Author: Irene Hadiprayitno

Categories
Development Human Rights

Development Hazard

In this article I revisit the concept of development hazard, which was the core of my doctoral research defended in 2009. Some new insights are included to argue for employing two main principles – fair distribution of benefits and popular participation, contained in the Declaration on the Right to Development. This article is published as open access in the Chinese Journal of Good Governance, and can be downloaded here.

The abstract reads:

It is common to criticize the right to development as a confusing compilation of ideas that brings into question its progressive realisation. This article concentrates precisely on this deferring situation. However, rather than scrutinizing the reasons of failures, it aims to explore a violation-based approach to the right to development in its connection as an instrument to address development hazards. The analysis focuses on two aspects of the right to development, firstly, the entitlement to fair distribution of benefits, as the basic argument to the obligation not to cause any harm in development, and secondly, the entitlement to participation, as an instrument to prevent and combat development hazards.

Categories
Food Security

Food Sovereignty and the Anthropology of Food

Antropology Forum has recently published a special issue on Food Sovereignty and the Anthropology of Food: Ethnographic Approaches to Policy and Practice.

The articles collected here began as papers at a panel on Food Sovereignty organised  at the annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society, held at the Australian National University in November 2013. The subtitle ‘local and global solutions to human survival under deteriorating climatic conditions’ stressed the relevance and indeed urgency of anthropological attention to food. While the editors saw this relationship between food policy and practice as a fallow field awaiting urgent anthropological cultivation, similar seeds were being sown across the world at the same moment.

These papers are selected because they contribute to the task of filling this gap by providing anthropologically conceived and ethnographically driven investigations of global and national processes, policies, organisations and discourses as they intersect with the lives of local communities.

The special edition consists of several countries studies, some of them are:

Categories
International Law

Third World Approach to International Law

The journal of Third World Quarterly has recently published a special issue on the Third World Approach to International Law.

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is a movement encompassing scholars and practitioners of international law and policy who are concerned with issues related to the Global South. The scholarly agendas associated with TWAIL are diverse, but the general theme of its interventions is to unpack and deconstruct the colonial legacies of international law and engage in efforts to decolonise the lived realities of the peoples of the Global South.

In addition to important critical analysis to theoretical fundamentals relevant to the study of the Third World, the special issue also deals with more immediate praxical questions of if, how, and when to deploy international legal argument, whether as sword, shield, or strategy of rupture. The concept is engaged in an open manner, in order to avoid an essentialised Third World identity, but to deconstruct it, so as to allow for a fuller disciplinary engagement with the plural, hybrid, ever-evolving, and contested performance of identity everywhere.

Some of the chapters worth reading are:

Categories
Food Security Human Rights Indonesia

Food Systems Governance

How to explain that despite growth in food production, many are still lacking of adequate food? This is a classic question that has been investigated by many leading lights from various disciplines, including the Noble Laureate Amartya Sen in his groundbreaking research in the 1970s. But challenges remain and this is the focus of the new volume edited by Amanda Kennedy and Jonathan Liljeblad from University of New England Australia. The title of this book is Food Systems Governance: Challenges for justice, equality and human rights. Their starting point is law, and what is the role of law to form the pivot around which these issues are addressed in society in the form of food governance mechanisms. Accordingly the chapters in this book address a range of issues in food governance revolving around questions of justice, fairness, equality and human rights.

I am honoured to have been given the opportunity to contribute to this exciting publication. My chapter entitled ‘Transnational Legal Processes of the Right to Food: Lessons Learned from Papua, Indonesia’, discusses whether and how the growing network between transnational actors that advocate the right to food delivers political change, in the sense that they challenge order the power in society. The paper is based on the paper I presented during the Conference under a similar title, held in Beijing China, May 2014.

Categories
Development Human Rights

The Global South

The latest issue of the Third Quarterly is dedicated to examine a phenomenon called: the Global South. This special edition is currently free to download and divided into three themes: Ideas and shifting power relations, International peace and security, Human rights and development. As stated in the introduction, the focus of this volume is about ‘then’ and ‘now’. The nine individual articles contribute towards improving our understanding and bridge-building in different ways – sometimes by making the differences clearer, sometimes by probing how we could conceivably move beyond them, sometimes by calling into question the shibboleths of international cooperation.

Some of the chapters are: