis on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, income inequality and the environment. The Center is committed to the goal of social justice, and the politics of forgiveness, accountability and reconciliation. It seeks to promote collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and critical thinking about human rights, with particular emphasis on developing undergraduate courses that highlight these questions, and sponsoring campus-wide events that encourage awareness and activism on human rights issues.”

The primary goal of the course is for each student to prepare a @25 page paper on some aspect of human rights. All papers should make use of primary as well as secondary sources. The topic students choose will be up to them, but each student will work closely with the professor throughout the semester.

There will be two formats for the weekly class meetings. For part of the semester we will read and discuss articles on human rights as well as bring Duke faculty and outside speakers to share their scholarly work and policy engagement on human rights.

At other times in the semester we will read and critique each other’s work. First we will consider the research perspective of each student and later in the term we will read drafts of the final paper.

Students do not need to have a background in human rights to enroll in the course.

The effectiveness of aid in low-income countries has been the subject of intense debate. The course will examine the context and objectives of international aid, the record and lessons, and recent efforts and proposals for change within the international community. There is a special (but not exclusive) focus on Africa, since more robust growth and poverty reduction on that continent are at the center of the aid effectiveness debate. In this exploration of the politics of aid, attention will be focused on the principal stakeholders, their motivations, and the quality of interaction among the various players (Governments, NGOs, bilateral donors, and multilateral institutions), along with the bottom line–whether aid is resulting in poverty reduction in low-income countries. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with recent literature on the topic, key debates surrounding aid effectiveness, the policies and actions of different donors, and recent proposals and measures aimed at improving development assistance. The course is primarily a group discussion, with occasional mini-lectures, student presentations, debates, case studies, two papers, and a final simulation.