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Conservative legal provocateur Eric Posner has an article titled "Think Again: International Law" in the most recent Foreign Policy. If you are involved in human rights work, it won't make you happy.

Posner writes:

"Academic research suggests that international human rights treaties have had little or no impact on the actual practices of states. The Genocide Convention has not prevented genocides; the Torture Convention has not stopped torture. The same can be said for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and a host of treaties meant to advance the rights of women and children. States that already respect human rights join human rights treaties because doing so is costless for them. States that do not respect human rights simply ignore their treaty obligations."

What is Posner's argument here? That laws that aren't followed 100 percent of the time should be disposed of? That genocide and torture shouldn't be illegal?  If that is, in fact, what Posner is saying, his complaint isn't with international law, but law in general. After all, murder is illegal in every society, yet murders are still committed everywhere.

Posner goes on to explain:

"The evidence shows that human rights are best in those states that are wealthiest, leading many scholars to speculate that the best way to promote human rights is to promote growth."

Wealthier states are, on average, more likely to respect human rights, but Posner is assuming that economic growth causes states to respect human rights. There is a huge body of literature, including, most famously, Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, that concludes the exact opposite, that respect for human rights -especially freedom of expression- enables disaster-prevention, poverty reduction, and economic growth.

Then, there are the glaring examples of developed and wealthy countries showing little respect for the rights of people residing within their borders. Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore might all be developed, but they're hardly paragons of good human rights policy. Economies can boom and skylines soar on the labor of exploited, brutalized underclasses, and in spite of authoritarian denials of civil and political rights.

However, countries like Singapore, representing the so-called "authoritarian development" model, and rentier states like Saudi Arabia -regimes that survive on income from natural resources- are exceptions globally. Most undemocratic countries are dismally poor.

As law, human rights have instrumental value to people campaigning for equality, exposing cruelty, and taking cases against their abusive and feckless governments to national and international courts.

As a follow-on to the previous post, the information below is from Transitionland, who has worked on refugee resettlement issues.

People often ask what they can do from the States to help with various humanitarian crises and catastrophes - I can't think of anything more needed than helping refugees, who often arrive with nothing at all. If anyone is looking for a volunteer activity in the States, please consider her suggestions below.

There are resettlement offices in nearly every state. A great many of these offices are hurting badly in the economic downturn, and struggling to provide essential services to the refugees they resettle. Volunteers can make a very big difference.

A few things your local resettlement office can probably use:

1) Mentors, especially for refugee youth.

2) Volunteer English teachers.

3) Community health volunteers to run workshops on nutrition, women's health, and personal safety.

4) Donations of furniture for use in the office and in refugees' new homes.

5) Volunteer movers with vans or pick-up trucks.

6) Web-design and general technology volunteers.

7) Volunteer grant-writers. (Note to those of you looking for humanitarian jobs: this can be easily turned into an internship or fellowship.)

8) Lawyers and activists to run civil rights/civil liberties and anti-discrimination workshops, and to do pro bono work on asylum cases.

9) Volunteer interpreters and translators. (Karen, Burmese, Arabic, Farsi, Somali, French, Spanish, Nepalese and Russian are in high demand.)

10) Job development volunteers to help refugees create or edit their resumes, practice interviewing, and look for jobs.

11) Volunteers (ideally but not necessarily clinical psychologists) experienced with providing care to trauma victims.

When you get in touch with a resettlement office, it's good to be specific about what skills you have and what kind of volunteering you would like to do. That gives volunteer coordinators an idea of what special talents they can call on. That said, you don't need any special qualifications to be a general support volunteer or a mentor, just the right attitude.

You can find your local resettlement field office by checking the websites of the following organizations:

International Rescue Committee

U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

Heartland Alliance for Human Rights and Human Needs

Iowa Department of Human Services

Church World Service

Episcopal Migration Ministries

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops/Migration and Refugee Services

World Relief

For more information about refugee resettlement, read the excellent Transitionland blog.

[Iraqi refugees in the US are briefed by their sponsor - Photo from the AP article 'Policy turn diverts Iraqis from Michigan' (4 October 20080)]

This is the third part of a series looking at how to find a job in the field.  The posts were written by Transitionland, a woman with a human rights and development background trying to break into international aid work.

As for background - Transitionland has spent the last five years as a volunteer, intern, fellow, and junior employee in various human rights and humanitarian organizations in the States and abroad.  She is currently continuing a decade-long obsession with Afghanistan and is passionate about refugee issues.  She also writes the phenomenal Transitionland blog.

Part one is here, and part two is here.

The so-called "holy trinity" of finding jobs in the aid field –experience, networking, and education– also applies to internships.

Only, if you're a student, or fresh out of school, you probably don't have much experience (if any) and you probably don't have many (if any) connections.

You'll have to work with what you have. Here's how:

• Ask professors you've had for relevant subjects who they know in the field, and ask for letters of recommendation stressing how well you did in your courses on economic development/human rights/public health/non-profit management/etc.

• If you still have access to a university career center, make use of it. Get your resume/CV professionally edited. Make sure you have a good generic cover letter that you can modify slightly for each different internship you apply to. If available, schedule mock interviews. If you're out of school, get your successful friends to help you out with resume and cover letter editing and mock interviews. All of these do make a difference.

