Global Campus Human Rights Journal: second issue now online

The Global Campus of Human Rights enriches its online publications with the second issue of the Global Campus Human Rights Journal (GCHRJ). Launched in 2017 and already counting on thousands of readers around the world, the GCHRJ keeps serving as a forum for rigorous scholarly analysis, critical commentaries, and reports on recent developments pertaining to human rights and democratisation globally. The second issue of Volume 1 is now available online at https://globalcampus.eiuc.org/human-rights-journal and consists of three parts.

The first part, ‘Articles’, contains three contributions. Two articles relate to intractable conflicts, while the third investigates the possibility of the ChevronTexaco case in Ecuador being charaterised as ‘cultural genocide’.

In the second part, ‘Special focus: Securitisation’, the emphasis falls on the phenomenon of securitisation and its impact on human rights. Professor Anna Krasteva, who acted as co-editor of the Journal for this issue, explains how “human rights are not only the normative ‘measure’ to assess securitisation, but also to examine the capacity of civil society to produce alternative discourses and mobilise resistance through various forms of civic activism, mobilisations and popular protest. The two lines of research – securitisation and civic resistance – are not structured separately in the special focus part of this issue of the Journal, and are interwoven in various case studies”. 

With staff and students from each of the seven Master’s programmes authoring an article, the ‘Special Focus’ section provides a unique array of perspectives on the issue of securitisation, covering Africa, the post-Soviet space, the Balkan states, Europe, the Asia Pacific, the Arab world and the Americas. “The coverage is global, and the articles in this issue collectively satisfy any hunger for geopolitical diversity” – said Krasteva as she underlined the need to “opt for refreedomisation, for the empowerment of human rights defendants and active citizens for deconstructing and resisting securitisation, for imagining alternative discourses and policies. Because we are also academics aspiring to change the world”.

The third section, ‘Recent regional developments’, covers selected regional developments in human rights and democratisation during 2016 in the Arab region, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Asia Pacific. 

GCHRJ is supported financially by the European Union Commission and is an open-access journal available on the Global Campus Open Knowledge Repository. Submissions - in English, French or Spanish - are welcome at any time and should be sent to Isabeau de Meyer at idemeyer1@gmail.com. The Guidelines for Authors can be found here.