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"Donnelly, Jack"
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The Relative Universality of Human Rights
Human rights as an international political project are closely tied to claims of universality. Attacks on the universality of human rights, however, are also widespread. And some versions of universalism are indeed theoretically indefensible, politically pernicious, or both. This essay explores the senses in which human rights can (and cannot) be said to be universal, the senses in which they are (and are not) relative, and argues for the \"relative universality\" of internationally recognized human rights.
Journal Article
International human rights
\"International Human Rights studies the ways in which states and other international actors have addressed human rights since the end of World War II. This unique textbook features substantial attention to the domestic politics of human rights, as well as an extensive emphasis on theory. The thoroughly updated fifth edition brings the theories and legal issues related to human rights into sharper focus with a streamlined eleven-chapter organization, separate treatments of rights-based theories and international relations theories, and updated case studies. International Human Rights allows readers to understand how and why human rights are violated, what international action can do to address these violations, and why human rights remain such a small part of international relations\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Elements of the Structures of International Systems
Structural international theory has become largely a matter of elaborating “the effects of anarchy.” Simple hunter-gatherer band societies, however, perfectly fit the Waltzian model of anarchic orders but do not experience security dilemmas or warfare, pursue relative gains, or practice self-help balancing. They thus demonstrate that “the effects of anarchy,” where they exist, are not effects of anarchy—undermining mainstream structural international theory as it has been practiced for the past three decades. Starting over, I ask what one needs to differentiate how actors are arranged in three simple anarchic orders: forager band societies, Hobbesian states of nature, and great power states systems. The answer turns out to look nothing like the dominant tripartite (ordering principle, functional differentiation, distribution of capabilities) conception. Based on these cases, I present a multidimensional framework of the elements of social and political structures that dispenses with anarchy, is truly structural (in contrast to the independent-variable agent-centric models of Waltz and Wendt), and highlights complexity, diversity, and regular change in the structures of international systems.
Journal Article
Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice
In the third edition of his classic work, revised extensively
and updated to include recent developments on the international
scene, Jack Donnelly explains and defends a richly
interdisciplinary account of human rights as universal rights. He
shows that any conception of human rights-and the idea of human
rights itself-is historically specific and contingent.
Since publication of the first edition in 1989,
Universal Human Rights in Theory and
Practice has justified Donnelly's claim that
\"conceptual clarity, the fruit of sound theory, can facilitate
action. At the very least it can help to unmask the arguments of
dictators and their allies.\"
eBook
Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power and International Society
How is unrivalled American power reshaping 21st-century international society? Is the
United States an empire, in fact or in the making? This article attempts to
elaborate the conceptual resources required to answer such questions. I focus on
multiple forms of hierarchy in anarchy and diverse practices of
sovereign inequality—concepts that most mainstream
perspectives ignore, find paradoxical, or even dismiss as self-contradictory. After
defining empire and hierarchy in anarchy, I present a typology of international
orders tuned to thinking about empire and its alternatives. The central section of
the article explores three classes of formal inequalities common during the
Westphalian era—special rights of Great Powers, restricted rights for
outlaws, and a wide range of particular practices of
‘semi-sovereignty’. I then sketch ten historically grounded
models of hierarchical international relations. Two brief applications to
contemporary American power seek to illustrate the value of this conceptual
apparatus. Throughout, my focus is on appreciating the precise nature and
considerable variety of international inequalities. I argue that the concepts of
hierarchy in anarchy and sovereign inequality, but not empire, are essential for
understanding the shape and development of contemporary international order.
Journal Article
The discourse of anarchy in IR
Contemporary International Relations (IR) typically treats anarchy as a fundamental, defining, and analytically central feature of international relations. Furthermore, it is usually held that IR since its inception has been structured around a discourse of anarchy. In fact, however, until the 1980s anarchy was rarely employed as a central analytical concept, as I show by examining 145 books published between 1895 and 1978. The conceptual and analytic centrality of anarchy is not imposed on us by international reality. Rather, it is a recent and contingent construction. Given the shortcomings of standard uses of ‘anarchy’ – especially the facts that there is no clear, generally agreed upon definition, that ‘the effects of anarchy’ are not effects of anarchy (alone), and that anarchy is not the structural ordering principle of international systems – I argue for returning to earlier practice and putting anarchy back in the background of IR.
Journal Article
Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization?
This is an edited text of the fifth John Vincent Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of Keele on 9 May 1997 in which Jack Donnelly attacks the still common scepticism about international human rights-although from an unorthodox angle.
Journal Article
Levels, centers, and peripheries: the spatio-political structure of political systems
This article develops a ‘spatio-political’ structural typology of (national and international) political systems, based on the arrangement of homogeneous or heterogeneous political centers and peripheries in layered political spaces. I then apply this typology to Eurocentric political systems from the high middle ages to today. Rather than see no fundamental change across nearly a millennium (the system remained anarchic) or a singular modern transition (with several centuries of fundamental structural continuity on either side), I depict a series of partial structural transformations on time scales of a century or two. I also recurrently step back to consider the nature and significance of such structural models; why and how they explain. International systems, I try to show, do not have just one or even only a few simple structures; their parts are arranged (structured) in varied and often complex ways. Structural change therefore is common and typically arises through the interaction and accumulation of changes in intertwined elements of interconnected systems (not from radical innovations or dramatic changes in core principles). And structural models, I argue, explain both continuity and change not by identifying causes (or mechanisms) but through configurations; the organization of the parts of a system into a complex whole.
Journal Article
