Each autumn, students returning from internships through the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship may select an upper-level undergraduate course devoted to these questions: ICPR 301, “Human Rights & Development in the Context of Global Inequities.” The course is one of two that the Center offers to its returning summer interns and all Tri-College students. Both courses aim to help students understand experiences that called on them to act as global citizens, to see whether those experiences challenged any of their received ideas, and to think of ways they might use that experience and understanding to challenge injustice.

In this course, taught by Tom Donahue (Political Science and Independent College Programs), students examined theories of some of the leading obstacles to peace and justice worldwide, including the charge that European and Japanese colonialism created an ongoing system of economic exploitation and cultural imperialism by the rich countries over most of the world, the allegation that we live under a global racial order, and charge that the global economic order harms the severely poor. Students assessed these theories in light of their experiences as global citizens. Then, armed with these assessments, they confronted different accounts of the ends and means of economic and social development, and of the grounds and content of universal human rights. The course aimed to help students build their own answers to the course’s central question: to what extent can human rights and economic and social development solve these problems?

“The course introduces students to development economics, the philosophy of human rights, and theories of global injustices,” says Donahue. “These three are rarely taught together in today’s academy; the prevailing hyper-specialism discourages it. However, the CPGC, Haverford, and the Tri-College Consortium are all committed to advancing peace and social justice. So these institutions see that development projects won’t get far without human rights; they realize that human rights programs are weak tea without development; and they see that the point of both is to help reduce injustice. Moreover, students naturally want to explore the connections among different branches of inquiry. So doing this course through the CPGC lets us work out how our experiences in the world should change us, how we should change the world, and how it all hangs together. That, to me, is what the liberal arts are all about.”