This chapter discusses the position (and especially protection) of the individual in international law, whether through human rights law, refugee law, the right to self-determination, or other means

This chapter argues that an adequate account of group rights requires an embedded understanding of moral duties and rights within the context of common action for a common good. Drawing from Alasdair MacIntyre, I explain why group agency for a common good, through various social practices, grounds a framework of natural justice with correlative duties and rights, including various group moral rights. This account of natural justice is completed by an appeal to the common agency of an institutionalised political community for a political common good. I argue that human rights are a subset of moral rights, which ‘cry out’ as a matter of justice for political enforcement or realisation, whether against violations of fundamental natural law precepts or dereliction of core political responsibilities. These include group rights where the protected aspects of personal human flourishing are pursued through the common action of groups, such as families, trade unions, religious communities, and political communities. Moreover, group rights are essential to human rights – human rights presuppose the group moral right of political authority to administer justice for the common good.

Many scholars have detected a decrease in political violence in recent decades, but the causes of this decline remain unclear. As a contribution to this debate, this chapter revisits the controversy over trends in conflict after the end of the Cold War. While several scholars made ominous predictions of surging ethnic warfare, Ted Robert Gurr presented evidence of a pacifying trend since the mid?1990s and predicted a further decline in ethnic conflict in an article on"ethnic warfare on the wane." Leveraging more recent data on ethnic groups and their participation in ethnic civil wars, this chapter evaluates if Gurr was right about the decline of ethnic conflict, and if he was right for the right reasons. We assess whether an increase in governments' accommodative policies toward ethnic groups can plausibly account for a decline in ethnic civil war. Our findings are largely compatible with Gurr's observations and stand in stark contrast to various pessimistic projections that were made in the early post-Cold War period. Among a number of empirical dimensions, we have found that this relatively optimistic perspective holds up well despite a surge in civil conflict in recent years. Ethnic, as opposed to non-ethnic, civil wars appear to have subsided after the mid-1990s, and this decline is at least partially attributable to an increase in governments' accommodative policies toward ethnic groups, such as the granting of group rights, regional autonomy, and inclusion through governmental power sharing, as well as democratization and peacekeeping.

This chapter introduces the thought of Otto von Gierke. It outlines the philosophical tenets of classical pluralism and its rich vocabulary of group entities. It traces the rise of pluralism in nineteenth-century Germany, through its short golden age in early twentieth-century England, to its eclipse and afterlife following World War I. It argues that classical pluralism offers the most comprehensive and convincing theoretical model on which to regulate the relationship among individual, state and civil society in general, and between English law and British Islam in particular.

The chapter examines, in detail, five internal features that characterize the norm providing protection from incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, as codified in Article 20(2) of the ICCPR. These five features are the ‘emotive’ component, the ‘incitement’ component, the tensions between equality and liberty rights of speakers and members of targeted groups, the ‘group identity’ component, and, finally, the ‘religion’ component. The chapter elaborates on the dilemmas of interpretation and implementation generated by these internal features. It illustrates how the minimalist and maximalist approaches to the legal regulation of hate speech perceive these five features differently. Furthermore, they clarify how the libertarian and egalitarian approaches to freedom of expression, as well as the individualist and communitarian approaches to rights, address differently the conundrums created by the five features. This ultimately generates different delineations of the meaning and scope of the norm, and different views on whether or not legalistic constraints on hate speech (or, rather, quasi-legalistic restrictions) are warranted, as well as on the scope and nature of such restrictions.

The purpose of the discussion in this chapter is to suggest some cardinal changes to the practice of male circumcision in order to make it more humane and less painful to its subjects. Balancing between group rights and the rights of the child, it is essential to avoid unnecessary suffering. It is one of the liberal state’s obligations to protect the best interests of vulnerable third parties. The chapter opens with some preliminary data about male circumcision and then explains its importance in Judaism and in Islam. It examines the medical reasons for male circumcision and the risks involved in the practice; subsequently, it discusses the critique of male circumcision. The discussion also highlights the points of agreement and disagreement between those supporting and opposing the ritual and insists that male circumcision should be performed by using anaesthesia. The final part of the discussion includes a proposal for humane male circumcision that considers religious sentiments and the rights of the child, aiming to strike a reasonable balance between competing interests. The hope is that the proposal will be debated in parliaments in the Western world.

