This four article journal-based dissertation builds on Gene Sharp's framework of nonviolent direct action, along with Hess and Martin's repression backfire, in order to deepen our understanding of how state repression impacts protest mobilization and historical processes of social change. After initially problematizing Gene Sharp’s notions of power and consent with aid of political discourse theory, and two case studies of the 1905 Russian Bloody Sunday Massacre and the South African 1976 Soweto Massacre, the dissertation moves onto specifically explain the conditions under which protest mobilization is likely to continue after severe state repression. A causal process model underpins the logic of the dissertation. It identifies generalizable antecedent factors and conditions under which repression backfire is most likely to occur. Numerous mechanisms are also introduced that help explain the operation of this process across different historical eras and political systems. After applying this process model and its mechanisms to the 2013 Turkish Gezi protests, a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 44 different historical massacres is presented in which repression backfired and increased protest in some cases, but not others. Repression backfire is a highly asymmetrical and nonlinear causal phenomenon. I conclude that nonviolent protest strategy has been a salient factor in historical cases of repression backfire and is also vital for the ability of protests to withstand state repression. However, the role of nonviolence is partial and to some degree inadequate in explaining repression backfire if it is not linked to other general factors which include protest diversity, protest threat level, and geographic terrain.

Emerging in the mid 1990s, the dominant way in which a human rights discourse and practice has been formally incorporated within many development NGOs has been through what is commonly referred to as “rights-based approaches” (RBAs). This thesis speaks of RBAs as a ‘broad umbrella concept’, thereby acknowledging their expansiveness and what in many ways appears to be a one-approach-fits-all message. However, despite considerable research into RBAs, little attention has been directed towards the boundaries of this concept. In order to approach this, this research develops three analytical themes: ‘rights talk’; theories of voice; and concepts of framing. By invoking a broad sociological approach to the study of human rights, premised on a social constructionist view of human rights practice, this research was built on two stages. The first stage involved documentary analysis of key publications and in-depth interviews with campaigners from within eight development NGOs. The NGOs were sub-categorised as: ‘relief’, ‘faith-based’ and ‘political’. The second stage involved an ethnographic study of one of the ‘political’ NGOs. This study was used to develop an initial case study for an alternative to RBAs to be established. Grounded in the voices expressed across both stages of the research, this thesis provides a conceptual distinction between approaches ‘inside’, ‘alongside’ and ‘outside’ RBAs. It develops this by identifying three key ‘perspectives’ on rights talk. The thesis then builds on this analysis by proposing a new approach, identified as ‘rights-framed approaches’. Rights-framed approaches are proposed on six core dimensions. They contribute a new framework, revealing key ways in which campaigns can be framed through a human rights discourse and practice, whilst remaining ‘outside’ of RBAs. Through this proposal, the 1 thesis aims to move discussions within the existing literatures away from the dominance of the concept of RBAs, towards alternative approaches.

Analysis of relationships between states and citizens has almost monopolised the Human Rights legal discourse. In my thesis, I start from the position that Human Rights is a philosophical and historical victory of humankind, whose application cannot be limited to dictating norms in traditional forms of governance; Human Rights primarily define the human being as an individual, as a group, as a societal entity. Therefore, when we discuss Human Rights we do not pursue what governing states 'ought' or 'ought not' to do, but how human beings 'should' endure their lives in a dignified manner; how they should be treated independently of who their acting opponent might be. The Internet, on the other hand, has evolved through the years into an uncharted virtual structure of uncounted online operations and services run by private commercial actors. Within this setting, where the online application platform performs as a land parallel and the private commercial host as the de facto ruler, online identity is mirrored into service accounts. Hence the human being‘s digital existence seems to be depending, to a large degree, on the private initiative – and will. Whilst exploring various relevant themes, the thesis revisits the issue of the application of Human Rights in private relationships through the lenses of online electronic communications and using the example of commercial online virtual worlds. According to my conclusions, a simple projection of the state/citizen model onto ISPs/users relationships does not give sufficient ground for contesting Human Rights within that context. What we need is to deconstruct predominant dogmas in modern Human Rights theory and legislation and to readjust our focus back on the human being and its universal manifestations.

This doctoral study explored how a commitment to human rights evolved, developed and unfolded within 22 UK companies from the perspective of those responsible (some 30 participants). It did so by adopting a flexible, exploratory and inductive research design within a broader interpretive and qualitative approach. A purposeful sampling strategy was used to select companies from a previous study and semi-structured interviews were conducted with business managers from a cross-section of UK companies. The data was analysed and structured using a process based sensemaking and organising framework consisting of three interconnected stages which, together, illustrate the development of human rights within UK companies. In summary;  The first stage, enactment, describes when companies first noticed human rights and what they did to understand its relevance to the corporate setting (and in doing so enacted human rights, bringing it into existence for the company).  The second stage explores the formal interpretation of human rights adopted by companies and the language used to convey and describe this understanding. It also notes the human rights standards that companies recognised and deemed relevant to their business operations.  The third stage focuses on the structures, processes and measures put in place by companies to action, organise and realise their understanding of human rights internally. It then focuses on lessons learned and knowledge retained for future use. The study makes a number of important empirical, methodological and practical contributions. It makes its principal contribution to the developing body of knowledge, practice and research in the business and human rights academic field. It does so by providing much needed qualitative, in-depth and nuanced data on how the human rights concept is used, interpreted and managed within the business setting.

