Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges

At a time when states are increasingly hostile to the international rights regime, human rights activists have turned to non-state and sub-state actors to begin the implementation of human rights law. This complicates the conventional analysis of relationships between local actors, global norms, and cosmopolitanism. The contributions in this open access collection examine the “lived realities of human rights” and critically engage with debates on gender, sexuality, localism and cosmopolitanism, weaving insights from multiple disciplines into a broader call for interdisciplinary scholarship informed by practice. Overall, the contributors argue that the power of human rights depends on their ability to be continuously broadened and re-imagined in locales around the world. It is only on this basis that human rights can remain relevant and be effectively used to push local, national and international institutions to put in place structural reforms that advance equity and pluralism in these perilous times. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Anthony Tirado Chase is a Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College, USA and Chair of its Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy. Chase has published widely on human rights in the Middle East and globally. His books include the Handbook on Human Rights and the Middle East and North Africa (2017), Human Rights, Revolution, and Reform in the Muslim World (2012), and Human Rights in the Arab World: Independent Voices (co-edited with Amr Hamzawy, 2006). Chase has received Harvard Law School, Fulbright, and U.S. Institute of Peace fellowships, among others, and has worked with transnational non-governmental organizations across the globe, as well as with the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Program, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Pardis Mahdavi is Executive Director of the Executive Leadership Academy at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Previously she was University President at the University of La Verne, Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of Montana, and dean at Arizona State University and University of Denver. She is a non-fiction writer with 20 years of experience as an anthropologist, public health researcher, and expert in sexual politics across the globe. She is the author of five books, including the first book on the sexual politics of modern Iran, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution (2008). A former journalist turned academic, she has written for Ms. Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The Conversation, The Huffington Post, Jaddaliyya, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her work has been covered in documentaries, radio shows, podcasts, and media outlets, including CNN, PBS, NPR, and Publishers Weekly.

Hussein Banai teaches in the Department of International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, USA.

Sofia Gruskin directs the University of Southern California Institute on Inequalities in Global Health (IIGH). She is Professor of Preventive Medicine and Chief of the Disease Prevention, Policy and Global Health Division at the Keck School of Medicine; Professor of Law and Preventive Medicine at the Gould School of Law; and an affiliate faculty member with the Spatial Sciences Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. A pioneer in bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to global health, Gruskin's work - which ranges from global policy to the grassroots level - has been instrumental in developing the conceptual, methodological and empirical links between health and human rights. With a long-standing focus on HIV, sexual and reproductive health, child and adolescent health, gender-based violence, non-communicable disease, and health systems, Gruskin's work also seeks to address the manifestations of inequalities in a range of new areas, including sustainability, climate change, and the long-term impacts of COVID-19 and other emerging pandemics.