Accessing and Implementing Human Rights and Justice

Accessing human rights and justice mechanisms is a pressing issue in global politics. Although an understanding of justice is inherent in broad human rights discourses, there is no clear consensus on how to develop adequate means of accessing them in order to make a difference to people’s lives. Further, expansions of the boundaries of both human rights and justice make any clear and settled understanding of the relation difficult to ascertain.

This volume tackles these issues by focusing on the dilemmas of accessing and implementing human rights and justice across a range of empirical contexts while also investigating a range of conceptual approaches to, and understandings of, justice, including issues of equality, retribution, and restoration, as well as justice as a transnational professional project. The contributors, representing a range of disciplinary backgrounds and diverse voices, offer empirical examples from Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Tunisia, and Uganda to explore the issues of accessing and implementing human rights and justice in conflict, post-conflict, and transitional settings.

This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, human rights, international criminal justice, and conflict response.

Kurt Mills is Professor of International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Dundee. He is Vice-Chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System and past Vice-President of the International Studies Association. His research and teaching focus on human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal justice, and the responsibility to protect, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa: Responsibility to Protect, Prosecute, and Palliate (University of Pennsylvania Press) and Human Rights in the Emerging Global Order: A New Sovereignty (Macmillan), and co-editor of Human Rights Protection in Global Politics: Responsibilities of States and Non-State Actors (Palgrave) and Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford). He has published numerous peer reviewed articles and chapters in edited volumes.

Melissa Labonte is Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. Her research and teaching interests include the human rights, humanitarian politics, peacebuilding, multilateral peace operations, conflict resolution, and West African politics. She is the author of Human Rights and Humanitarian Norms, Strategic Framing, and Intervention: Lessons for the Responsibility to Protect (London: Routledge, 2013) and co-author (with Brendan Cahill, Fordham University) of Inter Arma Caritas: Contemporary Humanitarian Studies and Action (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2018). Her research has appeared in leading international relations journals, including African Affairs; Disasters; Global Governance; International Journal of Human Rights; International Studies Perspectives; and Third World Quarterly.