Rapoport Center Working Papers
Dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on human rights, the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series (WPS) publishes innovative papers by established and early-career researchers as well as practitioners. The goal is to provide a productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, activists, practitioners, and the public.
Recent Submissions
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Between Intra-Group Vulnerability and Inter-Group Vulnerability: Bridging the Gaps in the Theoretical Scholarship on Internal Minorities
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2021)The scholarship on internal minorities has generated different proposals for addressing concerns about the oppressive impacts of minority cultures’ practices on their more vulnerable members. Critical reflection on this ... -
Duty to Disobey: Modernism, Autonomy, and Dissidence in the Global 1930
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2021)This essay constellates a set of modernist texts to pursue a question predominantly considered the provenance of legal philosophical studies, namely, a one’s obligation to obey the laws of the state that one belongs to, ... -
An Ethos of Restitution: Walter Schwarz and the Gloss
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2021)Berlin, 1950s. Newly arrived back in Germany after escaping from the NS regime, a Jewish lawyer called Dr Walter Schwarz settles in Berlin. He opens a law practice assisting clients who are making private restitution claims. ... -
Mapping Gender Violence Along the Balkan Route: Humanitarian Assemblages, Securitization Policies, and the Experiences of Women Refugees and Migrants
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2020)Based on the lived experiences of migrants and refugees in Serbia, this paper argues that anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling humanitarian projects and securitization deals are serious sources of violence at the EU-Balkan ... -
Wages of Liminality: How an in-between status lowers the earned wages of women health workers
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2020)In this paper, I analyze the experiences of the world’s largest, all-women community health workforce through the lens of liminality. Originally used to describe transition from one state to the other, the concept of ... -
Colonized Masculinities and Feminicide in the United States: How Conditions of Coloniality Socialize Feminicidal Men
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2019)This paper argues that the colonial conditions faced by African American men contribute to the construction of feminicidal masculinities. Feminicide—the killing of women because they are women—has received increased ... -
The Only Panthers Left: An Intellectual History of the Angola 3
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2019)Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace, and Robert Hillary King, colloquially known as the Angola 3, spent most of their adult lives in solitary confinement, Wallace and Woodfox for the murder of Louisiana State Penitentiary Prison ... -
Now is (not yet) the Winter of Our Discontent: The Unfulfilled Promise of Economic and Social Rights in the Fight Against Economic Inequality
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2019)Material inequality or (extreme) economic inequality has been touted as one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. Wealth is “hemorrhaging upwards” rather than “trickling down.” In a world where the rich ... -
Fostering the Inclusion of Disabled Students in Higher Education in South Africa: Some Reflections
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2019)Higher education is an important step towards ensuring human development. This was understood by South Africans who included the right to education, and to further education, in their Constitution. Subsequently, the country ... -
Domesticating Human Rights on African Soil: Theorizing from Practice
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2019)In the 70th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), this paper proposes an alternative perspective on the progress of the international human rights regime inaugurated in 1948. Focusing on the ... -
"United We Stand" The Collective Mobilisation of African Women in Athens, Greece
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2019)This paper explores how African women in Athens are collectively mobilising to resist and manage the exclusionary and othering processes they all-too-often face in their everyday lives. In particular, it focuses on the ... -
Striving for Solutions: African States, Refugees, and the International Politics of Durable Solutions
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2019)How do international structure and African agency constrain or propel the search for truly “durable solutions” to the African refugee situation? This is the central question that I seek to answer in this paper. I would ... -
Re Georgio: An Intimate Account of Transgender Interactions with Law and Society
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018)In its everyday operation, the law presumes to narrate trans stories and shape trans lives. This piece shines a light on law’s claims to authority over transgender identities and transgender bodies, and offers an alternate, ... -
Reparation Through Transformation? An Examination of the ICC Reparation System in Cases of Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018)With the introduction of Article 75 to the Rome Statute, the ICC has set the goal to establish a reparation system for victims of mass atrocities. While processes of reparation for victims are only beginning to take shape ... -
Charting A New Human Rights Discourse 'from the Territories': Social Movements and Peace in Cauca, Colombia
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018)Peace with social justice has been elusive in Colombia, despite the series of laws and the latest peace negotiations to end the armed conflict that started in the 1960s. Instead of accepting top-down state-led legislation ... -
Truth, National Reconciliation and Cultural Interventions: Lessons Learned from the South African TRC
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018)The end of Apartheid marked the beginning of a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it. It was recognised by the Constitution that the pursuit of national unity required reconciliation. In response, the Truth and ... -
The Production of Precarity: How US Immigration “Status” Affects Work in Central Texas
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018)This paper analyzes how US immigration law exacerbates the precarity of immigrants’ work situations in ways that demonstrate that insecure work is not a function of the neoliberal economic system alone; rather, it is partly ... -
Feminist Dilemmas: The Challenges in Accommodating Women’s Rights within Religion-Based Family Law in India
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018)As with other postcolonial states, India maintains a so-called “personal law system” in the area of family law, according to which individuals are governed by the laws of their respective religious community. For feminist ... -
Decolonizing the International Criminal Court: Considering Questions of Bias in the Prosecution of African Leaders
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018)Although the establishment of the International Criminal Court remains a historic achievement in the field of international criminal law, the court is increasingly subject to criticism by some African leaders and due to ... -
Unequal and Under Threat: Economic Inequality and the Dangers to Environmental & Human Rights Defenders
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2017)In many countries with large endowments of natural resource wealth, resource extraction is considered to be the primary driver of economic development and a major contributor to GDP. Often, however, natural resource ...
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