This chapter explains the concept of reasonable multiculturalism. Building on the Rawlsian notion of reasonableness, and on Kymlicka’s formulation of multiculturalism, the mechanisms for reconciliation between liberalism and multiculturalism are outlined. What are the boundaries of multiculturalism within the framework of liberal democracy? What are the boundaries of state interference in the business of minority cultures whose norms and practices are at odd with liberal democracy? Reasonability assumes acceptance of the underpinning shared principles. Cultures that do not adhere to these principles are perceived as less reasonable. The extent of reasonability varies. But lacking reasonability does not immediately entail that the liberal majority should intervene in the business of the subcultures. Interference is warranted to restore justice. The chapter discusses the concept of mutual respect, distinguishing between two forms of cultural pluralism – ‘multination’ and ‘polyethnic’ states – and between two kinds of rights that a group might claim: the first involves the right of a group against its own members, the second involves the right of a group against the larger society. Furthermore, the nature of liberal tolerance and the mechanisms of deliberative democracy are explained, the latter instrumental for resolving disputes in a liberal democracy in a civil, non-violent way.

This chapter is concerned with the concepts of compromise and deliberative democracy. When compromise takes place between two or more parties, reciprocity must be present; that is, the concessions are mutual. It is argued that compromise and deliberative democracy are important in facilitating a healthy discourse between the majority and minorities about group rights and the extent of state interference in minority affairs. With proponents of discourse ethics, public reason and deliberative democracy, such as Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, Seyla Benhabib, John Dryzek, Amy Gutmann and Dennis F. Thompson, it is argued that this is a desirable approach to negotiating and resolving conflicts. The chapter agrees with Monique Deveaux that deliberative democracy is an invaluable resource for thinking about how liberal democracies and minority cultural groups might mediate conflicts of culture.

Chapter four demonstrates how the post-WWII liberal vision of international law feeds into the ideology of the postcolonial ‘liberal’ state in the form of ‘individualism’, thereby dominating the discourse on minority protection. One direct implication of the dominance of liberal individualism in the postcolonial constitutional architecture of rights is the denial of protection for minority groups. The liberal human rights regime is designed to diffuse cultural groups into individual units, so as to facilitate their assimilation into a homogeneous national (read majoritarian) identity. This chapter explains how international law, with its liberal underpinning, shrinks the scope of the right to self-determination and thereby perpetuates the vulnerability of, or in some cases even leads to the extinction of, minority groups. In this connection, I also highlight the peculiar challenge that postcolonial states face in reconciling the diverging forces of ‘liberal individualism’ and majoritarian ‘ethno-nationalism’. The former emanates from the liberal international legal order, the latter from the nationalist discourse of allegiance, entitlement, and legitimacy. The issue of citizenship and statelessness is also discussed in this context. My arguments in this chapter are supported by in-depth case studies on the Rohingya and the CHT hill people.

Self-determination conflicts have, for a very long time, been considered intractable. Given the apparent zero-sum game character to such conflicts, the only outcomes appear to be victory for either side or interminable conflict. While the post-Cold war era has brought about a further round of self-determination conflicts marked by very high levels of violence and civilian casualties, this period has also led to a significant number of self-determination settlements. In the main, these have been autonomy settlements or examples of federalisation; and are often combined with complex power-sharing arrangements. This practice has contributed considerable wealth to the tool-kit available to construct bespoke, internal settlement options in relation to the numerous secessionist conflicts or controversies around the globe. This chapter considers this settlement practice in light of international legal doctrine on self-determination, and in terms of the constitutional processes and transformations required to craft the particular autonomy, federal, transitional and secessionist solutions, which may be necessary to rejuvenate popular consent for the conflict-affected state going forward.

This chapter discusses the position (and especially protection) of the individual in international law, whether through human rights law, refugee law, the right to self-determination, or other means

This chapter surveys the South African state’s engagement with the international normative languages which emerged after 1945. Its focus is on the sustained effort to reconfigure apartheid into a form compatible with the lexicon of human rights, self-determination, and multicultural pluralism. Beginning in the early 1960s, apartheid, rebadged “separate development,” was interlaced with norms on self-determination, identity, and economic development. Apartheid was reset in a form which deferred to the prevailing ideals of the period, an effort that was never convincing, but was, in broad terms, disturbingly coherent. Drawing on South African archives and underutilized public relations tracts, it demonstrates that National Party ideologues were conversant in the new internationalist phraseology. Their agility remains a powerful example of how discourses of human welfare and freedom hold ample capacity for subversion into authoritarian instrument. Apartheid, a project of essentialist, racially determined nationalism, could be, and was, translated into various emancipatory and internationalist dialects.