If the cultural politics of human rights is to bring about any real change in practices of injustice and suffering, they must be organised. In many respects the ideal form of organisation to achieve the enjoyment of human rights is a global social movement or movements. Social movements are distinctive forms of organisation for social change that are understood to be flexible, popular and innovative, engaging people in their everyday life decisions as well as trying to change elite power structures. Social movements are made up of loosely connected networks of individuals, groups and what are often called non-governmental organisations (NGOs). ‘NGO’ is a useful category insofar as it puts together organisations that are independent of governments and that pursue ‘not-for-profit’ aims. NGOs are a ‘third sector’ in relation to governments and corporations. The category is misleading, however, if it leads us to neglect the enormous differences between organisations that are included within it. In general NGOs have a similar structure to corporations and to political parties: they are bureaucratic and hierarchical, and they employ professionals and experts. They can be very large, like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, called international NGOs (INGOs) because they have branches in more than one state. NGOs can also be very small: some human rights NGOs consist of no more than a couple of people with some form of relevant expertise, a computer and an office. Social movements invariably contain NGOs, but they always also contain grassroots organisations (GROs). In general GROs are different from NGOs in that they are less formally organised, less bureaucratic and they do not employ professionals. GROs can be support and self-help groups, they may involve members of communities who are directly affected by certain issues, and sometimes they include people who have chosen to live and work in solidarity with people suffering ‘human rights wrongs’.

This book has been more challenging to write than I expected. The first big challenge was how to avoid Eurocentrism. By Eurocentrism I mean the assumption that what happens in what I call the ‘Northwest’ – in the European settler states of the United States, Western Europe and Australasia – is the norm, and that other parts of the world will or should follow their example. Eurocentrism is quite evident in some human rights advocacy. However, critics of human rights who see governments and corporations from the Northwest as facilitating or legitimating ‘Western neo-liberal imperialism’ do not necessarily escape it either: when their analyses are limited to discourses that originate and circulate in the United States, for example, they seem to assume that it is only what happens there that is really important. In this book I have tried to develop theory and methodology to understand how contexts, actors and claims for human rights differ around the world as well as what they share in common. The task is complicated because one of the most important contexts for the realisations of respect for human rights is the dominance of the owners of financial and industrial capital, state officials, and also international non-governmental organisations that are based in the Northwest. To get a good understanding of the range of possibilities represented by human rights today we must take seriously both the variety of local constructions of human rights people are creating to deal with specific injustices and also the effects of global geo-politics on what they are able to achieve using a language of human rights.

This brings me to the second challenge of studying human rights. I develop a version of sociology that enables us to study structures as well as meanings; what is ‘social’ as well as what is ‘cultural’ about constructions of human rights. Broadly speaking sociologists and anthropologists have tended to focus on the small-scale and local: on meanings that are created and sustained in communities and movements. Most international relations (IR) scholars and political scientists studying human rights focus instead on large-scale structures, networks and international organisations. In this book I argue that we xmust do both. Studying structures (of capitalism, post-colonialism, gender) and organisations (corporations, non-governmental organisations, inter-governmental organisations, and above all states – which are not all the same) is crucial to understanding both the possibilities and the limitations of human rights today.

The cultural politics of human rights is pragmatic: claiming authority to define human rights is intended to make a difference in the world. Although they are idealistic, utopian even, human rights are also supposed to be realisable in practice. As we have seen throughout this book, contemporary human rights are not just claims for freedom from state violence. Today human rights are claimed in an expansive and inclusive set of inter-related demands that include rights to freedom from all kinds of violence: from hunger and homelessness, the destruction of marginalised ways of life, discipline and punishment for being a woman. Transforming structures of geo-politics, of globalising capitalism, of gender and sexuality, and of the legacy of colonialism: these are all potentially radical aims in that they are meant to alter the conditions of our lives and so make a fundamental difference to people who are treated with less than equal respect. But however radical they may be, framing suffering as a ‘human rights wrong’ invariably situates demands as reformist too. Whether they mobilise people at the grassroots or not, claims for human rights address duty-bearers: officials in organisations who may be persuaded to make use of the moral and material resources over which they have influence to support demands for greater justice, less suffering. The pragmatism of the cultural politics of human rights is both radical in its aims to fundamentally transform structures, and reformist in that it tries to achieve these aims through existing organisations.

