The ongoing war in Yemen, ignited in September 2014 by the Houthi insurgency and exacerbated by March 2015 Saudi-led military intervention, has inflicted unimaginable suffering on the Yemeni population. The conflict has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions displaced, with Yemen now fragmented into territories controlled by various armed groups and proxies, each pursuing their agendas. Yemeni people endure unimaginable hardships, with the vast majority living below the poverty line, lacking access to essential services, and being denied their fundamental rights. As a result, they face immense challenges to survive in their daily lives. Amidst this turmoil, thousands of civilians have fallen victim to abduction, arbitrary detention, torture, and forced disappearance at the hands of warring parties and their proxies, often funded by regional powers, principally by the Saudi, UAE, and Iranian regimes. Many remain missing, their fate unknown. This research paper aims to shed light on these egregious human rights violations in Yemen, focusing on the dreadful realities of cases of abduction, detention, torture, and disappearance between 2018 and 2023. Drawing on verified reports from organizations like the Mothers of Abductees’ Association, this qualitative study will thoroughly analyze documented cases and investigative reports to uncover the extent of these abuses by all warring parties. The findings will be evaluated in the context of international human rights principles and Yemeni law, seeking to raise awareness and advocate for justice for the victims. Keywords: Yemen, abduction, detention, warring parties, human rights, violation, justice

International human rights norms have been advancing since the establishment of the UN, which included the promotion of human rights as a goal in its Charter. The current studies on human rights norms tend to explore how international norms have been developed, adopted by states, used by advocacy groups, or challenged by states and non-state actors. The tendency is to treat international human rights norms as external to societies, especially to developing countries. This paper is based on a comprehensive study that questions the merits of this “external treatment” and examines human rights norm development at the intersection of domestic and international politics through a longitudinal study of Turkey. Turkey has been engaged in the UN-led and European human rights regimes early on, joined the ILO in 1932, and is an original signatory of the Helsinki Final Act (1975) of the OSCE, that upholds “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms” as one of its ten guiding principles. Despite these engagements, however, Turkey maintained an inconsistent and problematic human rights record. Focusing on human rights norms, the project examines the articulation of human rights by political parties and governments in their programs during the 1920-2018 period, when Turkey maintained some form of parliamentary system. It includes the analysis of 66 government programs and 102 party programs issued by 63 major political parties represented in the parliament or received attention in the media. It involves manifest and latent content analyses of these two sets of documents to identify: (1) when “human rights,” as a term, appears in each program; (2) which specific rights (e.g., freedom of press, the right to education) or rights of vulnerable/marginalized groups (e.g., the rights of children, women, disabled) are spelled out and gained frequency; (3) if rights are mentioned favorably or critically; (4) if there is a variation in the human discourse of ideologically distinct parties; (5) the extent to which party programs inform the government programs; (6) if there is a discernable pattern of change in the discourse of parties and governments; and (7) what factors – national and international – might have triggered changes. The paper presents some selective findings of this comprehensive study and provides evidence that in addition to adopting international human rights norms, governments and especially political also generate new norms in response to the national political developments and human rights practices.

Although coverage of the Zan, Zindagi, Azadi movement in Iran has faded from the media spotlight in the United States, protesters continue to advocate for the expansion of women’s rights in the Islamic Republic. Unfolding in parallel with this activism are theological discourses among Iranian religious intellectuals (rawshanfikran-i dini) who have composed systematic critiques of the Islamic Republic’s patriarchal construction of Islamic thought. This paper contends that despite significant points of substantive coalescence among religious intellectuals on the content of women’s rights, irreconcilable methodological divergences persist on how a critique of patriarchy ought to proceed. The enduring question dividing Iranian thinkers has been: does a persuasive critique of patriarchy require a revision of widely held beliefs about divine revelation (wahy) and the nature of the Qur’an? This question was posed by the Muslim philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush in his controversial text Bast-i Tajrubih-i Nabavi (Expansion of Prophetic Experience) published in 1999. As scholars Ali Akbar, Abdullah Saeed, and Forough Jahanbakhsh note in their respective studies, Soroush argues that the conventional view that God dictated the words of the Qur’an to Muhammad would logically entail divine approval of certain patriarchal themes and passages of the Qur’an. Thus, a robust conception gender justice in Islam must, Soroush contends, be rooted in an alternative framing wherein the Qur’an was “divinely inspired” but not literally dictated by God. In Soroush’s view, the verses frequently cited by patriarchal thinkers are “incidental” (‘aradi) to the Qur’anic message and are trivial consequences of Muhammad’s historical context. While Soroush’s framework has attracted significant attention and support, other reformists such as Mohsen Kadivar argue that Soroush’s radical view of revelation (and the Qur’an) is ultimately unnecessary for a critique of patriarchy. Kadivar argues that the rational tools developed by Muslim jurists (fuqaha’) are sufficient to defend egalitarian gender justice and to undermine entrenched patriarchal interpretations of Islam. As Adis Duderija describes, Kadivar proceeds by drawing a distinction between the historical expression of Qur’anic values (during Muhammad’s era) and an egalitarian vision of gender justice derived from the objectives (maqasid) and spirit of Islamic law—all of this, he contends, without the necessity of rethinking divine revelation. This paper introduces and analytically contrasts the starting points, assumptions, and methodological choices illuminating how Soroush and Kadivar’s “compatible” critiques of patriarchy are in fact rooted in radically divergent methodologies that will animate and influence Muslim reformist debates in the years to come.

