Human Rights, Security Politics and Embodiment

Virtuous institutions, such as human rights ones, have been neglected by securitization theory’s focus on the national state apparatus as the key driver of security politics. This book challenges this assumption, showing the ways institutional human rights, deemed the most progressive of rights, have been complicit in rendering the body vulnerable. While the book principally focuses on the treatment of the veiled woman, it also considers wider cases involving torture: the ultimate removal of control over one’s body and biggest transgression of human rights’ supposed foundational commitment to bodily integrity.

Aneira J. Edmunds is an authority on human rights. She tackles controversial and topical issues relating in particular to human rights’ control over the woman’s body and the limitations of ‘virtuous’ institutions such as the ICC and the ECtHR.