Month: January 2023

Rwanda’s Restorative Journey: Living Alongside Your Enemy

Posted on January 1, 2023January 25, 2023 by Branzell, Alex

Three days into the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, Carl and Teresa Wilkens made the heart wrenching decision that she would take their young children to safety, and he would stay at their home in Kigali and try to help. Neither had any idea that during the next 100 days more than a million people would be slaughtered, often by their neighbors.

Through the sharing of first-hand accounts of the catastrophic 1994 genocide and the country’s rebuilding journey that followed, Carl will discuss restorative justice and practices and engage us in guided conversations about what those practices mean today, particularly in the realm of rebuilding trust.

As a humanitarian aid worker, Carl Wilkens was one of two Americans who refused to leave Rwanda as thousands of expatriates and UN soldiers fled the country in the face of what is now known as the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi. Working together with Rwandan colleagues they brought food, water, and medicine to orphans trapped around the city.

These days Wilkens travels around the globe using the transformative process of storytelling and restorative practices to explore topics such as polarization, harmful conflict, and belonging. He is the Co-founder and Director of World Outside My Shoes.

"I'm Not Leaving"

In advance of the event, we encourage you to watch the 40-minute documentary, I'm Not Leaving, available in full & free on YouTube.

This 40-minute documentary shares snapshots of the genocide through the eyes of Carl and his wife Teresa along with: Gasigwa, a courageous Rwandan colleague whose home became a safe-house, Laura from the US Embassy who wrestled with Washington, DC to not abandon their mission, and Phil, one of the handful of UN peacekeepers who volunteered to stay in Rwanda and were tenuously hanging on to save lives. Their gut-wrenching choices and unexpected alliances formed during the 100 days of slaughter leave us with a surprising sense of hope and agency.

Exhibition Closing Reception: Madeline Baird on ‘Embodied Borders’

Posted on January 1, 2023February 2, 2023 by Branzell, Alex

We welcome you to join us for a closing reception to celebrate and discuss the most recent exhibition in the hall of The Dodd Center for Human Rights with the photographer. Madeline Baird's 'Embodied Borders' reveals the human toll of the exportation of U.S. border enforcement through a series of captivating photographs.

Madeline Baird is a PhD student in Anthropology at UConn. Prior to enrolling at UConn, Madeline earned an MSc from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and worked for a decade supporting public health program design and community-based research. Her current research employs ethnographic methods to explore constructions of health inequity, human rights, and healing in Latin America.

In recent decades, the extension of U.S. immigration and border enforcement policies to countries in Central America increasingly pressures migrant populations seeking refuge in the U.S. to travel the most remote and dangerous passages to the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2022, more than 200,000 migrants traversed the Darien Gap known to be one of the most dangerous sections of the journey through Central America. This series of photographs documents the embodied impact of the exportation of U.S. border enforcement 2,500 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border for migrants in transit through Panama.

Human Rights Graduate Research Forum

Posted on January 1, 2023April 15, 2023 by Akaslan, Imge

The Human Rights Graduate Research Forum provides an opportunity for graduate students in any discipline or school doing human rights-related work to receive feedback from peers and faculty in an informal and supportive environment. These forums occur once per month during the academic year. Each session is split between the student researcher's presentation and time reserved for questions and feedback.

We welcome graduate students and faculty from any discipline or school to attend. UConn graduate students doing human rights-related work are encouraged to sign up to discuss their work in a future forum.

Global Labor Rights Enforcement in Small and Medium-Sized Textile Firms
Wednesday, February 8, 2023 | 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Imge Akaslan

SMEs, enterprises that have 10 to 250 employees, account for two-thirds of all jobs worldwide, yet this significant segment of the global supply chain is heavily under-researched in contemporary scholarship on labor rights and policy approaches to labor rights protection often overlook their unique challenges. Through the in-depth study of SMEs in the Turkish textile industry, this project both advances our understanding of how small enterprises function, and also identifies new actors which influence variation in the enforcement of labor rights standards. Omitting SMEs as an entity leads to underestimation of some subset of actors’ role on enforcement of labor rights. Therefore, one of the main goals of this dissertation is to understand how intermediary actors influence the translation of labor rights norms into labor rights standards. By understanding the incentives of possible translators, we can then shape those incentives to influence the behavior of those translators and potentially improve labor standards in global supply chains. Ultimately, my findings will inform policy dialogues and advocacy efforts aimed at enhancing the human dignity of workers in global supply chains, no matter the size of the firm in which they work.

Imge Akaslan is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, Political Science Department. Her dissertation research examines the variation in the enforcement of labor standards in small and medium-sized enterprises and identifies new actors which influence the enforcement of labor standards in global supply chains. Imge holds a BS in global and international affairs from Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and an MA in political science from Binghamton University (SUNY).

