By Maaike Matelski – In this picture, anthropology students from Yangon University show the ‘three fingers salute’ for democracy. Students and university staff across Myanmar have been protesting against the recent military takeover. Since the…
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By Pamungkas (Yudha) Dewanto As a response to the global corona crisis, authorities all over the world set strict health protocols for travelers. Focusing on the case of China, anthropologist Biao Xiang argues that the…
1 CommentIn this episode, Puck de Boer talks with Aleeha Ali, who studied sociology in Pakistan, did a research master’s in anthropology in the UK and is currently a PhD candidate at the department of Social…
Leave a CommentStandplaats Wereld is expanding with a new component. We will continue to marvel you with our stories, but from now on, we will also explore them in the shape of a podcast. Host Puck de…
Leave a CommentBY PETER VERSTEEG AND HERBERT PLOEGMAN “The Future is a Metaphor” – Ursula K. Le Guin “You have a video conference in twenty minutes,” the voice on the phone says. “You will receive the holocall…
Leave a Commentby Matthias Teeuwen I had read “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (1998) and I wanted to write a blog about it. It contains a lot of interesting ideas including classic science fiction tropes…
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“Hodeidah is empty, Marina, there is no one there anymore”, says Noura to me this morning, in a short telephone conversation that is repeatedly interrupted because of the bad connection. Noura moved to Sana’a a week ago, fleeing the horrendous violence that has exploded in the city of Hodeidah since Thursday 14 June, the day before the start of Eid Al-Fitr. On that day the Saudi Led Coalition, mainly consisting of mercenaries and ground troops of the United Arab Emirates army, soldiers of the Yemeni National Army and Hiraak al-Tihama started the long planned attack on Hodeidah, Yemen’s main port on the Red Sea. In the past six months the United Nations and many humanitarian organizations have asked the Saudi-Led Coalition not to attack Hodeidah because 90 per cent of Yemen’s import, including most humanitarian aid goes through its port, but their calls have been to no avail. An attack on Hodeidah does not only lead to hundreds of thousands of displaced people who will flee the city, but also to a dramatic increase of famine and death in the country as a whole. Why is the international community unable or unwilling to prevent this from happening? And why do we hear so little about this humanitarian disaster in the Western media?
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Human rights have become a hotly debated topic in both the academic and the political world, one of the main points of contention being whether they are universal or not. As Eva Brems has shown, feminists and cultural relativists are among the staunchest opponents of the claimed universality of human rights, criticizing its male bias and Western bias respectively. Thus, many debates discuss the universality of human rights at what Jack Donnelly calls the historical or anthropological level, examining its historical roots. However, most of such debates (and debates with different approaches, for that matter) ignore the fundamental question: How can we know for sure if any or all human rights are (not) universal? My answer is that we cannot. We may make claims, but the social, legal, moral and philosophical complexity involved in human rights demands that we always acknowledge the uncertainty of our own claims. In other words, the debate about the universality of human rights is irresolvable, which has significant international implications.
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