• Make sure you have at least one exceptional writing sample to send to potential employers. This should be no longer than five pages, and it should be either journalistic or policy-oriented. You might write awesome comparative literature papers, but they're just not relevant.

• Play up your skills. You might not have worked for an NGO before, but chances are, you know how to do something useful for one, whether it's taking care of children, performing or teaching CPR and first aid, or working in a community garden. If you handled the finances or PR, or organized events for a student organization, make sure you stress that in your resume, cover letter, and interview. Work-study counts, too. It is, after all, work experience.

• If you are fluent in an additional language to English, make sure your resume reflects that. Potential employers will overlook a lot if you speak and write a language they desperately need.

• Be persistent. It took me six months and who-knows-how-many unreturned emails and phone calls to finally land the dream internship that opened every subsequent door for me. In general, it's best to wait a month after the deadline for an application has passed (or three weeks if there is no deadline) before you send a polite follow-up email to the hiring manager. If you still hear nothing, call, or send a few more emails, spaced out by two or three weeks each. You have nothing to lose in this situation. You were either rejected already, or the hiring manager is still waiting to make a decision. In the latter case, your persistence demonstrates your strong desire to intern for that specific organization -- points in your favor.

[Photo of the Kabul - Bamiyan Road from Hindu Business Line / Rasheeda Bhagat]

This is the second part of a series looking at how to find a job in the field.  The posts were written by Transitionland, a woman with a human rights and development background trying to break into international aid work.

As for background - Transitionland has spent the last five years as a volunteer, intern, fellow, and junior employee in various human rights and humanitarian organizations in the States and abroad.  She is currently continuing a decade-long obsession with Afghanistan and is passionate about refugee issues.  She also writes the phenomenal Transitionland blog.

Part one is here, and part three is here.

Step one in finding an internship is figuring out and articulating what you want to do, specifically. "I want to help people," is too broad, vague, and unhelpful, however honest the sentiment behind it may be. Anyone who is going into this line of work wants to help people, and potential supervisors will take that as a given. The real question is: whom do you want to help most, or first?

Do you care deeply about civilian war victims? Are you passionate about women's involvement in rural economic development? Are you a walking, talking encyclopedia on refugee issues? There are organizations that work specifically in each of these areas. Maybe you have multiple interests. Recently, I wrote in an informal job-related email, that areas I am interested in working in include; relief, media development, women's political and economic participation, human rights broadly, and public health. That's a lot of areas, but still specific enough to be serious. Still, the more specific, the better. I once had a classmate whose academic and professional obsession was grassroots organizing of gay and lesbian communities in the Philippines. I know he graduated last year, and I would bet a lot of money (that is, if I had any!) that he is working in grassroots organizing of gay and lesbian communities in the Philippines.

Ok, so you know what you want to do. Now, you need to find out who is doing that work. If you have an internet connection, this is pretty easy to do. Using internship specific and issue keyword searches on Idealist and ReliefWeb (under the advanced search option) are good places to start.

If you're American, or looking for an internship in the US, Idealist will give you a good idea of what's out there.

ReliefWeb will show you more opportunities abroad, especially in countries with major, ongoing relief efforts and development projects.

When searching ReliefWeb for internships, use the Advanced Search feature to search "Internship, [your area of interest]" and then "Intern, [your area of interest]".

Part three will be up tomorrow.

[Road in Afghanistan - Photo posted to Flickr by Carl Montgomery]

Over the next three days, will be running a series looking at how to get a job in the field.  The posts were written by Transitionland, a woman with a human rights and development background trying to break into international aid work.

As for background - Transitionland has spent the last five years as a volunteer, intern, fellow, and junior employee in various human rights and humanitarian organizations in the States and abroad.  She is currently continuing a decade-long obsession with Afghanistan and is passionate about refugee issues.  She also writes the phenomenal Transitionland blog.

Hello, Humanitarian Relief readers.

If you're like me, you're looking for a job in the field of humanitarian assistance and it's proving way more difficult than you expected it to be. War, poverty and oppression haven't gone away, but the aid world (and the NGO world more broadly) has been hit by the global economic downturn, so organizations aren't hiring as many people as they were even a year ago. The path to stable, decent-paying employment at this time is a long and uneven one.

This is my first post in a series on my search for a job as an aid worker.

Well, actually, this post will be on something I can safely say I know how to do well, and receive emails about on a regular basis: finding an internship.

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to lump internships at humanitarian, development and human rights organizations together. In professional life, people cycle between these anyway, because the objectives of human rights, humanitarian and development work often (though not always) intersect.

The Internship, Your First Step:

The bad news: the recession and the Madoff scheme have badly hurt the budgets of many organizations, and there are more entry-level positions being eliminated than created.

The sort-of-good news: there are more internships than before, because it's cheaper to hire even four paid interns than to pay the salary one full employee, and there's still as much work to be done as ever.

(I will touch on paid vs. unpaid internships later on.)

Landing an internship with an organization won't guarantee you future employment there –many people mistakenly think this is the case— but it will;

• Give you experience actually doing the work you want to do

• Quickly teach you whether this is really the path you want to take

• Build your resume

• Provide you with lots of useful connections for future job-hunting

Part two is here, and part three is here.

For more information on finding a job in the field, also check out this earlier post on the topic.

[Photo from the Afghan Embassy in DC]