We are excited to announce the release of the latest issues of volume 9 of the Global Campus Human Rights Journal. These new issues reaffirm our commitment to advancing in-depth scholarship and critical discussions on today’s pressing human rights and democratisation challenges.
Issue 1: Rights on the ground
The first issue explores how rights are claimed and lived at the local level. From a study on ecofeminist movements across Greece, India, Italy, Lebanon, and Spain, to an examination of racial inclusion policies in the Brazilian state of Pará and and marginalised groups in the Amazon, as well as persistent gaps in protection against intersectional discrimination of persons with disabilities. Subsequent contributions inquire how legal systems themselves fall short of their protective promise, reflecting on the ethical and social funtions of lawyers, revisiting the criminalisation of poverty through vagrancy law in the Philippines, offering a critical reading of the insanity defence and fitness-to-stand-trial doctrine in India, documenting the practical stakes of protection status through the experience of Ukrainian refugees accessing housing and healthcare in Slovakia, broadening the lens to ask what global accountability for the right to health might actually require, and assessing how Hungarian law restricts the rights of media creators with a focus on the delicate balance between child protection and freedom of expression. The issue closes with an account of Forever Associates Zimbabwe’s role in the country’s 2023 elections, a case study for the contested boundary between civic organising and politics.
Issue 2: Rights in the algorithmic age
The second issue explores some human rights implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital governance. From AI-driven demographic governance and the risks of dehumanisation in EU migration policy, to the CBP One application and algorithmic bias in United States asylum processing, the gap between the Taliban’s curated digital image and the lived and legal realities of those it governs, a comparison of how AI expansion intersects with the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment across regions, and the key question of accountability for AI-enabled warfare and its human rights consequences. The issue then turns to questions of governance and pedagogy in this new landscape: how the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative might be better aligned with community-led monitoring to strengthen ESG frameworks in mining; a ‘radical’ rethinking of human rights education amid the twenty-first century’s ‘polycrisis’; and critical pedagogy as a tool of transitional justice. The volume closes with an account of transnational education and political activism among students displaced by Myanmar’s Spring Revolution.
As co-editors, Ravi Prakash Vyas, Chiara Altafin and Mariana Hadzijusufovic share: “Placed side by side, the two issues speak to each other. Volume 9.1’s grounded, case-based accounts of exclusion — by poverty, disability, race, displacement, and diagnosis — anticipate the concerns raised in Volume 9.2, where new digital and algorithmic systems risk automating and scaling the very forms of exclusion the first issue documents in human terms. Read as a whole, Volume 9 asks not only how rights are violated, but how the tools available for their protection and their erosion are changing.”
GCHRJ is an open access journal published under the auspices of the Global Campus of Human Rights, also available on the Global Campus Open Knowledge Repository, and is supported financially by the European Union. No fees are charged for submission, article processing, or publication.
The journal welcomes submissions on a wide range of topics relating to the fields of human rights and democratisation, but particularly welcomes contributions that speak to the Global Campus of Human Rights: Vision, Mission and Strategic Objectives 2024-2028.