NYU Florence Library & Online Resources: Law, Sociology & Media

Human rights are considered one of the big ideas of the early twenty-first century. This book presents in an authoritative and readable form the variety of platforms on which human rights law is practiced today, reflecting also on the dynamic inter-relationships that exist between these various levels. The collection has a critical edge. The chapters engage with how human rights law has developed in its various subfields, what (if anything) has been achieved and at what cost, in terms of expected or produced unexpected side-effects. The authors pass judgment about the consistency, efficacy and success of human rights law (set against the standards of the field itself or other external goals). Written by world-class academics, this Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of human rights law.

This newly revised, greatly expanded, and updated edition is the essential tool for navigating the language of international human rights related to law, jurisprudence, politics, diplomacy, and philosophy. Broadening the scope and enhancing our understanding of international human rights, the second edition of A Handbook of International Human Rights Terminology contains over four hundred new commonly used key terms and acronyms as well as corrections to terms that have taken on new meaning since the publication of the original. It also includes new treaty instruments and citations of important human rights instruments. Designed to be accessible to persons from different systems and regions of the world, this handbook fills an important void in the burgeoning discourse of international human rights and will become a vital reference work for specialists, students, and newcomers to this field.

Today it is usually not long before a problem gets expressed as a human rights issue. Indeed, human rights law continues to gain increasing attention internationally, and must move quickly in order to keep up with a social world that changes so rapidly.This Very Short Introduction, in its second edition, brings the issue of human rights up to date, considering the current controversies surrounding the movement. Discussing torture and arbitrary detention in the context of counter terrorism, Andrew Clapham also considers new challenges to humanrights in the context of privacy, equality and the right to health. Looking at the philosophical justification for rights, the historical origins of human rights and how they are formed in law, Clapham explains what our human rights actually are, what they might be, and where the human rightsmovement is heading.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This is the first book to offer a systematic analysis of human rights in the 21st century. The chapters, written from diverse methodological perspectives, provide rich and varied insights on vital questions concerning the resiliency, weaknesses, and prospects of human rights today.

Gender is an increasingly prominent aspect of the contemporary debate and discourse around law. It is curious that gender, while figuring so centrally in the construction and organization of social life, is nevertheless barely visible in the conceptual armoury of law. In the jurisprudentialimagination law is gender-less; as a result legal scholarship for the most part continues to hold on to the view that gender plays little or no role in the conceptual make-up, normative grounding, or categorical ordering of law. The official position is that the idea of law and legal fundamentalsare, or at least ought to be, gender-independent.This book challenges these long-held assumptions. Exploring the relationship between law and gender it takes gender as a core concept and analytical tool and examines how law is conceptualized, organized, articulated, and legitimated. How can gender be given meaning in legal texts, doctrine, andpractices, and how can gender operate within the law while simultaneously appearing to be outside it?The relationship between gender and the law is relevant to virtually all areas of law including in particular criminal law, tort law, family law, employment law, and human rights. Increasingly issues of gender are perceived as the concern of all, reflecting broader debates in the law, includingthose of equality and sexuality. Covering the key theoretical and substantive areas of jurisprudence, this volume by Joanne Conaghan will be essential reading for all interested in gender studies and legal theory more widely. It offers a clear, concise introduction to gender studies and centralfeminist concerns for a legal readership.

This volume offers a unique reflection on the historic and contemporary influence of the New Approaches to International Law (NAIL) movement within the context of Europe and America. In particular, the contributions focus on the intellectual product of NAIL's founder, David Kennedy, in relation to three legal streams: human rights, legal history, and the law of war. On the one hand, the volume is valuable reading for a broad audience interested in the current challenges facing global governance, and how critical studies might contribute to innovative intellectual and practice-oriented developments in international law. On the other hand, stemming from a 2010 seminar in Madrid that brought together scholars to discuss David Kennedy's scholarship over the last three decades, the contributions here are a testament to the community and ideas of the NAIL tradition.nbsp; The volume includes scholars from a wide field of legal interests and backgrounds.

The Oxford Handbook on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations presents an innovative, authoritative, and accessible examination and critique of the United Nations peacekeeping operations. Since the late 1940s, but particularly since the end of the cold war, peacekeeping has been a central part of the core activities of the United Nations and a major process in global security governance and the management of international relationsin general. The volume will present a chronological analysis, designed to provide a comprehensive perspective that highlights the evolution of UN peacekeeping and offers a detailed picture of how the decisionsof UN bureaucrats and national governments on the set-up and design of particular UN missions were, and remain, influenced by the impact of preceding operations. The volume will bring together leading scholars and senior practitioners in order to provide overviews and analyses of all 65 peacekeeping operations that have been carried out by the United Nations since 1948. As with all Oxford Handbooks, the volume will be agenda-setting in importance, providing theauthoritative point of reference for all those working throughout international relations and beyond.

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."