This dissertation examines the ongoing problem of business actors violating human rights and the regulatory attempts to deal with the problem at the international level. In particular, it considers the work of the UN Secretary- General’s Special Representative on Business Human Rights, John Ruggie and the ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ framework as elaborated in the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. It also critically analyses the UN Global Compact, the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises as well as developments in the European Union in this area. Each of these regulatory mechanisms demonstrates elements of new governance, hybrid or third way models of regulation such as voluntarism, wide participation through multistakeholder structures and subsidiarity, all of which are useful soft law techniques that contribute to a culture of human rights or human rights norm internalisation. Nevertheless, they fall down in failing to provide a normative regulatory framework which would address human rights abuses by business actors which remain unresponsive to soft law models of regulation. Specifically, there is a lack of redress for the victims of human rights abuses by business actors and the current regulatory models do not offer a deterrent to or punishment of such abuses. This dissertation argues that the international community must thus re-conceptualise the business and human rights problem and move towards a mandatory international legal paradigm. New governance models have emerged from a changing international legal paradigm and they represent a move away from State-centric regulation towards the complementary co-existence of hard and soft rules in one domain. While many of the new governance techniques offer useful means of internalising a human rights culture within the business community and thus helping to prevent human rights abuses, nevertheless, the lack of normative rules means that no binding redress mechanisms or remedies are available. A true new governance approach allows both normative and non-normative standards to co-exist. Given that the voluntary business and human rights initiatives alone have failed to address the problem adequately, a new international normative approach is necessary. This thesis posits that re-conceptualising business actors as human rights dutyholders does not require a major paradigm shift. International law has always recognised business actors as subjects of international law, or alternatively, participants at minimum, and there is no good reason why they cannot be subject to human rights obligations. This thesis advocates the application of a horizontal approach to human rights which encompasses human rights violations by business actors. At present, a conservative, positivist and State-centric perspective of international law prevails, which prioritises the maintenance of State sovereignty over the rights of individuals not to be abused by business actors. The law is correct as of October 2011.

The current scholarship on copyright predominantly considers this area of law from the standpoint of economics. Likewise, since the adoption of the TRIPs Agreement, contemporary copyright law-making and practice has mainly been constructed around the assumption that its job is to create incentives to make more expressive works in the form of copyright embedded in goods and investment. Copyright law has heavily skewed towards the protection of corporate copyright ownership rather than individual authorship. In this model, culture is seen as the marketplace for merchandising and producing the products of copyright industries and an economic space facilitating the process of creativity. Intellectual properties are said be essential assets in firms’ portfolios and an important component in the macro-economic development of a country. Thus, current copyright law has predominantly an economic-oriented model that shapes its cultural and development policies. This thesis offers an alternative framework for copyright law focusing not on economic development alone but on more broadly promoting human development and one of its predominant framework, namely the ‘capabilities approach’, to transform the ‘controlled culture’ that individuals live in to a ‘fair culture’. Thus, this study’s central research questions are: How could western (UK, EU, and US) copyright laws’ economic-oriented development and culture visions be reshaped through the capabilities approach and ‘participatory culture’ considerations in order to enhance participation in culture? And what legal resolutions and remedies could be drawn from the fundamental rights framework (specifically from the right to take part in cultural life and freedom of expression) to make such a shift in copyright laws? Freedom is a crucial value in the construction of a fair culture within copyright. Inspiration here is Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘development as freedom’ and Martha Nussbaum’s idea to rationalise these freedoms as touchstone values in constitutional entitlements. To promote ‘development as freedom’, in Amartya Sen’s words, copyright law cannot be detached from the considerations of fostering people’s capabilities to participate in cultural and political life. Therefore, the main contention of this thesis is that copyright law does more than encouraging the creation of more commodities and investment: it fundamentally affects human development and substantive freedoms, or capabilities, of all people to live a good life in a democratic culture and society. The challenge that this thesis posits is how to bring the politics of human dignity and the politics of welfare into a single framework within copyright law. To this end, the capability-oriented human rights assessment of copyright law is brought to open a fresh discussion over the conventional wisdom mentioned above. To replace the existing ‘culture and economic development model’ with the ‘culture and human development model’, this study identifies capabilities or substantive freedoms (cultural human rights and freedoms), as a way of evaluating copyright law’s goals in general and its impact on individuals’ capabilities to freely express themselves and participate in cultural and political life. As an alternative to traditional development measures, Sen and Nussbaum propose the concept of the advancement of ‘central capabilities’ in which capabilities represent ‘what people are actually able to do and to be’. This inquiry aims at creating a synergy between the ‘capabilities approach’and human rights framework through the identification of relevant capability-based cultural human rights and freedoms to set a normative base for the construction of a fair culture. Again from a capabilities perspective, this thesis further analyses some contemporary issues surrounding contemporary copyright enforcement measures - namely notice-and-4 takedown and graduated response procedures, file sharing, disclosure orders, filtering and website blocking orders, the extension of copyright terms, pre-established/statutory and additional damages, technological protection measures and the intermediary liability, the extension of criminal liability and notice-and-staydown - where the tension between copyright law and cultural human rights and freedoms are more acute. This helps to identify the important cultural netibilities (freedoms/capabilities on the Internet) in a networked world. In the final analysis, this thesis proposes two frameworks, one for legislators and one for courts, to engage with these cultural human rights and freedoms which are of importance for the advancement of human development. In the former framework, the copyright rules laid down by the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement are discussed as a case study to show more concretely how copyright law affects human development and to make proposals for future direction of treaty and law-making with respect to it. The second framework, by fundamentally relying on the legal test proposed by Abbe Brown in her book “Intellectual Property, Human Rights and Competition: Access to Essential Innovation and Technology,” aims to complete this thesis with the introduction of a legal test (deconstructive multiple proportionally test) for courts to engage with a conflict of norms between human rights and copyright, which will make them take cognisance of human development paradigm, when such a conflict is encountered.