The Electric Vehicle Revolution: From a Human Rights Angle
Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Francesco Rouhana

Electric vehicles (EVs) have evolved rapidly owing to technological advancements and a growing interest in renewable energy to eliminate transportation’s dependency on fossil fuels and mitigate the effects of climate change. While EVs could revolutionize the transportation industry, they could jeopardize social equity and environmental stewardship efforts. Current studies on transportation electrification often fail to evaluate the EV revolution implications in human rights terms. International human rights law provides universally accepted norms, standards, baseline indicators, and modes of inquiry and reporting that could significantly advance and sharpen impact analysis. In this study, we explored the potential human rights implications that EVs pose for individuals and societies throughout their life cycle. Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights-based treaties as our baseline, we analyzed the existing and likely EVs’ impacts on human rights. We identified potential measures to address human rights violations. Stakeholders (governments, private sectors, civil society) need to work closely together to make the transition to low-carbon transportation more equitable and sustainable.

Exclusion and Embrace: Secondary Refugee Students and A Pedagogy of Belonging
Wednesday, April 12, 2023 | 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Sara Harvel

America has an identity problem. People in America experience degrees of political, social, and economic rights that affect the extent to which they feel included or excluded from the nation. Social and racial hierarchies exist in part because of our settler colonial history, immigration policies, and our narrow perception of who can be American. The problem of exclusion in America is highlighted in how people perceive refugees. Historically, policies and practices communicate a hierarchy of acceptance to refugees that complicates the degree to which they experience membership and belonging. This is especially true for refugee secondary students in public schools.

To refugee secondary students, schools are sites of socialization where they learn cultural norms while establishing a sense of personal identity in a new environment. To refugee secondary students, schools are structures, composed of individual people, that either extend membership or not. These schools can either reproduce social injustices and maintain status quo or push against structural inequities and promote belonging. Research has shown that peer acceptance is one of the most important factors contributing to refugee student sense of belonging. However, many students do not know how to interact with people who are different from themselves. Society needs students to interact and extend belonging to one another across differences, and schools need to teach students how to do it. This study explores the relationship between curriculum, instruction, and community in order to promote a pedagogy of belonging as measured by membership, relationship, and skills. Ultimately, this study may contribute to an analysis of school communities and the varying purposes of education. I also hope to contribute to conversations about migration and education.

Sara Harvel is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education. Her focus is on Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on social studies education and human rights. She taught internationally in Qingdao, China for several years and also did NGO work on the Thai-Myanmar border, focusing on child advocacy and social entrepreneurship. Sara is a graduate assistant with the Neag School of Education and with Dodd Impact. She is interested in human rights education, refugee and immigrant school experiences, teacher education, and school communities.

Grit & Grace: The Fight for the American Dream

Posted on January 1, 2023February 15, 2023 by Branzell, Alex

Grit & Grace: The Fight for the American Dream is a groundbreaking documentary-style film produced by the 117th Congress's House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth and directed by Oscar Guerra, Associate Professor of Digital Media & Design at UConn Stamford. Narrated by EMMY® award-winning actress Sarah Jessica Parker, this first-of-its-kind movie features three true stories from across the country of what it means to find economic security in America, as well as the diverse paths people are taking to get there.

The event will begin with a reception and remarks by Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons, UConn President Radenka Maric, former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, U.S. Representative Jim Himes, and Grit & Grace director Oscar Guerra. A full screening of the film will follow. After, community leaders from across Connecticut will join Representative Himes for a panel discussion contextualizing the film.

Radenka Maric was named the 17th president of the University of Connecticut by the Board of Trustees on September 28, 2022. She had served as UConn’s vice president for research, innovation, and entrepreneurship since 2017. Maric has been a faculty member and researcher since 2010 at the University, where she also is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor. Maric holds multiple patents, is an elected member of several prestigious professional organizations, published hundreds of scholarly works, received more than $40 million in research grants, and is fluent in four languages with a working knowledge of others.

Jim Himes represents Connecticut’s 4th District in the United States House of Representatives. Jim was born in Lima, Peru, and moved to the United States with his mother and sisters at the age of 10. He worked extensively in the business and non-profit worlds before entering public service. He now lives in Cos Cob, Greenwich with his wife Mary and enjoys (not frequent enough) visits from his daughters Emma and Linley. As a member of Congress, Jim works hard to provide all American children the same opportunities he had to succeed: access to a first-rate public school, affordable and effective health care, a decent and safe home, and a supportive community.

Oscar Guerra is an Emmy® award-winning director, researcher, and educator. He is an Associate Professor of Film and Video at the University of Connecticut and a producer at PBS FRONTLINE. Dr. Guerra’s focus is storytelling which promotes critical thinking and social investment. He aims to produce media that provides a way for underrepresented groups to share and disseminate counterstories, contradict dominant and potentially stereotypical narratives, and strengthen their voices and identities. Dr. Guerra’s career spans the spectrum of television environments, music, multimedia production, documentaries for social change, promotional videos, immersive media, and vast international experience.

