Right now, there’s an excellent series going on over at the Gender Across Borders blog called “Culture and Human Rights: Challenging Excuses for Gender Based Violence.” I will be following the posts in this series, but I also wanted to bring up discussion about the topic over here. Cultural relativism is used worldwide as an…
Recently, I revisited one of my favorite articles on the need for a shift from “rule of law orthodoxy” to a “legal empowerment” approach. The article, written by UC Berkeley Law Professor Stephen Golub, argues for a much needed paradigm shift into thinking of rule of law more in conjunction with international development, the rights…
I was thrilled to find this TEDxZurich talk by Karen Tse, Founder and CEO of International Bridges to Justice (IBJ). I previously interned with IBJ and to this day, credit my time there for sparking my passion for access to justice issues. IBJ is an incredible and innovative organization that works to end torture worldwide…
A few months ago, a controversy erupted in Afghanistan when the government announced that it would take control over running women’s shelters in the country, places where many Afghan women and girls turn to as a last resort after being subject to domestic violence, abuse, and forced marriage. These shelters were some of the few…
I am honored and excited to present an interview with Jonathan Smith, a lecturer in Global Health and Epidemiology at Yale’s School of Public Health. Jonathan’s work is incredibly inspiring. As both an epidemiologist and filmmaker, he uses strategic storytelling to advance issues of health, law, and human rights. Jonathan graduated with a Masters from…
In the U.S., we often take our legal rights for granted; but sometimes — in other countries, the legal system actually serves to set back the rights of the poor and marginalized groups. In China, a pretty shocking new law has significantly curtailed the rights of divorced women. On August 13, the Supreme Court issued…
“Think Again: War” is an excellent piece by Joshua Goldstein for Foreign Policy. He argues a point that really hit home for me: the world is not a more violent place today. It just seems that violence, death and destruction are everywhere and perhaps even more prevalent than in the past. But this is simply…
I am honored to present a guest post by Bwalhuma Isaac, a Lawyer and Paralegal from Uganda. Isaac works at the Uganda Christian Lawyer’s Fraternity, West Branch, Kasese, Uganda. He was kind enough to provide his thoughts on access to justice, the law, and human rights work in Uganda – from his own personal experience….
As an undergraduate studying abroad at LSE, I had my first introduction to microfinance and became enamored with social enterprise. I co-founded a student development think tank that focused on providing student consulting services to microfinance institutions (MFIs) including research, development, and marketing. We pitched it as a social enterprise in a business plan competition…
I wanted to share an incredible article I recently ran across, by Rosalind Eyben on Contestations: Dialogues on Women’s Empowerment: Recent years have seen a marked shift in official development discourse, with less emphasis on a rights-based approach and more on an efficiency approach to gender equality, a tone set by the World Bank’s 2006…
