Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By P.A.J. Waddington
The academic long vacation offers the opportunity to catch–up on some reading and reflect upon it. Amongst my reading this summer was the special edition of Policing and Society devoted to contemporary rioting and protest.
By Jan Wouters and Sanderijn Duquet
In early 2011, a series of revolutionary chain reactions against uncompromising and authoritarian regimes set the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) in motion. The popular uprisings spread quickly across the Arab world and their effects continue today.
By William Schabas
For more than a decade, 10 October has been the World Day Against the Death Penalty. It is an important activity of the global movement against capital punishment. Amnesty International has been campaigning on the issue since the 1970s. But since the beginning of the century, the movement has grown.
How do nations across the globe declare their intent in the formation of a new government? To celebrate the launch of the innovative, new platform Oxford Constitutions of the World, we have highlighted a broad range of preambles from several jurisdictions below and the full constitutions freely available on the Oxford Constitutions of the World site for a limited time.
By Cherie Hackelberg
Without a doubt, attending society conferences is one of my favorite job responsibilities as a Marketing Manager for the Academic and Trade books division at Oxford. I typically spend the majority of my days marketing our books from my desk.
By David Karpf
Last week, MoveOn.org announced its opposition to President Obama’s proposed military strikes in Syria. MoveOn will now begin mobilizing its eight million+ members to speak out against the Syrian action, and is already planning rallies around the country.
By Lucas Lixinski
In June this year, developments around the Great Barrier Reef were excitedly discussed and closely scrutinized by the World Heritage Committee, a subsidiary organ of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
By William Chislett
The installation of a concrete reef by Gibraltar in disputed waters off the British territory, which is designed to encourage sea-life to flourish, was the final straw for Spain, which has long claimed sovereignty over the Rock at the southern tip of the country.
By Edward Zelinsky
A group of California state senators, including senate president pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, has called for California’s public employee pension plans to protest Russia’s homophobic laws and policies by ceasing to make Russian investments. While the senators are right to denounce Russia’s assault on human rights, they are wrong to call for the divestment of the Golden State’s public pension funds.
By Jennifer Moore
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 do not justify missile strikes in Syria. The humanitarian principle of distinction requires that military force is used without indiscriminately targeting civilians, but does not sanction the use of force itself. International humanitarian law thus governs the conduct of war but not its initiation.
On the 30th of August the United Nations observes the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Emmanuel Decaux (President of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances) and Olivier de Frouville (Chair and Rapporteur of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances(WGEID)) have taken the time to consider a few questions with us in recognition of this important observance day, which was established by the UNGA (resolution 65/209, para. 4).
By Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel
Although there has been much progress in the United States toward social justice and improved health for racial and ethnic minorities in the 50 years since the 1963 March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, much social injustice persists in this country — with profound adverse consequences for the public’s health.
By Jean Allain
Today is International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, established by UNESCO “to inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of peoples”. That tragedy was the development of, in Robin Blackburn’s words, a “different species of slavery”. One that took the artisan slavery of old (consisting in the main of handfuls of slaves working on small estates or as domestic servants) and industrialised it, creating plantations in the Americas which fed the near insatiable appetite of Europeans for sugar, coffee, and tobacco.
By Jennifer Moore
On the 19th of August, World Humanitarian Day, we honor the contributions of humanitarian workers around the world, especially those who have lost their lives helping people in war-torn societies. This day was first marked in 2008 through a Swedish-sponsored resolution in the United Nations General Assembly
By Brenda Stevenson
Those who followed the Trayvon Martin case this summer did so not just because of the conflicting details of the shooting deaths of these two unarmed black youth, but because these cases, like too many others, have played out in our public consciousness as markers of American justice. Does “liberty and justice for all” actually exist; or are these words from our Pledge of Allegiance just part of the grand American narrative that is more myth than reality?
By Rosemary Nagy
In Canada, there are almost 600 documented cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women over the last twenty years. The Canadian government has continuously refused to hold a national public inquiry into the missing and murdered women, despite mounting international and domestic pressure to do so.