This post is the third in a series examining the future of the international order. One of the five programmatic series that the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace explores is Global Governance, and in 2018, the Chair began a series of conversations focused on the future of the international order. This series of short reflections highlights the ideas discussed, and the solutions offered for improving international relations.
In the fall of 2018, the annual conference of the International Studies Association-Northeast (ISA-NE) was held in Baltimore, Maryland. The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace organized a panel at the conference on The Ethics of Human Rights in a Digital World. The conference theme was World Politics in The Digital Age and the conference organizers encouraged papers, panels, and roundtable proposals on the topics below:
- New capabilities and vulnerabilities affecting inter-state relations
- Emerging challenges in global governance
- The impact of populist impulses, social movements, and non-state actors
- Pressures on traditional sources of truth, authority, and expertise
- The power of algorithms, hashtags, and viral images
- Efforts to theorize and historicize the networks, systems, technologies, and practices shaping world politics in the twenty-first century
The ISA-Northeast conference is particularly focused on interdisciplinary research and actively seeks to build networks between graduate students, junior, and senior scholars.
The panel organized by the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace featured five papers exploring different aspects of The Ethics of Human Rights in a Digital World. The goal of the panel was to further our understanding of how new technologies are offering new ways to ensure the protection of human rights, but also posing challenging ethical questions, about the right to privacy, the increase in surveillance, and the need to think about human rights not only in a physical space but a virtual space as well.
Dr. Kate Seaman, presented a paper Defending Human Rights in a Digital Age, which examined the ways in which new technology is being utilized in the defense of human rights across the globe. In many cases this technology is enabling human rights defenders to raise awareness, and to secure information in ways which were not previously possible but also poses new risks.
Professor Matthew S. Weinert’s paper Cultural Heritage and Cultural Rights in an Age of Digital Reproduction explored the positive and negative ethical implications of the digital reproduction of cultural heritage and their impact on the meaningful exercise of cultural rights with particular reference to the destruction of cultural heritage in times of armed conflict and the 2009 UN Human Rights Council creation of the position of Special Rapporteur to study and clarify the notion of cultural rights; identifying best practices to promote them; and proposing responses to obstacles to the realization of cultural rights
Professor Stefanie Fishel’s paper Human Rights in a Material World argued that the focus on disruptions of human rights based on the digital or virtual is one that is still eliding the deeper issues inherent in human rights especially the gendered and radicalized traditions from which it came. Her paper interrogated how the debate over rights in “the digital age” is a continuation of the avoidance to come terms with the moral and ethical stakes in the rights discourse.
Professor Hoda Mahmoudi’s paper The Ethical Foundations of Human Rights in a Changing World examined how large-scale changes are impacting on the ethical foundations of human rights. In a time where humans are more closely connected, where technology is making the world seem smaller, the paper argued it is even more important to understand how rights are understood and enforced, and how this can be done in an ethical way.
Professor Jennifer Whitten-Woodring and Nicole Anderson concluded the panel with their paper on Covering or Covering up? The effects of media freedom and media access on social and economic rights. Their paper posited that social and economic inequities are unlikely to gain media attention unless some news event draws attention to them. Specifically, the paper theorized that the effect of media freedom on social and economic rights will depend on the occurrence of disasters and this was tested across countries and over time (2003-2012) utilizing the Index of Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment, which focuses on a government’s capability to fulfill its economic and social rights obligations based on its resources and the Global Media Freedom Dataset.
As the panel discussed, the world today is very different to the one in which the UDHR was proclaimed in 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly, beginning the codification process of human rights in international law.
The preamble affirms the
recognition of the inherent dignity and…equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family
and goes further to assert that human rights are
the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. (United Nations, 1948).
Whilst human rights have become increasingly codified, in both national and international legal systems. Debates continue to focus on what types of rights should be codified, political rights, social rights, economic rights, environmental rights, and increasingly digital rights.
The panel examined some of the crucial ethical questions raised by our increasingly digitalized world and explored how the changes in technology are challenging and strengthening the foundations of human rights.
About the Author:
Kate Seaman is the Assistant Director to the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace where she supports the research activities of the Chair. Kate is interested in understanding normative changes at the global level and how these changes impact on the creation of peace.
You can find out more about the Bahá’í Chair by watching our video here.