Disability is defined by hierarchy. Regardless of culture or context, persons with disabilities are almost always pushed to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
With the advent of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), disability human rights seemingly provided a path forward for tearing down ableist social hierarchies and ensuring that all persons with disabilities everywhere were treated equally. Despite important progress, the disability human rights project not only remains incomplete, but has often created new hierarchies among persons with disabilities themselves or across the human rights it promotes. Certain groups of persons with disabilities have gained new voices while others remain silenced and certain rights are prioritized over others depending on what states, international organizations, or advocates want rather than what those on the ground need most.
This volume was inspired both by the continued need to expose human rights violations against persons with disabilities, but to also explore the nuanced role that hierarchies play in the spread, implementation, and protection of disability human rights. The enjoyment of human rights is not equal nor is the recognition of specific individuals and groups’ rights. In order to change this situation, inequalities across the disability human rights movement must be explored.
Divided into five parts:
- Who counts as disabled?
- Political, social, and cultural context
- Which rights on top, whose rights on bottom?
- Pushed to the periphery in the disability rights movement
- Representations of disability
and comprised of 34 newly-written chapters including case-studies from the Anglophone Caribbean, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ghana, Haiti, Hungary, India, Israel, Kenya, Latin America, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Serbia and South Africa, and other countries, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, human rights law and social policy.
Stephen J. Meyers is Director of the Center for Global Studies, at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. He is the author of Civilizing Disability Society: The UN Disability Convention socializing grassroots disabled persons organizations in Nicaragua. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Megan McCloskey is Senior Fellow, Disability Inclusive Development Initiative, International Policy Institute, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.
Gabor Petri is postdoctoral researcher at the Democracy Institute, Central European University, Budapest and Honorary Lecturer at the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
