The Third Generation Project was born in response to the increasing need to emphasize the rights of communities and peoples in the face of the world’s most pressing challenges.
The aim of our work is to:
Create a space for multi- and inter-disciplinary discussion on the human rights issues
Produce research that outlines structural and systemic inequalities that expose communities and peoples to the effects of climate change over others
Generate recommendations to policy circles that reflects the concerns and priorities of communities and peoples who are seeing their rights violated
Reform Western research methodologies to become collaborative, transparent, and latitudinal in their nature, moving away from the legacies of oppression and extraction that currently surround them.
In international law, the three generations of human rights each refer to political, socio-economic, and solidarity, or ‘collective’, rights respectively. The first and second generations of human rights (i.e. political and socio-economic) are enshrined in numerous international and regional treaties and statutes often in the form of rights allocated to the individual person. However, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights spearhead the allocation of human rights to communities and peoples, and are the only two international statues that enshrine the need to protect communities and peoples and their right to self-determine and exist. Our name seeks to emphasize that human rights institutions and agendas must incorporate both the individual and the community in order to ensure
Contact
☎ CONTACT
Prof. Ali Watson, managing director
amsw@st-andrews.ac.uk
+44 (0)1334 46 2930
➤ LOCATION
Rm. 244, New Arts Building
University of St. Andrews
Fife, KY16 9AX Scotland, UK
Areas of Research
CORPORATE & STATE ACCOUNTABILITY
We remain committed to shining the spotlight on this culture of impunity that allows corporations and state governments to perpetrate violence and abuse the rights of communities and peoples. This means more than just holding states and corporations accountable to often inadequate human rights institutions. We believe Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is paramount to the environment surrounding any relationship between corporate and state entities and communities and peoples.
CLIMATE Migration, Displacement, and Relocation
We are studying and linking existing health and socio-economic infrastructure and human rights institutions and cultures to climate change-induced displacement and migration. It is imperative more than ever that mass migrations caused by climate change are understood under this lens so that the world can begin seeing and reacting to our current reality.
Resource rights
The World Health Organization predicts that by 2025, half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas. We believe communal ownership over natural resources and food sovereignty are the paths forward to ensuring healthy and sustainable communities. We are committed to supporting communities and grassroots organizations fighting for these rights.
“I was very struck by the fact that the impacts of climate change are undermining a whole range of human rights: rights to food, safe water and health and education. But it is also displacing people, which is very likely to cause not just human distress but potentially conflict. So for me it’s a very, very serious issue of human rights.
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