Marc Jaffe is the CEO of the Children's Learning Centers of Fairfield County. As the second largest early childhood education provider in Connecticut, CLC has been a leader in developing and implementing high-quality and affordable early childhood education and care programs since 1902. Marc came to the nonprofit sector after serving for more than twenty-five years as a senior publishing, licensing and technology executive where he honed strong management, strategic-planning and cross-platform business development skills.

Ivonne Zucco, MBA, PCC, serves as the People and Culture Director of Building One Community, a Stamford-based nonprofit organization with the mission to advance the successful integration of immigrants and their families through education, employment, empowerment, and engaging the entire community. She has formerly held the roles of Operations Director and Workforce Development Director at B1C. During the five years with the organization, Ivonne has worked with leadership to integrate people, physical space, and processes to improve the quality of service and the organization's productivity. In her former role as Workforce Development Director, Ivonne managed the Skills Development, the Hiring Site, and the Unpaid Wages programs. The Programs' goal is to develop relevant job skills training for low-income immigrants in the greater Stamford area while providing job placements as a community resource, connecting local employers to immigrant workers.

Read the Report:

Commissioned by the former House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, Grit & Grace is a documentary illustrating the economic challenges facing American communities at a personal level. It is a groundbreaking companion to the detailed final report from the Committee, which set out to study solutions to address America’s growing prosperity gap at the national level.

Their findings and recommendations have been organized into a final report, Bridging the Divide: Building an Economy that Works for All, available below.

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A Source of Escalation or a Source of Restraint? Whether and How Civil Society Affects Mass Killings

Posted on January 1, 2023February 9, 2023 by Akaslan, Imge

In this Human Rights Research and Data Hub Workshop, Dr. Evan Perkoski will present his research on state-led mass killings. Why do some state-led mass killings end quickly while others endure for over a decade? And why do some states murder millions of constituents during the course of mass killings, whereas other states seem to retreat from the brink after killing hundreds? A large body of work has focused on the important role played by civil society and non-governmental actors in initiating different forms of rescue, evasion, and assistance in the midst of different cases of mass killings, as well as the political pressure they have applied in bringing about the ends of civil conflicts. Despite many inspiring and hopeful cases of collective action under systems of intense repression, other research finds civil society can accelerate or exacerbate mass killings. In this paper, we test some basic mechanisms that emerge from the literature on the connection between civil society and mass killings, and we find that a complex albeit meaningful relationship exists. We find that, in general, a relatively participatory and autonomous civil society is correlated with shorter mass killings. However, we also find that active civil societies are associated with higher rates of lethality, particularly when those civil society sectors exist in highly unequal polities. Because most mass killings are relatively short, our findings suggest that civil societies in states with uneven access to power are more commonly correlated with longer, deadlier spells of government violence. This conclusion seemingly supports the view of civil society skeptics, at least in highly unequal contexts where mass killings have already begun.

Evan Perkoski is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at the Marine Corps University.

He studies issues relating to terrorism, insurgency, and violent and nonviolent uprisings. In his book project, he explores the fragmentation of militant organizations (like Al Qaeda) and the conduct and survivability of breakaway splinter groups (like the Islamic State). Some of his other work looks at the onset of mass killings in popular uprisings, the logic of covert and clandestine cyber operations, and how cooperation and competition influence the behavior of militant groups. His research generally leverages new data and quantitative methods to understand political violence.

Reimagining Gender Violence as Torture

Posted on January 1, 2023April 7, 2023 by Branzell, Alex

Is gender-based violence (GBV) different in any important way from what is understood as torture?
The participants in this forum, basing their arguments on decades of experience in law, clinical work, activism and scholarship, assert that understanding GBV as torture is essential for furthering public understanding of the true nature of GBV, and importantly, for improving the response and redress measures for victims.

This expert panel is one in a series of public engagements of the 2023 Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights Rashida Manjoo, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences.

Rashida Manjoo is Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town where she taught for many years in the Department of Public Law and also convened the LLM Human Rights Program. She continues to supervise PhD candidates in the Faculty of Law.

Professor Manjoo has over four decades of experience in social justice and human rights work both in South Africa and abroad. Until July 2015, she held the position of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, a post she was appointed to in 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Her UN work over six years has included monitoring and reporting on States' compliance in responding to and preventing violence against women, its causes, and consequences, both generally and in different country contexts. She has particularly highlighted the interaction of interpersonal, communal, institutional, and structural factors that negatively impact the interdependence and indivisibility of the human rights of women, and the challenges of the normative gap in international law on the issue of violence against women.

