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.

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), Human Rights Encounters Legal Pluralism (ed. with Eva Brems and Giselle Corradi, Hart, Oñati International Series in Law and Society, 2016), Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America (ed. with Nancy Postero, Stanford, 2013), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (ed. with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge, 2010), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (ed., Blackwell, 2009), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (ed. with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge, 2007).