In order to facilitate a subsequent operationalization of civil liberty, the paper attempts to define and ground civil liberty on the basis of liberal political philosophy/theory as this tradition provides fruitful conceptual distinctions and specifications and offers some interesting motivations for taking civil liberties into deeper consideration. Different clusters of perspectives are found in the literature and one these is identified as key to understand the character of civil liberty and the relationship between civil liberty and democracy. Thereafter, to specify was is plausibly meant by civil liberties, I introduce three historically significant forms of rights codifications, that is, agreements about rights put down in peace treatises on the background of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants; national declarations and constitutional provisions connected to the revolutions in the seventeenth century England and the late eighteenth century USA and France; and international conventions on human rights. As one cannot settle the question of the plausibility of civil liberties just by reference to their legal recognition, I turn to some of the justifications offered by liberal philosophers that are briefly confronted with some general critiques.

The paper concludes that there are good reasons to respect civil liberties and to narrow the focus to (modern, negative) liberal freedom understood as absence of state interference in certain personal exertion rights. On this background, five rights are selected to constitute the core of a civil liberty measure: freedom of opinion and expression; freedom of assembly and association; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; freedom of movement and residence; freedom of recourse to independent courts.

Comparative educational research has influenced the development of the world society perspective as surely as the world society perspective has shaped research directions in comparative education. Rooted in neoinstitutional ideas emphasizing the extent to which actors and activities are profoundly constructed and influenced by their environments, the world society perspective imagines world models or blueprints of progress and justice that give rise to and increasingly standardize nation-states,

organizations, and individuals. The role of education and educationally certified professionals in the overall process of standardization is a core premise in this perspective and a recurring feature of comparative educational research motivated by this perspective. The universalistic character of these models and the formal rationality associated with them facilitates standardization, in aspiration and policy, if not always in practice. Simply put, what all of this means is that we increasingly live in a world in

which there are shared standards about who is a person, what constitutes an organization, and what does a nation-state look like. Furthermore, there is a sense that those entities not in the know can learn to become and act like proper nation-states, organizations, and individuals. How else can one explain the proliferation of expertise roaming the world with the latest word on learning to learn, benchmarking, accountability, transparency, democracy, civil society and other virtues de jour!

Much of the empirical research which situated the world society perspective on the comparative education map is well known and has been summarized elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the two global trends that serve as corner stones of the world society research edifice are the enormous expansion of educational enrollments at all levels and the expanded scope of the aims and uses of education and the plethora of educational organizations that embody and elaborate these purposes. Ours is truly a world certificational society. There are of course alternative ways of accounting for the rise and impact of the world certification society. And, these in turn have raised critiques of the world society perspective, critiques often centering on issues of agency and power. These critiques are not without merit, but unfortunately, they often lead to exaggerated and culture free understandings of agency and to oversimplified notions of power cum coercion which underestimate the authority and influence of world cultural models.

In this paper I first briefly reiterate some of the main ideas of the world society perspective and explore its roots in neo-institutional theories. Next, I identify a direction of future theorizing and research which both challenges and extends the world society perspective and comparative education research. I first propose to distinguish between institutionalized domains and contested terrains. A clearer understanding of the former is enhanced by the explicit recognition of the latter. Thirdly, I apply this distinction to the question of the role of education in the political incorporation process. The transformation of the masses into citizens via mass schooling is an established theme in comparative political sociology, which has strongly influenced key strands of world society driven research. Here I emphasize a second distinction, one between earlier issues of exclusion versus inclusion and current issues regarding the terms of

inclusion. Lastly, I reflect on the changing character of the polity to which one is offered membership in the education based incorporation process. Much of the literature continues to privilege the nation-state and national citizenship. But there is also an emerging literature on human rights and even human rights education. So, I conclude by distinguishing between national citizenship and world or transnational citizenship.

The article reports that by definition Iraq is in the midst of a civil war and has been ever since the first year of the "post-war" era in 2003. Since the United Iraqi Alliance took control of the government in 2005, there has been an increase in deaths and disappearances of Iraqi Sunnis. Signs of civil war include a hollow state, political polarization, inflammatory rhetoric, irreconcilable demands, and human rights violations.

In a world of rivalrous states whose peoples are connected ever more directly by globalization, Thomas Nagel has forcefully reasserted a classical thesis of early modern political thought: outside the state, Nagel argues, there is no justice. 1From this it follows, given the absence of a global state, that there can be no global justice.

Now, the Russian government's s retreat from democracy, as well as its actions to undermine human rights protections have become regular topics in Washington, therefore our topic could not be more timely. What we would like to discuss today is how the U.S. government should respond to those challenges in Russia.

As many of you know Russia has been a consistent concern to the commission, not so much because of the severity of its religious freedom violations but also due to its fragile human rights situation, including that of religious freedom. And trends of the past few years raise serious questions about Russia's commitment to democratic reform and the protection of religious freedom.

After a commission visit to Russia in 2003, we expressed strong concern that the Russian government was retreating from democratic reform endangering the significant human rights gains achieved in the dozen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, Russia serves as a model for other countries of the former Soviet Union and other nations emerging from dictatorship.

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Universal Human Rights brings new clarity to the important and highly contested concept universal human rights. The Charter of the United Nations commits nearly all nations of the world to promote, to realize and take action to achieve human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, yet this formal consensus masks an underlying confusion about the philosophical basis and practical implications of rights in a world made up of radically different national communities. This collection of essays explores the foundations of universal human rights in four sections devoted to their nature, application, enforcement and limits, concluding that shared rights help to constitute a universal human community, which supports local customs and separate state sovereignty. Rights protect the benefits of cultural diversity, while recognizing the universal dignity that every human life deserves. The eleven contributors to this volume demonstrate from their very different perspectives how human rights can help to bring moral order to an otherwise divided world.