Given their pragmatic, reformist dimension, we might conclude that the most important question about human rights is: ‘do they work?’ Has the explosion of human rights claims since the end of the Cold War made any difference to human suffering?

Measuring human rights

Perhaps unsurprisingly the most focused and coherent attempt to answer this question comes from analysts of statistical data. Statistical analysis of the effects of international human rights treaties is a growing area now in political science, international relations (IR) and International Legal Studies.1 Statistical analysis of the effects of campaigns is also becoming more important to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and inter-governmental organisations (IGOs), especially when they must justify their activities to donors.

According to the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) ‘everyone’ is entitled to life, liberty, political participation, and a degree of economic and social security. ‘No-one’ is to be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty, tortured or subjected to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. In principle, universal human rights are ‘de-territorialised’, applicable to everyone, everywhere. In this respect human rights seem to be made for migrants, since most (though not all) can also be said to be de-territorialised insofar as they travel to live outside the states of which they are citizens.

In terms of the situations migrants leave behind them, it is not hard to see the relevance of human rights: people flee their homes because they are afraid of being attacked by armed militias or of being bombed; they are displaced from their homes and livelihoods by development projects or environmental damage; they move to find a better way of life for themselves and their families, trying to escape poverty, ill-health and economic insecurity; and they flee violence that is threatened or that they have suffered at the hands of state agents or from which their state has failed to protect them. Given that people are suffering from poverty, lack of opportunities and violence in some parts of the world, very often their reasons for moving to another country are mixed. In terms of the human rights they may enjoy migrants fall into quite different legal categories. In Europe and North America, authorised migrants are workers who have been recruited for their skills, people who have come legally to join other family members, or who have been granted political asylum as refugees or who are waiting for a decision on their application for asylum.

Until recently, human rights standards were set and monitored in inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) in ways that confirmed men as having greater value than women. The human rights listed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are supposed to apply to everyone ‘without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’ (Article 2 UDHR). However, foundational human rights documents, the UDHR, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) are not gender-neutral. They do not apply equally to women and to men. The fact that these documents use the pronoun ‘he’ throughout is not accidental. Rather than listing universal, gender-neutral rights, they list ‘what men fear will happen to them’ (Edwards 2011: 51–64). The UDHR, ICCPR and ICESCR practically never mention women explicitly, and they are above all concerned with what happens to people in the public sphere, as a result of activities and policies carried out on behalf of the state. The private domestic sphere of the family, which has at least as much impact on how women are controlled and exploited, is constructed in foundational human rights documents as a place of natural, family relations, somewhere that is itself in need of ‘protection’.

It was not until the 1990s that feminists came to the question, ‘Are women's rights human rights?’. The women's movements of the 1970s and 1980s took little interest in human rights. In the Northwest, radical and socialist-inclined movements were more concerned with raising consciousness and finding new ways to live in egalitarian and liberated ways outside the nuclear family than with changing laws and policies. Women's movements in what was then called the ‘Third World’ also had their own concerns, different in different national and regional contexts. Even when the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was signed and ratified in the 1970s, as a result of the efforts of people involved in the UN Commission on the Status of Women that dates back to 1946, it seemed too limited and bureaucratic to hold much appeal (Reilly 2009).

In principle, we have human rights simply by virtue of being human. We have rights regardless of which state we happen to be born into, what happens to that state, where we go or where we live. In this sense – though it sounds rather grandiose – whether or not a person actually enjoys human rights is the responsibility of the world.

It was in the newly founded UN that human rights were declared to be essential to all human beings. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 affirmed that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ (Article 1). The declaration is not, strictly speaking, a legal document. It is more in the nature of a promise. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the promise that the atrocities committed by the Nazis – the ‘barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’ in the words of the preamble to the declaration – would not be allowed to happen to anyone ever again. The preamble goes on to herald ‘the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want … as the highest aspiration of the common people’. No longer should individuals be killed, tortured, maimed, or allowed to suffer hunger and despair simply because they happen to live in an oppressive state, or because their neighbours believe they should not be there. ‘Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’ (Article 2).

It was in the UN, then, that the contemporary social construction of human rights was inaugurated. And within the UN there are continuing efforts to construct human rights in ways that will make good on the promises of the UDHR and the conventions and treaties that have built on it.

