Human Rights at the Crossroads

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a dramatic expansion in both the international human rights system and the transnational networks of activists, development organizations, and monitoring agencies that partially reinforce it. Yet despite or perhaps because of this explosive growth, the multiple statuses of human rights remain as unsettled as ever. Human Rights at the Crossroads brings together preeminent and emerging voices within human rights studies to think creatively about problems beyond their own disciplines, and to critically respond to what appear to be intractable problems within human rights theory and practice. This book includes essays that rethink the ideas surrounding human rights and dignity, human rights and state interests in citizenship and torture, the practice of human rights in politics, genocide, and historical re-writing, and the anthropological and medical approaches to human rights. Human Rights at the Crossroads provides an integrative and interdisciplinary answer to the existing academic status quo, with broad implications for future human rights theory and practice in all fields. We are challenged to identify, specify the possibilities, the constraints and indeed the contradictions that may arise when we are asked to put our Human Rights rhetoric to the test within economic frameworks, some of which may be unaccountable. In the human rights discourse old issues have been joined by new ones, challenging yet full of promise for scholarship and practice. Among the scholars is Professor Mark Goodale, who edited a recent work that carries the title 'Human Rights at the Crossroads'. That work shows that the issues have not gone away. They remain, they extend and they become more complex. Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland (In a speech to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, San Jose, Costa Rica, October 29, 2013)Acknowledgements ; Chapter 1: Human Rights After the Post-Cold War (Mark Goodale) ; Part I: Regrounding the Idea of Human Rights ; Chapter 2: Human Rights and the Politics of Contestation (Michael Goodhart) ; Chapter 3: Why Act Towards One Another "In a Spirit of Brotherhood"?: The Grounds of Human Rights (Michael J. Perry) ; Chapter 4: An Overlapping Consensus on Human Rights and Human Dignity (Ari Kohen) ; Chapter 5: The "Right to Have Rights" to the Rescue: From Human Rights to Global Democracy (Eva Erman) ; Part II: Human Rights and the Problem of the State ; Chapter 6: Prosecuting Human Rights Violations: Universal Jurisdiction and the Crime of Torture (Tobias Kelly) ; Chapter 7: Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights (Karen Faulk) ; Part III: Politics and the Practice of Human Rights ; Chapter 8: Whose Vernacular?: Translating Human Rights in Local Contexts (Daniel Goldstein) ; Chapter 9: Sacred Graves and Human Rights (Adam Rosenblatt) ; Chapter 10: Human Rights Monitoring and the Question of Indicators (Sally Engle Merry) ; Part IV: Confronting Pathologies of Power ; Chapter 11: The Paradox of Perpetration: A View From the Cambodian Genocide (Alexander Laban Hinton) ; Chapter 12: "Why We Care": Constructing Solidarity (Alison Brysk) ; Chapter 13: Historical Amnesia, Genocide, and the Rejection of Universal Human Rights (Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann) ; Part V: Reproduction in the Age of Human Rights ; Chapter 14: The Law's Legal Anthropology (Ronald Niezen) ; Chapter 15: Cutting Human Rights Down to Size (Harri Englund) ; Chapter 16: Acceptable Uses of People (Pheng Cheah) ; Index