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discourages the multiculturalism that clinton so strongly endorsed and rather advocates the reinforcement of us military superiority 312 while i would agree that an international world order based on civilizations would eliminate much of the conflict that we have today i see it as an impossible feat it is counterintuitive to the nature of humans as well as the religions we profess leave a comment link february 19 2013 is idle no more a spiritual battle is idle no more a spiritual battle is the idle no more a spiritual battle go leave a comment december 20 2012 review of men militarism un peacekeeping a gendered analysis whitworth sandra men militarism un peacekeeping a gendered analysis london lynne rienner publishers 2004 pp 224 in her book men militarism un peacekeeping sandra whitworth paints a disturbing yet not entirely convincing picture of united nations operations as they pertain to peacekeeping missions she argues that the so called best practices of the un and it s third party military forces have extremely detrimental and ultimately fatal implications that overshadow the missions themselves 183 at the heart of these best practices is the contradiction which emerges as a result of peacekeepers being trained first and foremost as killing machines in a hyper masculine environment 12 using canada s missions to somalia and cambodia she asserts that the subjugation of feminine traits and values results in severe exploitation of women and children as they are the most vulnerable members of society while she provides a provocative and passionate exposé littered with thorough research this book leaves many loose ends and unanswered questions then again perhaps answers are not her objective she begins with a brief explanation of the origin of un peacekeeping in response to conflicts emerging after the cold war peacekeeping in turn became an accessible military platform for many smaller states including canada and gave way to the military myth that to this day permeates canadian culture this myth has not only fueled our national identity but distinguished ourself from the other as it hails canada to be a selfless middle power acting with a kind of moral purity not normally exhibited by contemporary states 14 in turn however it serves as part of the contemporary colonial encounter establishing knowledge claims about both us and them knowledge claims that then serve to legitimatize the missions themselves 15 likewise for the un while it is defined by peacekeeping peacekeeping gives purpose to the un 25 through this lens whitworth examines the un s mission to cambodia which many deemed a success and while they did reduce the violence that prevailed there and repatriated almost 370 000 cambodian refugees the peacekeeping soldiers who were deployed left a trail of tragedy behind them the untac s mission created a booming prostitution industry and left the economy in chaos whitworth narrows in on canada s peacekeeping shortcomings in chapter four as she uses the atrocities in somalia as a case study for evidence of the implications of an overly masculine militarism she argues that soldiers trained for battle often feel cheated by their peacekeeping role 86 so when the airborne troops arrived in somalia they were ready for some kills some tried to write this off as a few bad apples but as whitworth demonstrates aggression targeted by racism sexism and insecurity are common and a part of military rights and rituals in chapter five whitworth recognizes the attention the un has given to gender peace and security issues but sees it as no more than empty rhetoric she quotes anne orford in saying many of these understandings signal the ways in which a gender perspective can be mapped onto existing ways of doing business without questioning any of the bases upon which peace security or even the category woman is understood 133 whitworth sees these failures of conflict prevention as the result of insufficient financial resources or properly trained staff an inability to collect and recognize the right kinds of data and failure of coordination either within the un or between the un and local governments militaries and agencies 134 finally in chapter six she focuses in again on canada it s military practices and the results of conflict on the individual namely post traumatic stress disorder whitworth concludes her book with the question do warriors make the best peacekeepers simply put no whitworth makes this evidentially clear throughout but where do we go from here one might think that she is trying to argue that there needs to be a more encompassing gender mainstreaming program sufficient training on culture and gender or more women making military decisions and deployed on peacekeeping missions but these argument are left inconclusive she assert that the un s attempt at gender mainstreaming was more a matter of theory than practice citing statistics from the past talks on afghanistan moreover their approach to gender is inconsistent but why wouldn t it be the united nations is just as it s name implies many nations if mainstreaming views gender as shaped by cultural class religious and ethnic differences and recognizes the power differentials between women and men the fluid nature of those differences and that these differences are made manifest in a variety of ways than the expression of gender values are going to be inconsistent between nations in somalia soldiers stated that they treated their women badly and were a bunch of homosexuals and while i am not condoning the behavior of the somalians westerns must make judgements through an internationally unbiased lens furthermore based upon this argument whitworth would have to totally disregard any role of women in the brutalization dehumanization torture and abuse of men at home and abroad in cases such as abu ghraib in which lynndie england a woman was found equally guilty imprisoned and stripped of her rank throughout this book i found myself questioning whether whitworth was taking up issues with the un the canadian military peacekeeping in general or all three or is it with the un s 2000 brahimi report that called for more robust peacekeeping which she interprets to mean more militaristic but perhaps her contention is with none of these and she ultimately just wants to prompt conversation about non militarized peacekeeping as she concludes it is time to insist on the ideas that will be dismissed as impractical and idealistic by the united nations militarized peacekeeping is founded on a series of contradictions such that it cannot deliver on the promises it makes to those who are subject to the missions or even those who are deployed on peacekeeping missions 186 leave a comment december 20 2012 confession i write better when i have an audience this past summer i began graduate studies and since then i have read more books written more reviews and crafted more essays than i have in the past 10 years and for what a final grade one letter i write for an audience of one which takes a tonne of pressure off but does very little for quality so i am just going to go ahead and begin posting in this space again perhaps just for validation perhaps for the benefit of others perhaps to open myself up to criticism and perhaps to engage my mind a little bit more in critical analysis so enjoy glean dare i say critique i would love to know what you think leave a comment july 6 2012 review of samuel moyn s the last