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View all past Essay Contest winners below. Click on the winner to see their paper abstract.
Mailman School of Public Health, Graduate
Sexuality and “Right to Privacy” in Bowers and Lawrence
The “right to privacy” has been a mainstay of human rights discourse, most notably in Article 12 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in a variety of state constitutions and legal codes. How this “right” is understood and legally operationalized, however, varies given time and place and especially when it intersects with different domains, such as sexuality. The legal and cultural understandings of privacy are key to conceptualizations of the individuals and groups allowed the benefits of rights affirmations and protections based on this principle. Unexamined assumptions about sexuality can also shape legal interpretations that, far from being neutral and objective, often invoke normative assumptions that constrict ideas of what individuals or dimensions of sexuality fall within the privacy sphere. Two significant U.S. Supreme Court cases addressing anti-sodomy law serve as instructive case studies of the way the principle of privacy has been invoked concerning rights pertaining to sexuality, and in particular, how conceptions of sexual rights can be both bolstered and narrowed by this principle. In analyzing the cases Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), this paper explores how Constitutional understandings, “folk” ideas about sexuality, and other contextual factors interacted to determine whether and to what extent state intrusion in consensual adult sexual behavior was perceived as a violation of an individual’s right to privacy.
Teachers College, Graduate
Challenges in the Interface between the State, Indigenous Peoples, and Bilateral Aid: the Philippine Department of Education, the Lumads of Mindanao, and AusAID
Nation-states problematically define their political relationship with indigenous peoples as predicated on ambiguities pertaining to the nature of sovereignty, self-determination, identity, and culture. These prevailing ambiguities are manifested in a colonial anxiety that forcefully works upon indigenous peoples. I reflect on the ambiguities of these concepts as they are articulated in choking entanglements for the Lumad peoples of Mindanao within a colonial institution—the Philippine Department of Education—supported by bilateral intervention and the neoliberal politics of Australian foreign aid.
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Graduate
ope Pius XII, Rights Talk and the Dawn of the Religious Cold War
From the early 1940s, Pope Pius XII began to advance an important language of rights, which denoted a new way of understanding church-state relations, and a new way of characterizing the leading friends and foes of the Catholic Church. His rights talk influenced lay Catholics in both the United States and Western Europe, by providing them with a framework for underwriting both the Allied cause in the Second World War and the Cold War consensus.
Columbia College, Undergraduate
Patterns and Advantages of Community-Based Resistance to Land Grabs in Madagascar and Ghana: What Lessons can be Learned for Sub-Saharan Africa as a Whole?
In this paper, I identify patterns of community-based resistance to land grabs by looking at two cases of successful resistance – resistance to the 2007 BioFuel Africa deal in Ghana and resistance to the 2008 Daewoo Logistics deal in Madagascar. I argue that community-based resistance is important because land grabs have severe negative effects on the local population, including dispossession of land, food and water insecurity, and lack of compensation; because the current drivers of the land grabbing phenomenon will continue to drive land grabs in the future, including food insecurity in wealthy developed nations, demand for biofuels, speculative investing in land, and FDI-attractive reforms in host countries; and because nascent top-down remedies for populations affected by land grabs, including international monitoring, host government regulation of foreign land investors, and transnational legal action, are not able to address the land grabbing phenomenon in a timely manner. The patterns of community-based resistance that I identify are the importance of individual leadership, NGOs, and dissemination of information in mobilizing the population against a land grab. These will be important in mobilizing resistance to the growing threat of land grabs.
Barnard College, Undergraduate
International and Local Peacebuilding: Understanding Successes and Failures in Liberia and Somalia
Civil wars are costly, complex political phenomena that evade quick fixes. Rebuilding societies in the wake of such devestation Why do peacebuilding missions succeed or fail after civil wars in low capacity states? Using a case study approach, this paper seeks to answer this question. The conflicts in Liberia and Somalia began similarly enough to allow a comparison of peacebuilding attempts to resolve both conflicts. Examining peace processes and treaty provisions in both conflicts along with the situational factors — the presence of civil society, previous experience with democratic institutions, the survival of political, economic, or cultural institutions, and the relationships with neighboring states — can help us to understand why peace was achievable in Liberia but still eludes Somalia.
Columbia Law School, Graduate
The Loliondo Massai Understood as "Conservation Refugees"
In July of 2009, riot police burned eight Maasai villages in the Loliondo region of Tanzania to make a game reserve—part of a long chain of brutal acts perpetrated against this tribe. It is not hard to see that the Maasai in Tanzania have been victimized, but this paper argues that appealing to the international human rights regime in this type of situation should not be so automatic. It examines the human rights treaties that both sides might invoke, the Massai for the right to life and property, the government for the greater population’s right to conserve the land. The paper finds that the international human rights regime is actually part of the larger context in which the Maasai became vulnerable—compelling both their initial and their continued repression. It elucidates three problems with the current human rights movement: human rights tend to be structured in such absolute terms that they become limiting; individuals are too particularized; and activists rarely tailor their approach to local conditions. Without addressing these problems, appealing to international human rights will only further alienate the Maasai—reifying their “otherness,” and trapping them in a perpetual standoff with the government in which both sides can claim absolute rights.
