This article identifies the major forces militating against the promotion of women's rights in the Sudan. These factors are intimately linked to the country's multiple political disputes including Darfur and southern Sudan. The effects of political violence is elaborated through a detailed examination of women’s political, economic and cultural rights. The article concludes by identifying the promotion of good governance and democratization as fundamental pre-requisites for advancing human rights and sustainable peace in the war-torn nation.

The idea that the state has a duty to protect minority cultures has become so influential that cultural rights might seem a logical extension of T. H. Marshall's idea of citizenship rights; that is, the most recent set of rights to enable the citizen to be a fully participating member of the political community. This article takes the view, however, that citizens do not have cultural rights in the sense of rights to the protection of their minority cultures per se. (...) Instead, we should consider how citizens have an entitlement to culture in the broadest sense, as a constituent of equal well-being. On this view, the state has a duty to enable its citizens to live well. Cultural enrichment may require the protection of endangered ways of life—such as those of minority cultures—but only if these cultures do not run afoul of citizens' equal well-being as autonomous individuals. (shrink)

Many of the most popular liberal arguments for cultural rights all note that the world is formed into groups. But in the attempt to universalise these arguments, it is too often assumed that the nation is the most important of these groups. This focus upon the nation ignores the many and varying bases of self?respect. It overlooks the fact that self?respect may be tied to many different kinds of groups. Further, most discussions of cultural rights are fuelled by the experience (...) of particular groups. Which groups depends on the theorist and issue at hand. The discussion may be sound for the particular group being discussed. But then many cultural rights theorists, in generalising from one case to others, may not have good reason to do so, leading into a mistaken universalism. The study of cultural rights arguments, with closer reference to the case studies that underpin them, should serve to limit illicit generalisation and to illuminate the true value of cultural rights arguments. (shrink)