Policy Brief
Can We Eradicate Hunger?
World hunger is prevalent yet receives relatively less attention compared to poverty. The MDGs have taken a step to address this with the resolution of halving the number of starving people in the world by 2015. A substantial and sustainable...
Working Paper
Political Sources of Humanitarian Emergencies
This diagnostic study explores the political conditions that are associated with humanitarian emergencies. It employs a risk rather than cause-effect methodology. Humanitarian emergencies are not random events. They occur most frequently in states...
Working Paper
Human Rights and the Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies
This paper defines a role for human rights and human rights workers in the discussion of humanitarian emergencies. The approach is to look at how human rights law, monitoring, and information can be useful in two ways: (1) to warn of an impending...
Working Paper
Legal empowerment and group-based inequality
Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on...
Working Paper
The Gender Dimensions of Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Based on analysing World Bank and other donor post-conflict reconstruction (PCR) loans and grants from rights-based, macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives, we conclude that few PCR projects identify or address gender discrimination issues...
Working Paper
State Recognition of the Right to Food at the National Level
This paper considers to what extent the human right to food has been recognized by countries in the world, by analysing international obligations and constitutional provisions, bearing in mind that the right to food may be either explicitly or...
Working Paper
Enforcing the Right to Food in India
Over the past decade, a series of events in India have brought the question of food security into sharp focus. Vast famine-affected areas versus surplus production and stocks of grains, the impact of globalization and World Trade Organization laws on...
Working Paper
Realizing the Right to Food in South Asia
Basic human rights recognize the intrinsic value of freedom, only not for the value of freedom itself, but also for its instrumental role enabling an individual to choose a bundle of commodities and wellbeing. The role of food, a basic necessity of...
Working Paper
Illegal Immigration, Human Trafficking, and Organized Crime
It is important to make a careful distinction between illegal immigration, human smuggling, and human trafficking which are nested, but yet different concepts. This distinction is relevant because these different categories of the illegal movement of...
Working Paper
Iraqi Forced Migrants in Jordan
This paper describes and analyses the case of Iraqis who, in the 1990s, have arrived in Jordan as forced migrants, and have continued to Western Europe or Australia as asylum migrants. The argument put forth is that trends of asylum migration cannot...
Working Paper
How do human rights violations affect poverty and income distribution?
The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of human rights on income distribution and poverty by exploring how both aid and trade can influence poverty and income distribution through human rights. The analysis employs data for 125 countries and...
Working Paper
‘Embedded’ Assistance
Donors face distinct challenges in operating in fragile states and supporting the building of state capacity. This paper explores one type of assistance – the ‘embedding’ of highly-skilled staff members within local government agencies – through a...
Book Chapter
Työntekijöiden oikeudet ja sosiaaliturva Kambodzassa
A Book Chapter in Joona Pietarila (ed.) Kambodza kriisien jälkeen. Kirjoituksia yhteiskunnan kehityksestä ja tulevaisuuden haasteista.
Book
Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure
Do we have a right to food? The significance of a human rights approach, and the way in which it translates to gender considerations, with links to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, agricultural productivity and the environment, adds a new dimension to the...
Working Paper
Access to what?
In this paper I issue a call for a primary focus on expanding and strengthening alternative, community-based justice system, as a strategy for securing the full benefits of legal agency to indigenous and other culturally distinct groups. I do so...
Working Paper
The Danish Model and the Globalizing Learning Economy
Although Denmark shares with the other four Nordic countries certain attributes, such as pragmatic protestant religion, small and homogenous population, strong social democratic parties and ambitious welfare states, it also has its own...
Working Paper
Constitutional social and environmental human rights and child health outcomes in Latin American countries
This paper analyses the health-improving effects of introducing four different constitutional social and environmental human rights (health, free education, adequate living (or welfare), and environment) and the American Convention on Human Rights...