utopia i didn t post a question last week but then again few ventured to answer my last couple of questions i have been trying to put in some decent time on my course work and therefore everything internet related has fallen to the wayside i thought however given my recent questions on human rights that you might be interested in my review of samuel moyn s book the last utopia i could go further but i will let my review speak for itself moyn samuel the last utopia cambridge massachusetts the belknap press of harvard university press 2010 pp 352 as a professor of european history at columbia university and a visiting professor of international human rights at yale law school one would assume that samuel moyn would provide a more persuasive argument on the history of human rights than he does in his book the last utopia human rights in history he clearly states his thesis in the the prologue human rights are best understood as survivors the god that did not fail while other political ideologies did 4 not only that but he seeks to prove that human rights did not emerge until the late 1970 s 7 climaxing with jimmy carter s presidency albeit only as a result of accident and the failure of other utopias it would seem that moyn ultimately saw human rights as a classic case of the emperor s new clothes and seeks to reveal the true history of human rights which matters most of all then in order to confront their prospects today and in the future 9 but because moyn does not see human rights as existing before the 1940 s and instead birthed as a scapegoat for other political agendas many problems inevitably arise i see these problems being linked for the most part to the fact that he is working off the presuppositions implied by a contemporary definition of human rights which is never explicitly outline and also to his determination to maintain human rights within a secular arena after discounting the the role of natural rights and the emergence of democracy in chapter one moyn argues that the subordination of rights to the nation state could have been the main historical reason for human rights failure to launch after the french revolution and throughout the nineteenth century 30 chapter two moyn names after a quote by moses moskowitz an early ngo chief when he said that human rights died in the process of being born 47 this stillbirth moyn contends was not a response to the holocaust or a measure to prevent further catastrophic slaughter but rather an introduction of rhetoric by means of the united nations which he says to capture the world s imagination they would need profound redefinition in a new ideological climate 48 in his third chapter moyn suggests that anti colonialism was an issue of collective liberation rather than human rights although some of the same language of self determination was used and he brings to light the complicated relationship between the state and the individual when he writes above all it integrated them in a commitment to collective sovereignty that would later seem the very barrier the concept of human rights was intended to overcome 98 chapter four is then concerned with the actual emergence of human rights through language action and result as he highlights the work of amnesty international and the infusion of human rights into american foreign policy and finally in chapter five moyn discusses the progress of human rights through the lens of international human rights law he concludes his book with a discussion of the hurdles that human rights face and will face in the future in a highly political milieu as we seek to make the world a better place based on the assumption that the history of human rights originated with the formation of the united nations moyn inadvertently places his whole argument in a secularized western scope moreover he works solely off of human rights as they are defined today but never explicitly states what this entails leaving the reader to piece together a definition by process of elimination even then i find moyn s arguments within this framework contradictory for example in remarking about the emergence of international organizations post 1870 39 we can only assume that human rights as he sees them are international in scope which he confirms in chapter three 87 however he discredits the abolition movement saying it was never framed as a human rights issue 33 the same goes for women s rights even though they both played out on an international level and neither of them were a result of anti colonialism which he later argues in chapter three was also outside of contemporary human rights in addition while abolition was heavily weighted in politics the latter was anti political in nature which moyn does attribute to human rights even though his history begins with their political birth through the un and only sees their fruit through political organizations with the exception of amnesty international as legitimate he examines the language used in the universal declaration and atlantic charter noting that from the beginning human rights meant different things to different people 50 yet he is so bold as to discredit any religious movements as not being a response to human rights or at least not sufficient enough to validate their existence i think rather what moyn assumes but never states is that human rights are secular in nature and therefore the work of the social gospel movement of the 1920 s or the work of the catholic church throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries don t count even though they were pivotal to the advancement of human rights and carried the spirit of humanism through times of crisis and war furthermore it would explain why he does not recognize abolition as being framed as a human rights issue because it wasn t it was framed as an equality issue based on christian principles and justice essentially what moyn sees as an accidental utopia i see as the secularization of an originally christian idea transforming a religious doctrine into an issue of morality in turn making it accessible by all whereas communism or it s later variations would inevitably suppress or contradict many individual political or religious beliefs human rights capitalized on the innate morality shared by all of humanity it is also noteworthy that while moyn sees the evolution of human rights from the 1970 s to present day he does not seem to accept progression as a viable possibility before then this is particularly evident in chapter four when he revisits the apartheid in south africa 173 it was anti colonial in inception and yet he clearly admits it evolved into a human rights struggle which was led by nelson mandela one of the authors of the freedom charter of 1955 and whose name has almost become synonymous with human rights yet is never mentioned in moyn s book in the same way christian principles of equality and justice which have been present since the old testament also have a place in the evolution of human rights albeit using a different language even so the universalisms represented transcend the maximalist utopia politics have created and therefore human rights will always be minimalist in nature while i agree with moyn on the discontinuities of the history of human rights namely the lack of resemblance to its so called enlightenment origins or the lag between the holocaust and a hospitable social climate to facilitate human rights in political sphere i feel that he fails see beyond the failure of the state agenda...