This volume explores the lives and activities of people of African descent in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It goes beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic focus of diaspora studies to examine the experiences of black and white Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans who settled or travelled in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. At the same time, while studies of Africans in Europe have tended to focus on the relationship between colonial (or former colonial) subjects and their respective metropolitan nation states, the essays in this volume widen the lens to consider the skills, practices and negotiations called for by other kinds of border-crossing: The subjects of these essays include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among 'Africans', and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the 'colour line' and testing the limits of solidarity. Case studies of family life, community-building and politics and cultural production, drawing on original research, illuminate the transformative impact of those journeys and encounters and the forms of 'transnational practice' that they have generated. The contributors include specialist scholars in social history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies and literature, as well as a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

Black Girls demonstrates the relevance of colonial legacies in the stories of the Afro-Surinamese and the Eritrean women who, in the 1960s and 70s, migrated to the Netherlands and Italy, respectively, and became domestic workers there.

Black Spaces examines how space and place are racialized, and the impacts on everyday experiences among African Italians, immigrants, and refugees. It explores the deeply intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, and how people of African descent negotiate, contest, and live with anti-blackness in Italy. The vast majority of people crossing the Mediterranean into Europe are from West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Their passage is part of the legacy of Italian and broader European engagement in colonial projects. This largely forgotten history corresponds with an ongoing effort to erase them from the Italian social landscape on arrival. Black Spaces examines these racialized spaces by blending a critical geographical approach to place and space with Afro-Pessimist and critical race perspectives on the lived experiences of Blackness and anti-blackness in Italy.¿

Drawing on in-depth empirical case studies, this book explores the lives of adolescent children of immigrants; those who, endowed with high cultural capital, are living the generational experience of growing up in a post-industrial, globalized and interconnected world. Although they face specific social constraints, this generation is also developing new skills such as managing ambivalence and multiple belongings, shifting codes and languages and claiming new forms of participation in social life. Accustomed to moving from one context to another, these children learn to use difference, equality, belonging, loyalty and identification in complex ways to help further their own personal opportunities. This book argues that one can view the diverse experiences of these young people more broadly to help shed light on the everyday social processes that are affecting contemporary youth as a whole.

Through an analysis of Chinese migration to Europe, this volume examines the most pressing migration and integration issues facing many societies today, from the political and policy-based challenges of managing increasingly diverse communities, to individual lived experiences of identity and belonging. In addition to chapters on the UK, France and Italy, the book spotlights one of the most extraordinary examples of Chinese migration to Europe: that provided by the city of Prato, just 20km from Florence in Tuscany, Italy. Renowned for its historic textile industry, Prato is now home to one of the largest populations of Chinese residents in Europe, a phenomenon that is remarkable not only for its magnitude but also for the speed with which it has developed. This edited collection, which brings together twenty-seven separate contributors, deepens our understanding of the case of Prato within the context of Chinese migration to the new Europe.

Stereotypical representations of the Mezzogiorno are a persistent feature of Italian culture at all levels. In Darkest Italy, John Dickie analyzes these stereotypes in the post-Unification period, when the Mezzogiorno was widely seen as barbaric, violent or irrational, an "Africa" on the European continent. At the same time, this is the moment when the Mezzogiorno became a metaphor for the state of the country as a whole, the index of Italy s modernity. Dickie argues that these stereotypes, rather than being a symptom of the failings of national identity in Italy, were actually integral to the way Italy s bourgeoisie imagined themselves as Italian. Drawing on recent theories of Otherness and national identity, Dickie brings a new light to an important and well-established area of Italian history - the relationship between the South and the nation as a whole.

Discusses the history behind the social, economic, and political reasons for leaving the original countries, and the cultures in the new places. This book discusses the impact and assimilation that the immigrant cultures experience in their adopted cultures. It includes various portraits of specific diaspora communities.

When we think of the Italian Mafia, we think of Marlon Brando, Tony Soprano, and the Corleones--iconic actors and characters who give shady dealings a mythical pop presence. Yet these sensational depictions take us only so far. The true story of the Mafia reveals both an organization and mindset dedicated to the preservation of tradition. It is no accident that the rise of the Mafia coincided with the unification of Italy and the influx of immigrants into America. The Mafia means more than a horse head under the sheets--it functions as an alternative to the state, providing its own social and political justice. Combining a nuanced history with a unique counternarrative concerning stereotypes of the immigrant, Salvatore Lupo, a leading historian of modern Italy and a major authority on its criminal history, has written the definitive account of the Sicilian Mafia from 1860 to the present. Consulting rare archival sources, he traces the web of associations, both illicit and legitimate, that have defined Cosa Nostra during its various incarnations. He focuses on several crucial periods of transition: the Italian unification of 1860 to 1861, the murder of noted politician Notarbartolo, fascist repression of the Mafia, the Allied invasion of 1943, social conflicts after each world war, and the major murders and trials of the 1980s. Lupo identifies the internal cultural codes that define the Mafia and places these codes within the context of social groups and communities. He also challenges the belief that the Mafia has grown more ruthless in recent decades. Rather than representing a shift from "honorable" crime to immoral drug trafficking and violence, Lupo argues the terroristic activities of the modern Mafia signify a new desire for visibility and a distinct break from the state. Where these pursuits will take the family adds a fascinating coda to Lupo's work.