States are the most important organisations for the enjoyment of human rights. Officials acting in the name of states assemble structures and concentrate resources in ways that make them exceptionally dangerous – well equipped to benefit from torture, rape and murder, and from turning funds that are ostensibly collected for public benefit through taxes and international aid to their own purposes. At the same time states are crucial to the realisation of human rights in practice: they enable officials to exercise authority nationally and internationally that can make a positive impact on how people live within their territories and in other states too. States are at the same time the violators and the guarantors of human rights.

It may seem odd to think of states as the guarantors of human rights. Where states have been considered from a social constructionist perspective in studies of human rights, they tend to be seen as obstacles to the realisation of human rights in practice. State sovereignty, the principle that there should be no outside interference in the affairs of states or in what goes on inside their territories, is seen as a problem for the realisation of human rights: it must be contradicted or transformed so that everyone, no matter where they are born or where they are living, can enjoy rights (see Levy and Sznaider 2006). But states are not just violators of human rights. International law does support state sovereignty (though precisely what this means is now changing, as we shall see in Chapter 4). But international law also makes states responsible for guaranteeing human rights. There is a paradox at the heart of international human rights law that we will be exploring in the following chapters: states are supposed to ensure the human rights of individuals within their territories against their own violations.

In 1972 Amnesty International organised a worldwide campaign to end torture. The organisation published reports on how torture remained a widespread practice in many states, and gathered one million signatures from eighty-five countries on a petition to present at the UN. Politicians, diplomats and military leaders denied that torture was going on in their states. However, the UN Convention Against Torture became international law in 1987, committing states that had signed and ratified it to outlawing torture for ever (Clark 2001; Kelly 2013).

In 2007, after decades of campaigning by grassroots organisations, supported by the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities and a Working Group on Indigenous Populations set up inside the UN, the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was finally signed and ratified by most countries in the world (with the notable exceptions of the United States, Canada and Australia). It is unclear as yet what difference international recognition of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will make to people's lives (Morgan 2011). Nevertheless, the transnational grassroots organisation Via Campesina is following the lead of indigenous peoples’ movements in proposing a declaration of the rights of peasants to protect rural ways of life (see pp. 106–10).

In 2003 a campaign was organised by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to put pressure on an Islamic court in Nigeria that was hearing the appeal of a woman named Amina Lawal. She had been convicted for adultery, solely on the word of the alleged father of the child she had conceived, and she faced death by stoning as punishment. Her suffering gained a good deal of media publicity especially in North America and Europe. But a small local organisation called Baobab asked for people outside Nigeria to stop sending protest letters because they misrepresented the facts of the case and angered local politicians, religious leaders and judges. The transnational campaign was undermining Baobab's authority.

3.0 Introduction

This chapter looks at how a jet engine produces thrust, which is a simple consequence of Newton's laws of motion applied to a steady flow. It requires the momentum to be higher for the jet leaving the engine than the flow entering it, and this inevitably results in higher kinetic energy for the jet. The higher energy of the jet requires an energy input, which comes from burning the fuel. This gives rise to the definition of propulsive efficiency (considering only the mechanical aspects) and overall efficiency (considering the energy available from the combustion process).

With few exceptions this book will be concerned with bypass engines. These are engines where some or most of the incoming air passes around and outside the core of the engine: this is the bypass stream. A fraction of the air enters the core and passes through the combustor. The bypass ratio is defined by mass flows of air as

The total mass flow rate is given by

Early bypass engines had more air going through the core than through the bypass, that is a low bypass ratio, but modern high bypass engines have around ten times as much air in the bypass stream. The jet velocity from the core and bypass need not be equal but they are normally designed to be similar and for the present purposes may be taken to be equal.

History and regulation

As jet air transport increased in the 1960s the annoyance to people living and working around major airports was becoming intense. Regulations affecting international air transport are governed by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), but this body was moving so slowly that in 1969 the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) made proposals for maximum permitted noise levels. After extensive discussions in the USA these were formally approved as Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) Part 36 in 1971, retroactive with effect from 1969, but only for new aircraft. Shortly afterwards the ICAO Committee on Aircraft Noise published similar recommendations, to be known as Annex 16, a formal addendum to the 1944 Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation; each member state had then to accept the rules in Annex 16 and write them into their legal framework. The underlying principle for the noise certification of aircraft under FAR Part 36 and Annex 16 are similar and has remained unchanged ever since, with the levels under the US and ICAO rules subsequently becoming virtually identical.

The certification for noise relies on measurements at three positions, two for take-off (referred to as lateral and flyover) and one for landing (referred to as approach). The levels are expressed in decibels (EPNdB) using effective perceived noise level (EPNL), described in outline below. The layout for testing is shown in Figure A1.

The noise at the lateral position is the highest noise measured along a line parallel to the runway whilst the aircraft is departing at full power and the maximum usually occurs when the aircraft has climbed to about 1000 feet. Flyover noise is measured directly under the flight path after take-off and at an altitude where it is normal to cut-back the power to reduce the noise whilst still maintaining a safe rate of climb. The approach noise is also measured directly under the flight path as the aircraft prepares to land, with the glide slope carefully controlled. The flights are for the maximum allowed weight of the aircraft and correspond to standard day temperatures (which will generally require corrections to be made to the measurements since tests are rarely carried out at precisely the standard conditions). Needless to say, aircraft do not always operate as specified for the tests, but the tests do at least provide a standard way of comparing aircraft and thereby regulating airport operations.

Introduction

This chapter sets out the background to the new airliner which is to form the basis of the first part of this book. The aircraft, to be called the New Efficient Aircraft (NEA), will be a large wide-body aircraft designed to give low fuel burn, in anticipation of the likely rise of fuel price and pressure to reduce CO2 emissions. The aircraft will have two engines.

The costs and risks of a new aircraft or engine project are huge, but the profits might be large too. Some background is first discussed concerning the history and business of jet propelled aircraft and the impact of concerns for the environment. In explaining the requirements some of the units of measurement used are discussed. Design calculations in a company are likely to assume that the aircraft flies in the International Standard Atmosphere (or something very similar) and this assumption will be adopted throughout this book. The standard atmosphere is introduced and discussed towards the end of the chapter.

1.1 Some background

The age of jet travel really got started when the Boeing 707 entered service in 1958. By the time this aircraft was initiated, Boeing had already acquired considerable experience of large multi-engine jet aircraft, bombers and tankers, so it was in a strong position to make good design choices. The 707 was conceived as a long-range aircraft, which in those days meant it was capable of flying across the Atlantic non-stop with a full load of passengers, typically 110 in a two-class cabin. The range with maximum payload was only 2800 nautical miles (nm), but the shortest distance between London and New York is 2991 nm and going west there are normally headwinds that increase the effective distance. Such flights would therefore operate with less than the maximum payload, which would mean less than maximum freight on board, if all seats were taken.

6.0 Introduction

In treating the gas turbine it is essential to make proper acknowledgement of the compressible nature of the air and combustion products. Compressible fluid mechanics is a large and highly developed subject, but here only that which is essential to appreciate the treatment and carry out the designs is given. There are also special approaches for handling the compressible, high-speed flow inside ducts which need to be introduced, and that is the purpose of this chapter. The most important book dealing with this topic is Shapiro (1953), but a more accessible account is given, for example, by Munson et al. (2009).

6.1 Incompressible and compressible flow

For liquids the changes in density are normally negligible and it is possible to treat the flow as incompressible. Thus the equation for steady frictionless flow along a streamline,

VdV + dp/ρ = 0,

can be integrated directly, assuming the density is constant, to give Bernoulli's equation

1/2V2 + p/ρ = p0/ρ, a constant.

p0 is the stagnation or total pressure and corresponds to that pressure obtained when the flow is brought to rest in a frictionless or loss-free manner. The term 1/2ρV2 is known as the dynamic pressure or dynamic head. A pitot tube records the stagnation pressure whereas a pressure tapping in a wall parallel to the flow records static pressure. The use of stagnation pressure is something like a book-keeping exercise – it indicates the pressure which would be achieved if the flow were decelerated to rest is a loss-free manner. The stagnation pressure also represents the pressure in a reservoir from which the fluid could be accelerated to velocity Vj and this is illustrated in Figure 6.1. The difference between stagnation pressure and static pressure is the dynamic pressure 1/2ρV2. An analogy which is sometimes helpful can be drawn between the hydraulic system and a mechanical system: static pressure is analogous to potential energy and dynamic pressure is analogous to kinetic energy.