Podcasts about cghr

This week, we sent Matt Mahmoudi to London to interview Dr. Thomas MacManus about the persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority population in Myanmar that has faced increasing violence from the Myanmar government in recent months. Thousands have fled their homes, and the government has banned access for journalists and aid organizations. Is this the beginning of genocide? As one of the few researchers to be granted access close to where the Rohingya live, Dr. MacManus provides an ideal introduction to the situation. And after the interview, our regular CGHR panel convenes to analyze the deeper roots of the conflict in Myanmar. Why has renowned leader Aung San Suu Kyi remained silent, and what power do states really have to prevent genocide? Dr. Thomas MacManus teaches at Queen Mary University of London. Learn more about his International State Crime Initiative at www.statecrime.org. This episode's music was composed by the machine-learning algorithm at JukeDeck. Create your own

This interview with Dr Graham Denyer Willis marks the first of the GCHR's Researcher Spotlights series. These videos focus on various academics at the University of Cambridge whose research relates to governance and or human rights topics.

A brief introduction to CGHR's research themes, by theme leads Dr Ella McPherson (Human Rights in the Digital Age), Dr Thomas Probert (The Right to Life), Dr Devon Curtis (Violence, Conflict and Peacebuilding) and Dr Sharath Srinivasan (Politics, Digital Technologies and the Media).

Head of Research and Development Dr Claudia Abreu Lopes introduces the work of Africa's Voices Foundation, a non-profit organisation spun out of CGHR research, at an event held in May 2015 to celebrate the Centre's first 5 years .

CGHR Research Associate Dr Thomas Probert describes the work of the Centre under the theme The Right to Life, at an event held in May 2015 to celebrate CGHR's first five years.

Director Dr Sharath Srinivasan describes CGHR's work under the research theme Politics, Digital Technologies and the Media, at an event in May 2015 to celebrate the Centre's first 5 years in May 2015.

CGHR Research Associate Dr Ella McPherson describes the work of the Centre under the research theme Human Rights in the Digital Age, at an event held in May 2015 to celebrate CGHR's first five years.

CGHR Director Dr Sharath Srinivasan gives a brief overview of CGHR's first five years at an event held in May 2015 to celebrate the Centre's 5th anniversary.

A short talk by CGHR Director Dr Sharath Srinivasan delivered at an event held in May 2015 to celebrate the Centre's first 5 years.

SynTalk thinks about dying & death from medical, ethical, existential, legal, & sociocultural perspectives, while constantly wondering how & why death is important. Is death ‘master-able’? The concepts are derived off / from Socrates, Glaucon, Epicurus, Jesus Christ, Hobbes, Stalin, Sydney Brenner, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Woody Allen, & Aruna Shanbaug, among others. How the hope for immortality is conceptually similar to the hope for justice? Can we avoid death before old age? How difficult is it to call someone dead, & is death an objective event? How life has changed from being ‘brutish, nasty and short’ a few centuries ago, & how the 20th century was in many ways the century of life. How is mortality different across age groups, and the role played by sanitation, vaccination, and oral rehydration over the years? Is death becoming more medicalized and protracted? Are more people now dying in hospitals? Why is it important to fight child mortality, and why is it likely that this global battle might be won or lost in the districts of India? Why the first month after birth is the most important to prevent avoidable death? Why the inevitability of death need (& should) not prevent appropriate public policy actions. How there is an opposition between life & death. What do we write on the death certificate, and why the cardio-respiratory arrest (for example) as a cause is not sufficient? How ‘extreme old age’ caused the death of Queen Mother? The difference and links between between physician assisted suicide, gradual withdrawal of care, (passive & active) euthanasia, medical care system, oral opiates, life support, & brain death. Why is the brain (stem) death becoming more popular, & possible links with organ transplant. Can there be a technology for death? How differently do people die? Can one prepare oneself to die (via philosophizing?)? What would leading oncologists do when they themselves face a terminal case of cancer? How suicide is the opposite of capital punishment. Do only human beings commit suicide; Why? Is death available to the ‘self’, in a moment when the self knows that it is no longer? How is the post-operative death different? Is the living cell programmed to die? Do we know what life is only through the occurrence of death, & is death a summation of life in some way? Is it important to not allow Market to take over death, just as it has taken over life? The importance of care for the dying? The role of the state in minimizing ‘bad luck’ deaths. How death is increasingly becoming banal and matter-of-fact, but is still (somehow) repressed culturally. Is it alright to have a cemetery in the middle of a university? How to die beautifully? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Saitya Brata Das (philosophy, JNU, Delhi), Prof. Prabhat Jha (epidemiology, CGHR, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto), & Dr. Sanjay Nagral (surgery, Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai).

