The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

ISBN 10: 0521683785 / ISBN 13: 9780521683784

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2007

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521683785
• ISBN 13: 9780521683784
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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).

Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University and President of the American Ethnological Society. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai'i (Princeton, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago, 2006), and Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwell, 2009). She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai'i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007 and the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010. She received an honorary degree from McGill School of Law in 2013. She is currently writing a book on indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance.