JUNE 1996. TURIN, ITALY: After a seventeen-year absence, no surprise that I had forgotten how lovely much of this city is: deep porticos running up and down the boulevards, giving shade to posh cafés and shops; baroque palazzi whose carved …
I agree with many parts of Jeff Isaac’s argument, and particularly with his list of ways in which our current era differs from that of the Progressives. I agree too with the general thrust of his presumptions—that we must invest …
If the many conflicts worldwide over minority rights, one of the most enduring, intractable, and lethal is the struggle in Sri Lanka between Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority. In thirteen years of civil war, a country with no external …
When Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, the indigenous population of what is now Brazil stood by some estimates at around three million. After five hundred years of epidemics, slave raiding, land expropriation, and more or less forcible cultural assimilation, …
A small set of crucial human rights are valued, at least in theory, by all governments in the contemporary world. Rights against torture, murder, genocide, and slavery are simply not contested in the public rhetoric of the international arena. Of …
In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville claimed, “Language is perhaps the strongest and most enduring link which unites men. All the immigrants spoke the same language and were children of the same people.” These common points of …
As this century draws to a close, Native Peoples are better off than at the start of the 1900s. However, in some respects little has changed. In these ninety-six years, the number of Native Americans has grown from a near-extinction …
Eritrea recently emerged from a devastating thirty-one-year war for national independence. One right, self-determination, held center stage. In the everyday, Wilsonian sense, this was achieved in 1991 by military success, and ratified by domestic referendum and international recognition. Yet, self-determination …
What would it mean to come to a genuine, unforced international consensus on human rights? I suppose it would be something like what John Rawls describes in his Political Liberalism as an “overlapping consensus.” That is, different groups, countries, religious …
Morning comes early to Northern Ireland every July 12. Not long after first light, men in bowler hats leave their flats in Belfast or their little homes in the countryside, some of them wearing great orange sashes that designate them …
Jews are not officially a minority in the United States today, but we were once, when I was growing up, the quintessential minority. We were the model with reference to which everyone else’s moral and political attitudes were determined Other …
“In the land of nowhere,” fantasized Thomas More, “it had been established by King Utopus that it should be lawful for every man to favor and follow what religion he would.” It sounds so reasonable five centuries later that one …
Earlier this year I stood atop a massive boulder with El Profe (The Professor) and other leading citizens of Hueycantenango, a timeworn town set on a bluff high in the Southern Sierra Madre. We looked out over hogbacked ridges, thicketed …
Since the mid-1970s, signs of Balkanization have arisen in France. Xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism are becoming more common, and the country’s tradition of lafcite (secularism)—the radical separation of the state from all forms of religion—has been confronted with a revival …
The whites of South Africa (roughly 5.5 million people out of a total population of 40 million) are only now getting used to being a minority. It is not just that until the last few years they had the political, …