Selma James on her latest contribution to Ralph Ibbott’s 'Ujamaa: the hidden story of Tanzania’s socialist villages'. Selma provides a provocative interpretation of Julius Nyerere’s political project and the insight it lends on contemporary global issues. Selma has authored many books across her career, including 'The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community'.

After a two-day meeting to discuss a report to the UN Human Rights Council, CGHR hosted an international panel of experts for a discussion of the uses of ICTs in the protection of human rights, particularly focusing on the opportunities and challenges associated with their potential for fostering greater accountability for violations. The panel: Christof Heyns – UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christina Ribeiro – Investigation Coordinator, Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court Christoph Koettl – designer and editor of Amnesty International’s Citizen Evidence Lab Eliot Higgins – creator of the Brown Moses blog, investigating the conflict in Syria Ella McPherson – CGHR Research Associate (chair)

CGHR talk by Professor Sir David Edward, 28th January 2015

Africa’s rapid digital revolution, especially through mobile communications, combined with radio’s popularity, offers a significant opportunity for engaging and analysing citizens’ voice quickly and in hard to reach places. The Africa’s Voices Foundation is a non-profit start-up growing out of interdisciplinary research at Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights. It combines social science insights with new approaches to data analytics, and is already supporting governance and development actors in a range of contexts. This presentation charts its genesis and its future ambitions.

On 19th June 2014, CGHR published and launched the outcome of its most recent collaboration with the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions: a study of the incidence of violations of the right to life across the African continent. This study, Unlawful Killings in Africa is the product of a year-long collaboration between CGHR Research Associate Dr Thomas Probert and the Special Rapporteur.

In light of the outbreak of violence in South Sudan, CGHR organized a roundtable discussion to give a snapshot of the conflict and its consequences to date, exploring its underlying causes, the implications for Sudan / South Sudan relations and the consequences for regional and international efforts at peacemaking and peacebuilding in the Sudans in recent years.

The French Embassy has generously sponsored a cycle of lectures and workshops which bring to Cambridge leading scholars from France to interact and foster research collaborations with experts in Cambridge from across the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Humanities and Social Sciences. In this second year of collaboration, the cycle of talks and workshops will explore the complex theme of identity in 21st-century France and beyond. The lectures, which will be given in English, are open to any member of the University. In this third lecture, co-organised by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, Francois Burgat, director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) will give a talk on When Authoritarianism fails in the Arab World: understanding the recourse to the Muslim lexicon. For the first time in decades, 'Arab revolutions', ushered in by the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, make it possible to seriously envision a phasing out of the autocratic machinery in the Middle East and North Africa.Whatever the end results of this awakening, the glimpse at a post-authoritarian era has already affected domestic and international political dynamics, if only by anticipation. In the parliamentary arenas, even if it is clear that its roots are to be found deep in the fourteen centuries of Muslim history and the realities or the myths of a long interaction with the West, the explanation of the rise of contemporary Islamism can be circumscribed within a timeline of the last hundred years or so. It is essential, to reach a better understanding, to distinguish two processes and so two levels of analysis: on the one hand, the essentially identity-centered reasons for which a generation of political actors originally choose to "speak Muslim", that is to say, preferentially and at times ostentatiously to have recourse to a lexicon or a vocabulary derived from Muslim culture; on the other hand, the diversified uses that such actors make of this lexicon, in each of the countries where the failure of Authoritarianism offers them new opportunities as well as in the North/South arena, contingent on variables which are simultaneously multiple, banal and profane, and so determine their different political claims and mobilisations. Francois Burgat is a political scientist, director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), and, since 2008, director of the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO - French Institute for the Near East, http://www.ifporient.org), a leading multidisciplinary research institution at the service of knowledge production on the societies of the Near-East with a focus on Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories and Iraq. F.Burgat has carried research in the Maghreb, Near East and Arabic Peninsula for the last 30 years and worked in the University of Constantine in Algeria, at the Cedej in Cairo, and was between 1997 and 2003 the director of the Centre Français d'Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales in Sanaa, Yemen. His publications available in English include Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda, Texas University Press, 2008;Face to face with political islam, Oxford, IB Tauris, 2002; and, with John Esposito (eds.): Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East, London, Hurst, 2002.

Conference Summary After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways? The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.

Conference Summary After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways? The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.

Monday 24 January 2011, Senior Common Room, POLIS Ms Soo Hee Choi (Visiting Associate at CGHR and International Relations Officer, Communications and Cooperation Division, National Human Rights Commission of Korea)