Welcome to our blog! Today, I'll give a brief overview of the blog's purpose, its (tenuous, but real) relationship to the University of Essex human rights programme, and why we've adapted the way we have.
Our Purpose & Focus
This blog is dedicated to all things human rights, development, humanitarian, refugee, peacekeeping, int'l criminal law, and law of armed conflicted related. And by "all things," I mean "all things that our authors find interesting." Posts will respond to the news, to developments within our various fields,
Sometimes, our pieces will be / will have been cross-posted at the Essex Human Rights Centre blog. This is not because the two blogs are related, nor are they competitive. We value the Centre's blog (and the simply amazing Daragh Murray), but this blog allows us to write more frequently, sometimes more irreverently, and often times more focused on a particular area or country than what is appropriate for the Centre's blog.
We're also hoping to have a more engaging conversation with our readers. So, comments are allowed and encouraged. We do, however, reserve the right to delete comments that are spam or click-bait as well as comments that degrade our authors or are otherwise uncivilized. We'll be the judge of what meets that threshold, and unfortunately you'll just have to trust us not to be over-zealous in our use of that right.
Each post will be tagged by the author to give you an indication of what they're focused on. Those tags also allow you to quickly sort through posts on similar subjects. We'll also each do an introductory post where we talk about ourselves, our interests, etc., and keep that page updated with links to our individual posts. You'll find a link to all of our introductory pages on our Authors' Notes post.
The Essex Connection
The blog's authors are all graduates (or very soon to be graduates) of the University of Essex human rights programs. We're hoping as we grow that this will include LLMs, MAs, and PhDs, as well as some undergraduate alumni. That's why "Essex" features in the title, though very few of the authors will actually be based at Essex.
There's a long standing joke of the "Essex mafia," a network of activists, advocates, academics, and other practitioners, who permeate the fields of human rights, humanitarian law, refugee law, peacekeeping, etc.
While we don't actually have a secret handshake, and very few of us ever carry guns (and even fewer have access to good cannoli), there is a bit of a common framework for how Essex students are trained when it comes to the human rights issues. There are also differences - and the various fields that contribute to human rights research sometimes clash. But, routinely listening to and benefitting from the discussions and debates of the likes of Nigel Rodley, Paul Hunt, Kevin Boyle, Francoise Hampson, Clara Sandoval, Sheldon Leader, Noam Lubell, Lorna McGregor, Sabine Michalowski, Scott Sheeran, and Ahmed Shaheed allows one to develop almost a certain cadence for sorting through human rights issues, even if our opinions are quite diverse and are voices unique. The opinions are the various authors alone and should not reflect directly on the Human Rights Centre - or each other for that matter.
But why the Justice League?
Now for the name... This is a bit of a re-release of this blog. In 2010, Tara started the blog with her Essex classmates, Ines Johnson & Gabriel Alegrett. It never quite got off the ground as we were all at the beginning of our careers and our time was spent on things like jobs searches, PhDs, etc.
But the blog has been in the back of her head for a while. The name comes out of Tara's childhood love of Wonder Woman and her desire to one day have an action figure and/or comic named after her. While we wait for Mattel and/or DC comics to come up with an acceptable plan, we figured we'd use our blog name to honour our collective fight for human rights and justice ... and our endless quest for that action figure.
In our introductory posts, we'll also choose a Justice League character we relate to, love, or you know, stumbled upon through a wikipedia black hole.
Our Purpose & Focus
This blog is dedicated to all things human rights, development, humanitarian, refugee, peacekeeping, int'l criminal law, and law of armed conflicted related. And by "all things," I mean "all things that our authors find interesting." Posts will respond to the news, to developments within our various fields,
Sometimes, our pieces will be / will have been cross-posted at the Essex Human Rights Centre blog. This is not because the two blogs are related, nor are they competitive. We value the Centre's blog (and the simply amazing Daragh Murray), but this blog allows us to write more frequently, sometimes more irreverently, and often times more focused on a particular area or country than what is appropriate for the Centre's blog.
We're also hoping to have a more engaging conversation with our readers. So, comments are allowed and encouraged. We do, however, reserve the right to delete comments that are spam or click-bait as well as comments that degrade our authors or are otherwise uncivilized. We'll be the judge of what meets that threshold, and unfortunately you'll just have to trust us not to be over-zealous in our use of that right.
Each post will be tagged by the author to give you an indication of what they're focused on. Those tags also allow you to quickly sort through posts on similar subjects. We'll also each do an introductory post where we talk about ourselves, our interests, etc., and keep that page updated with links to our individual posts. You'll find a link to all of our introductory pages on our Authors' Notes post.
The Essex Connection
The blog's authors are all graduates (or very soon to be graduates) of the University of Essex human rights programs. We're hoping as we grow that this will include LLMs, MAs, and PhDs, as well as some undergraduate alumni. That's why "Essex" features in the title, though very few of the authors will actually be based at Essex.
There's a long standing joke of the "Essex mafia," a network of activists, advocates, academics, and other practitioners, who permeate the fields of human rights, humanitarian law, refugee law, peacekeeping, etc.
While we don't actually have a secret handshake, and very few of us ever carry guns (and even fewer have access to good cannoli), there is a bit of a common framework for how Essex students are trained when it comes to the human rights issues. There are also differences - and the various fields that contribute to human rights research sometimes clash. But, routinely listening to and benefitting from the discussions and debates of the likes of Nigel Rodley, Paul Hunt, Kevin Boyle, Francoise Hampson, Clara Sandoval, Sheldon Leader, Noam Lubell, Lorna McGregor, Sabine Michalowski, Scott Sheeran, and Ahmed Shaheed allows one to develop almost a certain cadence for sorting through human rights issues, even if our opinions are quite diverse and are voices unique. The opinions are the various authors alone and should not reflect directly on the Human Rights Centre - or each other for that matter.
But why the Justice League?
Now for the name... This is a bit of a re-release of this blog. In 2010, Tara started the blog with her Essex classmates, Ines Johnson & Gabriel Alegrett. It never quite got off the ground as we were all at the beginning of our careers and our time was spent on things like jobs searches, PhDs, etc.
But the blog has been in the back of her head for a while. The name comes out of Tara's childhood love of Wonder Woman and her desire to one day have an action figure and/or comic named after her. While we wait for Mattel and/or DC comics to come up with an acceptable plan, we figured we'd use our blog name to honour our collective fight for human rights and justice ... and our endless quest for that action figure.
In our introductory posts, we'll also choose a Justice League character we relate to, love, or you know, stumbled upon through a wikipedia black hole.
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