Professor Manjoo is the former Parliamentary Commissioner of the Commission on Gender Equality, an institution created by the Constitution of South Africa, with a mandate to oversee the promotion and protection of gender equality and women's rights. She has also been involved in social context training for judges and lawyers, where she has designed both content and methodology.

She has authored several journal articles, book chapters and reports, including the co-edited books Women’s Charters and Declarations: Building another World; The Legal Protection of women from violence - normative gaps in international law; Criminal Justice and Accountability in Africa; and Violence against Women: Law, Policy, and Practice.

Rashida Manjoo is the 2023 Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.

Carla Ferstman joined Essex Law School in January 2018. She is a barrister and solicitor (British Columbia, 1994). DPhil (Public International Law) (Oxon); LL.M (NYU); LL.B (UBC); BA (Philosophy) (Western). She was Fernand Braudel Fellow (2022) at European University Institute (Florence); visiting professional (2015) at Centre for International Governance and Justice at RegNet, Australian National University (Canberra); and Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow (2012/13) at the United States Institute of Peace (Washington, DC).

Carla is a member since 2018 of the Council of Europe's Expert Council on NGO Law (a specialist body that provides commentary and expertise on the regulation of civil society activities throughout the Council of Europe). She is also on the JRR-UN Women SGBV Justice Experts Roster and on the Advisory Committee of Lawyers for Justice in Libya. She was a judge on the Aban Tribunal, an International ‘People’s Tribunal’ established to investigate atrocities alleged to have taken in place in Iran during the November 2019 protests, which held oral hearings in November 2021 and February 2022 and issued its final judgment in November 2022.

Carla has worked in the human rights field for the bulk of her career to date. After a brief period in private practice in Canada as a criminal defence lawyer, she began working internationally, first for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Rwanda and thereafter, at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London. She served as the Executive Legal Advisor of the Commission for Real Property Claims of Refugees and Displaced Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1999-2001), a mass claims body established pursuant to the Dayton Peace Accords to re-establish property rights and assist displaced persons to return home. In 2001, she joined REDRESS, a nongovernmental human rights organization which pursues justice on behalf of victims of torture and related international crimes, first as Legal Director and from 2004 - 2018 as Director. During her tenure, REDRESS won the MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

In 2022, Carla won the Essex Faculty of Arts and Humanities Supervisor of the Year award.

David Richards is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut, with appointments in both the Department of Political Science and the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, where he is Director of Graduate Studies.

David’s body of work on human rights includes more than two-dozen studies of: gender-violence law, the measurement of government respect for human rights including torture, US public support for torture, and the effects of globalization on human rights respect, among others. He has also authored reports for governments and international organizations.

Some current projects include studies of: torture in the time of COVID; sexual violence as torture; school infrastructure as a children’s right; the language of torture in narratives; and best-practices in teaching college students about torture.

David Richards is likely best known as the co-founder/director of the now-archived Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project. Funded multiple times by the National Science Foundation and World Bank, among others, this project provided information on the level of government respect for 16 human rights in 196 countries from 1981 to 2012. The CIRI Project’s data have been used by international organizations such as the United Nations and World Bank, and in 170 countries by governments, media, activists, businesses, scholars, and students.

David’s book (with Jill Haglund, Univ. of Kentucky) Violence Against Women and the Law (Routledge 2015), examines the strength of laws addressing four types of violence against women–rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment–in 196 countries from 2007 to 2010. Of central importance is the question of why these laws exist in some places and not others, and why they are stronger or weaker in places where they do exist. The book’s original data allow the testing of various hypotheses related to whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections. Also examined are the ways in which these legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions, and how transnational society affects the presence and strength of these laws.

Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson are feminist human rights activists living in Nova Scotia, Canada. For 30 years they have focused their work on supporting women who detail being victimized by family and non-family-based non-State torturer-traffickers with organized criminal informal networks with like-minded others. As independent researchers and scholars with many published articles, book chapters, and their 2021 book, “Women Unsilenced: Our Refusal To Let Torturer-Traffickers Win,” which shares their developed theory, models, and non-State torture (NST) victimization-traumatization informed care, expanding this work to name the infliction of consequential conditioned suicide-femicide victimizations. Their participatory research represents the voices of women from Canada, the U.S., Mexico, the UK, Western Europe, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Papua New Guinea, plus women who identify torture victimizations in prostitution and pornographic exploitations. Since 2004 they have participated in non-governmental organizational panels at the United Nations in New York, Geneva, and in Vienna where they are involved in a Working Group addressing non-State torture (NST) to create global education with the aim to eliminate all forms of non-State torture of women and girls. They develop resources, provide educational presentations and webinars nationally and internationally, including in the UK, the U.S., Spain, Portugal, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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"I'm Not Leaving"

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Reception

Associated Workshop – April 5 – Violence Against Women and the Normative Gap

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Rashida Manjoo

Carla Ferstman

David Richards

Linda MacDonald & Jeanne Sarson