The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local

Human rights are now the dominant approach to social justice globally. But how do human rights work? What do they do? Drawing on anthropological studies of human rights work from around the world, this book examines human rights in practice. It shows how groups and organizations mobilize human rights language in a variety of local settings, often differently from those imagined by human rights law itself. The case studies reveal the contradictions and ambiguities of human rights approaches to various forms of violence. They show that this openness is not a failure of universal human rights as a coherent legal or ethical framework but an essential element in the development of living and organic ideas of human rights in context. Studying human rights in practice means examining the channels of communication and institutional structures that mediate between global ideas and local situations. Suitable for use on inter-disciplinary courses globally.

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 ten books, including Human Rights Encounters Legal Pluralism (with Eva Brems and Giselle Corradi, Hart, Oñati International Series in Law and Society, 2015), Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America (with Nancy Postero, Stanford, 2013), Human Rights at the Crossroads (ed., Oxford, 2012), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge, 2010), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (ed., Blackwell, 2009), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford, 2009), and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford, 2008).