Although Jordan historically nationalized many Palestinian refugees, those displaced from the Gaza Strip after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War remain a stark exception. Since 1967, the Gaza refugees’ inability to obtain Jordanian nationality has rendered their lives more precarious and difficult, including through more expensive access to education, healthcare, and identity documents, limited property ownership, and restricted access to work. In addition, the rights that Gaza refugees do have, including access to “temporary” Jordanian passports, are located only in executive decisions and regulations, with no protections in law, thereby inhibiting their access to judicial redress and legal mobilization. Why are Gaza refugee rights governed only in the “shadow of the law” today, and how does this “temporary” citizenship materialize? This paper addresses these questions by tracing Jordan’s policies toward Gaza refugees over time, drawing from thousands of British and U.S. archival files describing Jordan’s internal politics from 1946–1993 and 240 interviews with ministers, lawyers, Gaza refugees, and others I conducted during 16 months of fieldwork in Jordan from 2016–2023. The paper finds that contradictory pressures on executive leaders at key policymaking junctures have circumscribed Gaza refugee rights to executive rules, rendering them indefinite temporary citizens, whose citizenship primarily manifests beyond the law and legal status. Overall, their temporary status and rights impedes their legal consciousness and advocacy as well as renders their access to work, identity documents, ownership, healthcare, and education always subject to change.

Gradually distancing from the parents as the central attachment and forming independent relationships is considered one of the central developmental tasks of adolescence (Havighurst 1953). In the classic conceptualization, this process is referred to as individuation (Walper & Wendt 2015). However, critical extensions of this theory note that adolescence represents a "space of possibility" (King 2013) which is constrained by social inequality. For example, the restrictions of asylum conditions bring challenges, both for the family as a whole and its individual members (Merry et al. 2017). Although refugee research regularly calls for young migrants to be treated as "completely normal" young people (Gravelmann 2016: 89-92; Lechner & Huber 2017: 111; Thomas et al 2018: 220-221), research on the topic of sexuality and relationship formation in the asylum context is still rare. When studies do deal with the topic, the focus is often on deficits, such as the obstacles faced by refugee women in accessing reproductive medicine (Mengesha et al. 2017) or on sexualized violence before, during, and after migration (Akin 2017). Drawing on the theory of the border regime (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013) and refugee transnationalism (Koser 2007) my paper asks how individuation takes shape under asylum conditions and whether the traditional conceptualization of individuation adequately grasps the realities of young Syrian refugees in Germany. The empirical research grounding this discussion is comprised of biographical narrative interviews (Rosenthal 1993) and their discourse-theoretical development (Truschkat 2018). The data analysis follows the reconstruction of narrative identities as proposed by Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2004). Preliminary results indicate that both accompanied and unaccompanied refugees each have their own challenges to overcome in the pursuits of individuation. Housing and general social integration also play key roles in the ability to form partnerships and establish a healthy relationship which balances closeness and distance with parents. With its focus on relationship formation during adolescence this paper aims to contribute to the "emotional turn", which views migrants as "sexual beings expressing, wanting to express or denied the means to express, their sexual identity" (Mai & King 2009: 296).In addition, the paper wants to critically question the myth of the "'prison house' of Arab family" (Joseph & Rieker 2008: 5) wherein parents with a migration background are often portrayed as an obstacle to integration (Apitzsch 2014). The research presented in this paper will address these concerns throught the voices of young refugees themselves.