Week 7 - Contentious Politics and Climate Change Flashcards
The emergence of climate science in the 19th century… TYNDALL and ARRHENIUS
John Tyndall (understands the concepts) and Svante Arrhenius (the brains/does the math): first time understanding of the greenhouse effect
Greenhouse effect: how hot air gets trapped in the atmosphere
1860s studied in the Alps
His work laid the ground work on future research
Tyndall and Arrehnius’ contribution to the political discourse around climate change set out four contributions
- Scientific foundation
- First to suggest a direct relationship between humans and climate change - Raising awareness
- Environmental movements
- Policy initiatives
The early environmental movement of the 1960s… Silent Spring by Rachel Carson:
- Helped set the stage for the environmental movement
- Pesticides (DDT) not only kills insects and invasive species but everything around them
- Her argument: explaining how DDT enters the food stage and is the cause of cancer and certain genetic diseases. Thus contaminating the world’s food supply
- Kennedy banned Ddt in the U.S
- Nature is vulnerable to human intervention
- She brought the question of climate science to the public
The institutionalization of environmentalism in the 1970s
EARTH DAY
Founded by U.S Senator Gaylord Nelson and Activist Denis Hayes
First Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970: estimated 22 million
One of the largest grassroots movements in U.S history
Mobilized millions across the U.S
The institutionalization of environmentalism in the 1970s
(Creation of US Environmental Protection Agency)
In response to many environmental crises (ex: Cuyahoga River Fire, 1969)
- Received a lot of mainstream media attention
President Nixon wanted to establish a U.S Environmental Protection Agency
1. Clean air act (1970)
2. Clean water act (1972)
3. The endangered species act (1973)
The institutionalization of environmentalism in the 1970s
(The Stockholm conference)
Formally known as the UN conference on the human environment
Primary objective was to address the interrelationship between human activities and the environment
Results:
- Stockholm declaration
- UN environment programme (UNEP)
- Recognition of environmental concerns as global challenges that require collective action
- Laid the groundwork for future international environmental agreements
Scientific consensus and policy initiatives in the 1980s
(The intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), 1988)
The IPCC is the UN’ body for assessing the science related to climate change
The IPCC’s first assessment report, released in 1990, laid the groundwork for understanding climate change: human activities are the significant contributor to global warming
The IPCC’s findings have been instrumental in shaping international climate policy, including the UN framework convention on climate change and the Paris Agreement
1990s international agreements and activism
(Earth Summit in Rio, 1992)
THE SUMMIT EMERGED FROM THE INCREASING RECOGNITION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AS CRITICAL TO GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT
Outcomes:
- Agenda 21
Comprehensive plan for global national and local action to achieve sustainable development during the 21st century
Emphasizes the need for environmentally sound development practices
- Rio declaration
27 principles aimed at guiding future sustainable efforts - Framework convention on climate change
Mother treaty - Convention on Biological Diversity
Aimed at conservation in biodiversity
Kyoto protocol 1997
Legally binding agreement set emission reduction targets for 37 industrialized countries and the european union, collectively known as annex 1 countries
Paris agreement builds on this protocol
Climate change as a policy priority in the 2000s
Extreme weather events
- Shift in public perception
Climate activism and NGOs
“An inconvenient truth”
- Documentary
- Marked a turning point in public opinions on climate change
The political science of human rights by Todd Landman
- The study of human rights represents an important nexus between traditional concerns within comparative politics and those in international relations
- Rights are relatively old but the notion of human rights is relatively new
- Since the universal declaration, the full content of human rights has grown in breadth and depth, where more rights have become codified in numerous human rights instruments to which more states have become party
- International human rights law and the mechanisms for its enforcement are a special type of regime since they do not seek to govern interstate relations, such as those regimes designed to protect the environment and trade but to govern individual state behavior toward citizens
- Realists argue that international law and treaties are merely epiphenomenal with no real impact on interstate relations. While some neo-realists and neo-liberal institutionalists regard human rights as projecting ‘liberalism into a realist world, a world dominated for several centuries by states and their collective interests.