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As Federico Varese explains in this compelling and daring book, the truth is more complicated. Varese has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. Varese spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, Varese charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. He explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. In a pioneering chapter on China, he examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. Based on ground-breaking field work and filled with dramatic stories, this book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.

This book focuses on the politics of national identity in Italy. Only a unified country for just over 150 years, Italian national identity is perhaps more contingent than longer established nations such as France or the UK.   The book investigates when, how and why the discussions about national identity and about immigration became entwined in public discourse within Italy. In particular it looks at the most influential voices in the debate on immigration and identity, namely Italian intellectuals, the Catholic Church, the Northern League and the Left. The methodological approach is based on a systematic discourse analysis of official documents, interviews, statements and speeches by representatives of the political actors involved. In the process, the author demonstrates that a 'normalisation' of intolerance towards foreigners has become institutionalised at the heart of the Italian state. This work will be of particular interest to students of Italian Politics, Nationalism and Comparative Politics.

Focusing on Turin, the northern Italian point of entry for so many Senegalese, this book chronicles the arrival and formation of a transnational African Islamic community in a largely Catholic Western European country, one that did not have immigrant legi

Thisbook explores the activism promoted by organised networks of civil society actorsin opening up possibilities for more democratic supranational governance. Itexamines the positive and negative impact that such networks of civil societyactors - named "interlocutory coalitions" - may have on the convergence ofprinciples of administrative governance across the European legal system andother supranational legal systems. Thebook takes two main controversial aspects into account: the first relates tothe convergence between administrative rules pertaining to differentsupranational regulatory systems. Traditionally, the spread of methods ofadministrative governance has been depicted primarily against the background ofthe interactions between the domestic and the supranational arena, both from atop-down and bottom-up perspective. However, the exploration of interactionsoccurring at the supranational level between legal regimes is still notgrounded on adequate empirical evidence. The second controversial aspectconsidered in this book consists of the role of civil society actors operatingat the supranational level. In its discussion of the first aspect, the bookfocuses on the relations between the European administrative law and theadministrative principles of law pertaining to other supranational regulatoryregimes and regulators, including the World Bank, the International MonetaryFund, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the Organization forEconomic Cooperation and Development, the Asian Development Bank, and theCouncil of Europe. The examination of the second aspect involves theexploration of the still little examined, but crucial, role of civil societyorganised networks in shaping global administrative law. These "interlocutorycoalitions" include NGOs, think tanks, foundations, universities, andoccasionally activists with no formal connections to civil society organisations.The book describes such interlocutory coalitions as drivers of harmonizedprinciples of participatory democracy at the European and global levels.However, interlocutory coalitions show a number of tensions (e.g. thegovernability of coalitions, the competition among them) that may hamper the impactthey have on the reconfiguration of individuals' rights, entitlements andresponsibilities in the global arena. 

Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their 'most similar systems' design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems and to propose new models, concepts and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Thailand.

This book focuses on the impact of digital media use for political engagement across varied geographic and political contexts, using a diversity of methodological approaches and datasets. The book addresses an important gap in the contemporary literature on digital politics, identifying context dependent and transcendent political consequences of digital media use. While the majority of the empirical work in this field has been based on studies from the United States and United Kingdom, this volume seeks to place those results into comparative relief with other regions of the world. It moves debates in this field of study forward by identifying system-level attributes that shape digital political engagement across a wide variety of contexts. The evidence analyzed across the fifteen cases considered in the book suggests that engagement with digital environments influences users' political orientations and that contextual features play a significant role in shaping digital politics.

This book is written by media scholars from all over Europe who are members of the Euromedia Research Group. What unites the group is the joint interest of its members in the analysis of media structures and media policy in Europe against the background of contemporary communication theories and concepts. The book has two parts: First, it looks into structural changes in specific media formats such as newspapers, radio, television and online-media. Second, it analyses specific problems and challenges in a comparative way, such as the creation of public sphere(s), the relation between media and democracy, public service media, media regulation and media governance, challenges of media industries etc.The book addresses graduate students in mass communication, scholars and practitioners interested in reflecting main development trends.It follows up from four books written by the Euromedia Research Group on media policy, published in 1986, 1992, 1999 and 2007.For a member list of the Euromedia Research Group visit www.euromediagroup.org

Framing the media in the context of Italy, this book explores why politics and government are so closely linked, and assess the question of whether it's just national pride that has allowed the media to remain relatively independent of global groups.

Governments make too little use of the skills and experience of citizens. New tools--what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise--are making it possible to match citizen expertise to the demand for it in government. She offers a vision of participatory democracy rooted not in voting or crowdsourcing but in people's knowledge and know-how.