Whether globalization improves or undermines human rights is not a matter that can be observed in the short term. Globalization is the second "great transformation" spreading capitalism over the entire world. Many of its short-term effects will be negative. Nevertheless, its medium and long-term effects may well be positive, as it impels social changes that will result in greater moves to democracy, economic redistribution, the rule of law, and promotion of civil and political rights. Capitalism is a necessary, though hardly sufficient condition for democracy: democracy is the best political system to protect human rights.
This does not mean that the non-Western world will follow the exact same path to protection of human rights that the Western world followed. No international law obliged the West to protect human rights during its own era of economic expansion. Thus, the West could practice slavery, expel surplus populations, and colonize other parts of the world. Genocide and ethnic cleaning were not prohibited.
This article warns that the human security discourse and agenda could inadvertently undermine the international human rights regime. Insofar as human security identifies new threats to well-being, new victims of those threats, new duties of states, or new mechanisms for dealing with threats at the inter-state level, it adds to the established human rights regime. When it simply rephrases human rights principles without identifying new threats, victims, duty-bearers, or mechanisms, however, at best it complements human rights and at worst it undermines them. A narrow view of human security is a valuable addition to the international normative regime requiring state and international action against severe threats to human beings. By contrast, an overly broad view of human security ignores the human rights regime; by subsuming human rights under human security, it also undermines the primacy of civil and political rights as a strategic tool for citizens to fight for their rights against their own states.
This article reviews human rights violations in Zimbabwe from 2000 to 2009, under the rule of Robert Mugabe. It argues that these violations, including state-induced famine, illegal mass expulsions, and systemic rape, constituted crimes against humanity. The article considers what African regional organizations, including the African Union and the Southern African Development Community, and various organs of the international community did, and might have done, to restrain Mugabe and his inner circle from committing these violations. It concludes that the lack of forceful action by African and international organizations constituted a failure to protect the people of Zimbabwe.
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