Doutje Lettinga

Article (in Dutch, with Lars van Troost) on the role of human rights in the foreign policy of India, Brazil, and South Africa. Focuses on the question whether the IBSA will become an alliance of global human rights defenders and promoters.

In this article we address the complex relation between international human rights organizations and unruly activism. We take the Pussy Riot case as a point of departure to illustrate that the institutionalized methods of international human rights organizations can clash with the more radical agenda and action repertoires of unruly groups and move...

Can human rights bring social justice? This collection of twelve essays explores the differences and similarities between social justice and human rights, providing divergent perspectives on whether and how human rights NGOs should pursue social justice. Poverty, inequality and human rights Worldwide socio-economic inequalities are mounting. Whil...

The Shifting Power and Human Rights Diplomacy series focuses on rising powers and their current and potential roles in the international protection and promotion of human rights. Will the human rights regime gain more support and legitimacy because of these power shifts, will rising powers try to restore the sanctity of state sovereignty within wor...

In this paper, we analyze political debates about headscarves and honour-related crimes in France and the Netherlands. We seek to explain why and how France and the Netherlands have come to unevenly politicize headscarves and honour crimes. Moreover, we try to understand how the argument of gender equality is increasingly used by different actors i...

While women in Europe who wear the Islamic headscarf are generally seen as outsiders who do not belong to the na-tion, some countries are more tolerant towards the wearing of headscarves than others. France, Germany and the Netherlands have developed different policies regarding veiling. In this paper we describe how headscarves became regulated in...

The world is inexorably becoming urban. Already, more than half of the world population lives in cities. By the end of this century this will be 90 percent. Cities have a direct impact on the lives of billions of people. Moreover, megacities like Beijing, New York, Sao Paulo and Delhi expand their political weight at the international stage. Noneth...

Debating The Endtimes of Human Rights is a collection of ten original essays on the future of international human rights, the International Criminal Court and the Responsibility to Protect. Discussing Stephen Hopgood's thesis that the endtimes have arrived for human rights. Edited by Doutje Lettinga and Lars van Troost (Strategic Studies Project, A...

Article (in Dutch) on the future role of the EU as a global human rights promoter

This country report sets the context for research on the impact of counter-terrorism legislation and policies on racial, ethnic and religious minority communities in the Netherlands. Despite the fact that over the last decade various security measures have been assessed, there are few studies on their context-specific effect. This report discusses...

This paper evaluates the explanatory capacity of ‘national models’ of migrant integration, through a comparative analysis of the regulation of Islamic headscarves on the one hand and civic integration abroad policies on the other hand in France and the Netherlands. It argues that ‘national models’, defined as historically rooted conceptions of nati...

In this article we compare the politicization and framing of the Islamic veil in parliamentary debates in France and the Netherlands between 1989 and 2007. If stark national differences in the framing of the issue can be found in the 1990, later years show more convergence, when the debate shifted to the ‘burqa’ in both countries. One important and...

In this contribution, we present an analysis of the regulations and public debates regarding the veil in the Netherlands between 1999 and 2006, thereby exploring the idea that the framing and regulating of veiling reflect national traditions of citizenship. In line with our hypothesis that the legacy of pillarization makes religious identity claims...