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This chapter examines the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the African human rights mechanism and their contribution to the development of issues relating to human security. It first outlines how NGOs can work with the African Commission before detailing the impact of their involvement on the human security agenda. It shows that NGOs have been central to the functioning and development of the African human rights system. Key to the drafting of the African Charter, supporting its Commission, staffing its headquarters, funding its activities, holding seminars, developing its publicity, submitting cases, and creating special rapporteurs and working groups, it is clear that the African Commission would not be in the position it is at present without their support.

This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

Globalization means that political control moves into the international system. Transnational democracy can follow suit, through democratization of the discourses that pervade and coordinate international politics. Transnational networks of non‐governmental organizations are important.

Although international administrators wield enormous power, they are not directly accountable to the populations over which they rule. Strictly speaking, a transitional administrator is accountable to the international body that appoints him or her. The lack of transparency is one way in which the issue of accountability manifests itself: key decisions may be taken by international authorities without sufficient public explanation offered for the reasoning behind them, creating the impression of arbitrary rule. Limited accountability does not, however, mean the total absence of mechanisms for local scrutiny. Discusses what mechanisms exist to help ensure that international authority is exercised on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the local population. Are these mechanisms adequate and, if not, how can accountability be strengthened?

Beginning with the establishment by the League of Nations of the first High Commissioner for Refugees in 1921, the scope and functions of assistance programmes for refugees gradually expanded, as efforts were made to regularize the status and control of stateless and denationalized people. During and after World War II, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) further expanded the international organizational framework for refugees. Since 1951, an international refugee regime—composed of UNHCR and a network of other international agencies, national governments, and voluntary or non‐governmental organizations—has developed a response strategy that permits some refugees to remain in their countries of first asylum, enables some to resettle in third countries and arranges for still others to be repatriated to their countries of origin.

This introductory chapter provides the historical background to the rise of the Big Society, surveying the history of voluntarism over the last century. Politicians and commentators have long bemoaned the supposed decline of civic life, fretting about its health and its future. In fact, the real story of voluntarism over the last hundred years has not been decline, but constant evolution and change. Whether the terms charity, philanthropy, civil society, non-governmental organisations, the third sector or the Big Society are used, voluntary endeavour is one of the most vibrant and dynamic areas of British public life. Voluntarism not only continues to thrive, but is also far larger than any political agenda that may be imposed upon it.

In the recent past, concerns have been voiced with regard to the influence of non-state actors, in particular non-governmental organizations (NGOs), on the international decision-making process. Some even feared that it may threaten the interstate system. This chapter takes up this concern and investigates whether such fear is justified. It considers the capacity of NGOs to conclude treaties, participate in treaty making, bring international claims, and incur liability under international law, and concludes that such fear is unfounded.

This chapter outlines and analyses the main human rights and minority rights instruments that have been adopted by a range of international and regional organizations; presents an overview of monitoring procedures and institutions concerned with minority rights; and identifies some never-ending problems such as the definition of the term ‘minority’ and the question of individual and group rights. It argues that current international activities relating to minority rights are characterized by scattered standards and weak institutions, and demonstrates the reluctance of governments in this field. The only notable international institutional trends concern the case-law of two treaty bodies and the dialogue functions of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities.

International efforts to increase equity, quality and access in primary education increasingly include calls to expand governance and educational resources by fostering partnerships between governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This chapter examines a partnership between India’s largest educational NGO, Pratham, and the governments of Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in Northern India. Pratham has created and implemented state-specific quality improvement programs in an effort to raise the learning achievements of marginalized students in government schools. Although the programs significantly raised achievement among children at the lowest levels of learning, the chapter argues that the most lasting success of these initiatives is in affecting education policy through advocacy, changing state behavior and raising the consciousness of people and governments regarding vital education issues.

When development studies were born, after decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, poverty was not an important concern of policy-makers. This chapter asks how this situation changed in the early 1970s, to launch the main question of how the interests of the poor became incorporated in policy-making. New data became available, showing that famine was still occurring and that a third of the poor were not gaining from growth; inclusive policies were presented as a means of allaying threats to state security within a cold war environment, especially in Asian developing countries; and a big boost was given to these policies by the commitment of donors – especially Robert MacNamara, the new World Bank president – to reorientate lending policies towards urban poverty and rural development. Under the stress of global crisis, poverty focus among aid donors decayed in the 1980s, but it continued among many recipients, especially in South and South-East Asia. In the 1990s, it was relaunched, first tentatively, as a means of protecting the losers from global adjustment (a process which, with the end of the cold war, now embraced Russia and the former Soviet Union) and then more decisively, a process which culminated in the Millennium Development Goals. In the 2000s, with the decay of the Washington consensus, the idea of pro-poor orientation becomes incorporated into a more state-dominated politics in a number of middle-income, especially Latin American, countries.

Traditional conceptions of citizenship have privileged individuals’ relationships to the state. However, recent emphasis on civil society as a terrain of democratic empowerment suggests a shift in our ideas about what citizens properly do and the arenas in which they do it. Jaggar argues that it would be a mistake to privilege activism in civil society over traditional state-centered political activity and she contends that democratic citizenship may—and must—be performed in multiple arenas. For example, some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have come to depend on governmental support. And governments in affluent nations may be better providers than civil organizations of the critical social services, such as nutrition, healthcare, and education, on which many women and children depend. Feminists need enriched understandings of citizenship that recognize the indispensability of both national and transnational civil society but still maintain a strong focus on the state.

This chapter discusses the role of industry groups and NGOs in the formulation of trade policies at the national and global level, and the importance of transparency and openness in policy formation in ensuring that governments are accountable. Information is a necessary condition for the ‘contestability’ of policy in national political markets, which in turn is a necessary condition for the ‘coherence’ of such policies, as well as the legitimacy of whatever multilateral rules are negotiated. The sections of the chapter are as follows: Industry and trade policy formation; NGOs and civil society; Governance of the WTO (World Trade Organization); Coherence of national policies; and Conclusion.

Although many NGOs devote themselves to delivering services to their clients, policy advocacy and analysis is also an important activity for them. However, despite strong recent interest in studying policy advocacy in non-governmental organizations, very little attention has been paid to exploring the work of public analysis in non-governmental organizations. This chapter will focus on the development of advocacy non-governmental organizations’ policy analysis in Taiwan. The content is framed as follows: First, the normative and practical reasons for policy analysis in the non-governmental organizations based on policy analysis and policy advocacy implications will be described. Second, viewing the evolution process of non-governmental organizations involving policy processes in the last thirty years will be helpful to understand the background and current situations of policy analysis in non-governmental organizations. Third, the observation and description of the type and approaches of policy analysis in Taiwan non-governmental organizations will be summarized. Finally, we will conclude with some implications and suggestions.

This chapter examines the importance of rights in social life and the social significance of trust. It argues that rights and trust are both indispensable constituents of collective life, and that no society can function without an acknowledged distribution of rights among its constituent members. It discusses rights and trust in the context of the family and universities in India. It contends that both rights and trust must be viewed not in isolation but in their dialectical relationship with one another in order to get a better sense of each. The chapter focuses on institutions which are social arrangements of a particular kind. It also describes rights and citizenship, the emergence of ‘rights activists’, who typically operate through non-governmental organizations, and the distinction between civil rights and the rights claimed by or on behalf of particular sections of the population such as women, the minorities, and the backward castes.