- But the international human rights regime represents a mutual gain for contracting states and it seeks to constrain state behavior towards citizens rather than state behavior towards other states
- Popular responses to scepticism
- To take a pragmatic turn by sidestepping the need for philosophical foundations for human rights and making legal and political claims about their existence and the need for their protection
- Response to the absence of agreed foundations for human rights involves making political claims about how rights may both constrain and facilitate human behavior
- Cultural relativism arguments against the universality of human rights have been criticized for the degree to which they seek universal empirical generalizations that travel across time and space while ignoring the contextual specificities of different nation-states and cultures
- The model shows how the international human rights regime can have an impact on state behavior, while they claim the inferences from the comparison of the eleven countries remain generalizable across cases irrespective of cultural, political, or economic differences
- Argues that if no progress has been made on this core set of basic rights of the person then it is highly unlikely that progress could be made on a less consensual set of rights
- Rationalist accounts at the domestic level focus on the intentional actions of individual agents while at the international level focus on the intentional actions of individual states
- Structuralist accounts at the domestic level focus on the interdependent relationships among individuals, collectivities, institutions, and organizations, and as such can move easily to the international level to provide explanations for the development of international institutions and questions of global governance
- Culturalist accounts at the domestic level focus on the broader holistic and shared aspects of collectivities, inter-subjective relationships, and mutual understandings that make human communities possible, while at the international level, such accounts are most akin to constructivist theories of international relations that focus on the social processes that lead to the formation and adherence to particular norms
Conclusions:
- For human rights, it is not the separate contribution that these theoretical perspectives contribute is interesting but the ways in which they intersect with one another
- Recognition of the embeddedness of these various political actors and the ways in which their ends are pursued will help inform our explanations for conditions under which human rights protection is made possible or the conditions under which human rights violations take place
- This article provided an account of the transmission of human rights norms that challenges the main tenets of realism, while the case study of Chile combined rationalist concerns over coalitions with different sets of preferences in the authoritarian regime with constructivist concerns over the delegitimizing impact of external human rights pressures
Reflections on Human Rights and Power by Pablo Gilabert
He writes about the tensions between the normative ideal of human rights and the facts of asymmetric power.
- The first is to reconstruct and assess a set of important powers related to worries about human rights
- The second objective is to propose a strategy for satisfying the desiderata identified in the previous section
Three power-related worries:
- Inexistence: there is no human rights
- Abandonment: the human rights project should be abandoned
- A normative recommendation
- Overall more desirable to drop human rights practices than to engage in it - Shaping: the human rights project should be reshaped in certain ways
- Shaping is the most appealing practical judgment
- The worries provide us with reasons to arrange the human rights practice in certain ways
As Gilabert (2018) writes, “Human rights are particularly relevant in the context in which there are significant asymmetries of power, but where these asymmetries exist the human rights project turns out to be especially difficult to realize” (375). And, at the center of these asymmetries of power is the state
Descriptive claims refer to empirical facts about what people believe they are entitled to in their social life and they report, explain, or predict how people act with respect to some putative entitlement
The existence of human rights is a normative face about what people owe to each other
Antonio Gramsci argued that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways domination and intellectual and moral leadership the achievement of the second kind of supremacy is what he called HEGEMONY
Conclusions:
- He proposes we build empowerment into our view of human rights
- Our understanding of human rights should be power-sensitive but not narrowly power-centered
Constructing Political Membership and Worthiness by Lindsey Kingston
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) emphasizes the inherent dignity and equal rights of all humans, yet real-world events reveal disparities in the enjoyment of these rights
- Hierarchies of personhood and legal nationality often determine who is considered “worthy” of rights, challenging the universality of human rights.
- The concept of functioning citizenship is proposed to address these gaps, advocating for a more inclusive understanding of political membership that transcends state borders and traditional citizenship norms.
The concept of human dignity is central to modern human rights, emphasizing that all humans possess inherent dignity and equal rights. Critics argue that the term “dignity” can be inconsistently applied, but defenders like George Kateb assert its universal nature.
- Despite the UDHR’s foundation for these rights, the modern human rights regime often fails to adequately protect them, as it assumes state governments will uphold these rights, which is not always the case.
Political discourse often highlights weaknesses in universal rights norms, with debates about citizenship and belonging marked by racism and exclusion, as seen in the United States and Europe.
- Citizenship is increasingly viewed as a tool for promoting human dignity.
Elizabeth F. Cohen (2009) argues that citizenship is a gradient category and that many individuals are on a spectrum somewhere between full and noncitizenship. She illustrates situations of semi-citizenship, which are closely related to the concept of “differentiated citizenship”.
- Ronnie Lipschutz (2004) argues that political participation in the institutionalized, public sphere is not enough for full membership. Instead, we must think critically about how to achieve meaningful political participation and make it matter.
- Kingston argues that the concept of functioning citizenship, which moves beyond mere legal status, can strengthen human rights norms and build a richer notion of political membership. This relationship between the state and the individual is active and mutually beneficial but also signifies membership in a broader, inclusive political community. The emphasis on functioning citizenship requires states to provide human rights as well as recognize the human dignity of all individuals. This requires the opening of political space for those who may not fit traditional conceptions of the citizenry.
To truly protect people’s rights to place and purpose, we need to challenge binary comparisons between citizens and noncitizens and acknowledge hierarchies of personhood in our own societies. Chapter 1 outlines how citizenship has evolved within political thought, and how the human rights regime created protection gaps for noncitizens and people at the margins. The rise of nonstate actors also complicates traditional conceptions of membership.
