CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Padua Soto, Marielys |
|---|---|
| Title | Xenophobia from an Evolutionary Biology Perspective |
| Summary | ABSTRACT Traditionally, the social and natural sciences are two domains that have been studied separately. However, connecting both disciplines, although a very complex endeavor to achieve, can provide useful non-conventional approaches to examine social and legal challenges. These approaches might assist human rights scholars in developing theories to understand social phenomena like xenophobia. With this objective in mind, we will resort to implementing evolutionary biology principles and the Darwinian school of thought. It is well known that our species, Homo sapiens, is capable of complex social manifestations in cultural settings like religion and language. However, our species is also biologically classified as a social primate. Analyzing human behavior from an evolutionary biological perspective, while also taking into consideration our natural and anthropological history, might serve to better understand why there is a manifestation of xenophobia in society today. Furthermore, integrating the evolution of humans along with biological postulates can prove to be relevant for a better implementation of human rights principles. Evolutionary biology suggests that our species has developed the biological capacity for altruism. Human rights principles may precisely be a concretization of this capacity, which has also been demonstrated to exist in other species that exhibit altruistic tendencies, competition for resources notwithstanding, which may be one of the sources of xenophobia. More specifically, we will focus on “Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which concerns the right to seek asylum.” In essence, this thesis will try to provide a correlation between what could potentially be the genesis of xenophobia, the human capacity for altruism in the context of asylum law, and how these two behavioral manifestations were illustrated in the Hungarian refugee crisis of 2015. |
| Supervisor | Judit Sándor |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/padua-soto_marielys.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University