by T.L. Magnanti and Y. Wang. / "November 1997." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 27).

This thesis considers the question of human freedom through the lens of the revival of republican political theory that has taken place in recent decades. In its first part, it distinguishes between different strands of that revival and argues that one of these presents a variant of human freedom which more adequately captures the human condition than does the ideal of freedom traditionally endorsed by liberal thought. It then considers that question of freedom in relation to very fundamental questions of power, law, and the reasons for which we accept the existence of an organised public power in the first place, arguing that the individual finds himself trapped between, on one hand, threats to his freedom which are horizontal, emanating from private parties, and those which are vertical, arising from the apparatus of public power which exists in order to protect man from man. In part two, one of the principal advantages identified for the neo-republican ideal - its aptness for application to the freedom of individuals in relation to each other, as well as in relation to the state - is explored within the specific contexts of the relationship of husband to wife and that of employer to employee. In each case, the relationship between the question of freedom and the specific legal rules which determine when and where public power will intervene against or on behalf of one party in relation to another, most generally the rules of private property, is analysed. It is argued that freedom is primarily a function of the ‘ordinary’ law: that which determines one’s rights and duties in relation to others, and which determines the distribution of property through taxation and spending. On the basis of this account, a renewed republican constitutionalism which focuses upon issues of property within the constitution - as a right protected by fundamental rights documents, and as a potentially distorting factor within the democratic process - is offered in part three. The normative element of republican constitutionalism is not exhausted by the issue of how to organise the organs of the state such that the individual is not dominated by the state: issues of private right being a function of constitutional processes, the constitution must also ensure that its outputs do not force man to live at the mercy of man.

It is commonly contended by the political right that freedom and equality are mutually incompatible values. This ‘incompatibility argument’ can be characterized as positing a trade-off between freedom and equality, such that the more a society realizes of one, the less it is able to realize of the other. Talk of trade-offs between values implies the possibility that they can be subjected to quantitative analysis, and in order to make sense of the trade-off interpretation of the incompatibility argument I identify quantifiable conceptions of freedom and equality. The incompatibility argument invokes negative freedom and equality of outcome. Consequently it is often resisted by endorsement of alternative conceptions of these values like positive freedom or equality of opportunity. Refraining from this strategy, I aim to show that for those committed to both negative freedom and equality of outcome the outlook is not as bleak as the incompatibility argument would seem to suggest. This is because the traditional picture ignores the context in which the trade-off between freedom and equality takes place, namely, the widespread privatization of resources. I argue that in addition to the advertised trade-off between freedom and equality, each of these values also trades off against the extent to which private property rights are enshrined. As above, for trade-offs to take place between private property and other social goals it must be possible to quantify private property, and I seek to show that such quantification can be achieved. If my analysis is successful we will then be faced with three trade-offs: freedom vs. equality, freedom vs. private property, and equality vs. private property. By integrating these three trade-offs into a single three-dimensional model I aim to present a more informative account of the relationships between the three goals. The extent to which freedom and equality trade-off against one another is itself determined in part by the extent to which a society realizes private property. As a result, by curbing or abolishing private property rights more freedom can be secured alongside greater equality.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Africa, 2002.