Human Rights Transformation in Practice

Tine Destrooper

ISBN 10: 0812250575 / ISBN 13: 9780812250572

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

About this Item

New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days.

Seller Inventory # B9780812250572

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Human Rights Transformation in Practice
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812250575
• ISBN 13: 9780812250572
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 526 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Human rights are increasingly described as being in crisis. But are human rights really on the verge of disappearing? Human Rights Transformation in Practice argues that it is certainly the case that human rights organizations in many parts of the world are under threat, but that the ideals of justice, fairness, and equality inherent in human rights remain appealing globally—and that recognizing the continuing importance and strength of human rights requires looking for them in different places. These places are not simply the Human Rights Council or regular meetings of monitoring committees but also the offices of small NGOs and the streets of poor cities.

In Human Rights Transformation in Practice, editors Tine Destrooper and Sally Engle Merry collect various approaches to the questions of how human rights travel and how they are transformed, offering a corrective to those perspectives locating human rights only in formal institutions and laws. Contributors to the volume empirically examine several hypotheses about the factors that impact the vernacularization and localization of human rights: how human rights ideals become formalized in local legal systems, sometimes become customary norms, and, at other times, fail to take hold. Case studies explore the ways in which local struggles may inspire the further development of human rights norms at the transnational level. Through these analyses, the essays in Human Rights Transformation in Practice consider how the vernacularization and localization processes may be shaped by different causes of human rights violations, the perceived nature of violations, and the existence of networks and formal avenues for information-sharing.

Contributors: Sara L. M. Davis, Ellen Desmet, Tine Destrooper, Mark Goodale, Ken MacLean, Samuel Martínez, Sally Engle Merry, Charmain Mohamed, Vasuki Nesiah, Arne Vandenbogaerde, Wouter Vandenhole, Johannes M. Waldmüller.

About the Author

Tine Destrooper is the director of the Flemish Peace Institute and a visiting scholar at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University. She is author of Come Hell or High Water: Feminism and the Legacy of Armed Conflict in Central America. Sally Engle Merry is the Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University and author of several books, including The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking.