Leading Political Scientist Visits Boston University to Address Global Controversy
Political scientist, author, professor, and University of Pennsylvania alum David Cingranelli, visited Boston University on Sept. 26 to deliver compelling insight on his extensive human rights research
.
Students and professors alike showed up to Cingranelli’s “Human Rights and Violent Internal Conflict” lecture in the George Sherman Union.
When asked what she found most interesting about the lecture, a Boston University student, Brynn Anderson explained that “It’s interesting that specifically women’s rights, full respect for women’s rights, is such an integral part of human rights research.”
The talk focused on how the role of human rights may affect a country's quality of life and amount of violence in that given country. Cingranelli discussed the leading question of whether or not violations of human rights help explain violence in communities themselves.
Essentially, Cingranelli argued that violence leads to violence; for example, if a leader feels threatened in their position and they react by violating human rights, society typically follows with violence of some sorts, which he described as a “vicious cycle.”
Cingranelli described himself as someone who is “best known in the field as somebody who has tried to quantify the extents to which all countries of the world respect internationally recognized human rights,” which he further described as being a controversial task. He emphasized his motivation for his research by stating that he wants more social justice and emphasis on the practice of human rights globally.
Controversial topics discussed in the lecture included the extent of healthcare in America, discrimination in different countries resulting from religion, and discussion of police brutality, all linked to a violation of human rights.
Despite these issues being arguable, much of the audience seemed to agree with Cingranelli’s stances, including Boston University sophomore Darden Pilkinton who said, “I wouldn't say I disagree with anything cuz I don’t know much about human rights research but I was struck by the fact that he mentioned that healthcare is considered a human right yet the people in our government act like it's not a human right, so I agreed with him on that.”
Cingranelli also discussed the role of religion in coherence with human rights, and emphasized that “nobody argues about freedom of religion but they argue about what it would mean.”Freedom of religion is considered a human right by Cingranelli that is used to compare countries, in regard to how much they practice human rights. The line between whether or not a country genuinely has freedom of religion is blurred because of what Cingranelli describes as there being an “in group” and an “out group,” specifically in organized religion. In his religiosity research he found that respect for human rights is lower in religious-based societies because it’s easier to violate the human rights of the “out” group, or the group that doesn’t practice the religion of the majority.
What Cingranelli considered to be a solution to making freedom of religion a human right for all members of society is that someone needs to “make religious leaders more sensitive to the impact they’re having when they denigrate the members of other religious groups.” He added, “but I’ve talked to religious leaders and they don’t want to hear it.”
After about forty years of political science research focusing on human rights, Cingranelli shared his thoughts on what’s happening and what needs to happen to progress the future in a global sense, as he continues his research. “What I think is happening is people want human rights for themselves, they don't really care so much about the human rights of people who are different from them and so I think there's ought to be more human rights education, especially about minority rights and the importance of maintaining minority rights to get a peaceful society, a prosperous society.”
(A piece of classwork assigned by Professor Peter Rand at Boston University)
