Bonny Ibhawoh

• PhD
• Professor at McMaster University

Background. Malaria remains a major global health challenge, disproportionately affecting pregnant women and children. In Nigeria, malaria in pregnancy contributes to 70.5% of maternal morbidity and 41.1% of maternal mortality. Recognising these risks, the World Health Organization recommends intermittent preventive treatment with sulfadoxine-pyrim...

Background Persons with albinism face challenges to their wellbeing, safety, and security, ranging from vision impairment and skin cancer to stigma and discrimination. In some regions, they also face human rights atrocities including mutilation and murder. Research on human rights and albinism is a relatively new field that has gained momentum sinc...

Background: Malaria is a major global public health issue that disproportionately affects pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization recommends intermittent preventive treatment with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP) for its control. Despite its proven efficacy, drug uptake remains low. Sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) sa...

Human rights doctrine is founded on a notion of universality and inalienability. However, critics of the dominant formulation of “universal” human rights claim that it privileges Western epistemology and does not adequately reflect the histories and lived experiences of Indigenous communities. This has prompted calls for a more inclusive conceptual...

Debates about legitimizing human rights in Africa have centred on making universal human rights principles relevant to local social and cultural contexts. Localizing human rights norms requires seeing human rights in terms of relevance to specific situations rather than as the application of abstract principles. In this paper, scholars and advocate...

This article examines how the Jerry Rawlings military government, the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in Ghana, framed its political agenda using liberal tropes about participatory democracy as a strategy to manufacture legitimacy and mediate political-economic crisis. The People’s Defence Committees (PDCs) and Workers’ Defence Committe...

The Nigeria-Biafra war contributed to the rise of post-colonial moral interventionism, ushering in a new form of human rights politics. During the war, relief agencies evacuated 4,000 children from the conflict zones to Gabon and Côte d’Ivoire to protect them from the conflict. This was part of a broader international humanitarian airlift operation...

This paper examines the inequalities and discrimination from which the female gender suffers. It is a major infringement of the rights of women and girls and therefore a major challenge to the development process. Gender can be referred to as the social and cultural construction of females’ identities in a given society which leads to socially cons...

Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics - edited by A. Dirk Moses July 2020

HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA - The Long Struggle: Discourses on Human and Civil Rights in Africa and the African Diaspora. Edited by Adebayo Oyebade and Gashawbeza Bekele. Austin, TX: Pan-African University Press, 2017. Pp. xxvii + 225. $35.00, paperback (ISBN: 978-1-943533-23-7). - Volume 60 Issue 1 - BONNY IBHAWOH

Discussions of human rights in Africa are often reduced to simplistic narratives of ruthless violators and benevolent activists. In my new book, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press) I attempt to go beyond this staid trope. This is an account of indigenous African rights traditions embodied in the wisdom of elders and sages; of huma...

This chapter examines British imperial rule of law and its relationship to colonial difference. The ideal of impartial legality within the British Empire was embodied in a supreme right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a right continues in force even in a few locations today. During its more active periods, the Privy Counci...

Minority groups in Africa are frequently the victims of local and global power structures. The marginalization and domination of the minority ethnic, religious and cultural groups are often a continuation of the ethnic, class and caste hierarchies established under colonial rule. Colonial rule brought together diverse ethnic and sub-ethnic national...

This book offers a thematic study of key debates in the history of the ethnic politics, democratic governance, and minority rights in Nigeria. Nigeria provides a framework for examining the central paradox in post-colonial nation building projects in Africa – the tension between majority rule and minority rights. The liberal democratic model on whi...

Protocols. I would like to begin by thanking the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor, and the organizing Committee for the Conference for putting together this exciting and intellectually stimulating conference. I am pleased to be back at Covenant University. When I first came here for a conference organized by the Department of Political Science two y...

This article explores historical and present-day exclusionary impulses within the human rights movement. It juxtaposes the widely celebrated expansion of universal human rights in the second half of the twentieth century with ideological and institutional counter-movements that have sought to restrict the scope of human rights. Using the exclusiona...

The historical link between anticolonialism and human rights has recently become a subject of wide-ranging scholarly debates. A growing number of human rights scholars argue that anticolonialism was not a human rights movement because it was concerned with popular liberation rather than curtailing state power over the individual. This article inter...

The Assets Coming Together for Youth project conducted a critical discourse analysis of mainstream media depictions of Jane-Finch to better understand the discursive strategies used to constitute urban youth. Although a substantive body of literature investigates the negative discourses, little analysis interrogates the nominally positive discourse...

Anticolonial struggles for self-determination had significant impact on the development of the idea of universal human rights. In the second half of the twentieth century, colonized people drew on the emergent language of universal human rights in their ideological struggles against European imperialism and to articulate demands for independence. A...

Historicizing and commemorating human rights struggles have become key aspects of contemporary human rights scholarship. Human rights violations represent the most extreme manifestation of political and social violence, and this often produces traumatic collective experiences that societies increasingly find necessary to commemorate and memorialize...

Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Impe...

Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Impe...

Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Impe...

Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Impe...

Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Impe...

Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Impe...

LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS - JengAbou. Peacebuilding in the African Union: Law, Philosophy and Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xvi + 334 pp. Table of Cases. Table of Declarations and Resolutions. List of Abbreviations. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Cloth. $99.00. - Volume 56 Issue 2 - Bonny Ibhawoh

The task of finding solutions to the conflicts in Africa remains urgent and topical. Although there have been fewer large-scale wars in the continent since the end of the Cold War, other forms of warfare persist. These include small-scale conflicts involving factionalized insurgents, electoral violence, and violence over access to resources within...

Urbanization was the central instrument with which colonial peripheries were incorporated into metropolitan cores. In Africa, colonial urbanization involved both the establishment of new cities and the transformation and expansion of old indigenous cities. The new cities that emerged were mainly located at seaports and at strategic points in the in...

Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, MutuaMakau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 252 pp., $49.95 cloth. - Volume 17 Issue 1 - Bonny Ibhawoh

The polarized debate amongst states, scholars, and practitioners over the right to development is underlined by salient paradoxes and contradictions. The rhetoric of the right to development has been deployed both as a language of resistance to oppose a hegemonic global economic system and as a language of power to assert national sovereignty and l...

The idea of globalization has helped to rehabilitate universalizing categories, such as colonialism and cosmopolitanism, criticized for their tendency to ignore the differences between local cultures and the operation of power. Drawing on the burgeoning discussion on historical globalization, and focussing on the role of African assessors, this art...

The fact that scholars and practitioners cannot agree on how best to describe a certain practice is an indication of the controversy and impassioned debates that the topic generates. "Female circumcision," "female genital mutilation," and "female genital cutting" are all used to describe the practice, common in some African and Muslim communities,...

The History of Ghana is one of the latest additions to the Greenwood Histories of Modern Nations series, intended to “provide laypeople with general and concise histories of nations in the contemporary world.” This volume provides a historical overview of Ghana from the emergence of precolonial societies, through European colonial rule in the ninet...

Studies in British war propaganda during the Second World have focussed mainly on the efforts made at “selling the war at home.” In many of these studies war propaganda in the colonies is seen simply as extensions of the discourses produced in the metroples of Europe. Imperial propaganda was essentially the dissemination of information from the met...

Those who, like me, have long wondered when, if ever, Canada will produce another international statesman and diplomat in the mould of Lester Pearson need wonder no more. In Stephen Lewis, the Canadian tradition of ground-breaking international statesmanship is assured. As the United Nations Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis has broug...

The role of human rights International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) has become increasingly important in an age of globalization in which they are seen as heralding a global civil society and a new world order based on a universal human rights. INGOs have been at the forefront of the “human rights revolution” – a revolution of norms and va...

Cet article se penche sur les tendances manifestes dans l'écriture de l'histoire de l'Afrique coloniale. On peut diviser en deux groupes importants les plus récentes approches à l'Afrique coloniale, tout en ne perdant pas de vue qu'il existe des recoupements. Certains intellectuels mettent l'accent sur les tensions et les ambiguïtés du colonialisme...

Let me begin with an anecdote that underscores the salience of the theme of this chapter. The story is told of a British anthropologist who, in pursuit of his grand career aspirations, decided to travel deep into the most obscure fringes of Africa for his research on a "primitive tribe." This "primitive tribe" of Africa, he had been told, was so re...

The death of Julius Nyerere in 1999 has renewed interest in the history of the socialist experiment in Tanzania and its relevance for the future of the developmetalist project in Africa. Positions on the issue have been polar- ized, with some commentaries based on reasoned, empirical research and analysis and others, essentially speculative, assumi...

This article examines the tensions and contradictions in the use of law as an instrument of coercion to consolidate British control in Nigeria and the legitimising rhetoric of human rights and social justice employed within the context of the operation of the law. The article explores the effects of laws introduced mainly to foster British colonial...

Discussions about cultural relativism and the cross-cultural legitimacy of human rights have been central to contemporary human rights discourse. Much of this discussion has focussed on non-Western societies where scholars have advanced, from a variety of standpoints, arguments for and against the cultural relativism of human rights. Arguments for...

Human Rights Quarterly 22.3 (2000) 838-860 Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,Human Rights at the Dawn of the 21st Century The polarized debate over the universality or cultural relativity of human rights seems to have given way in recent years to a broad consensus that there is indeed a set of core human rights to which all human...

The effects of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and other policies of the major International Financial Insti- tutions (IFIs), particularly the World Bank and the Interna- tional Monetary Fund (IMF), on social and political condi- tions in Africa have been the subject of extensive debates. Much of this discussion has focused on the negative so...

Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, this paper examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. It argues that Imperial Appeal Courts we...