Peris S. Jones

Biography

Peris is Professor in the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. Born in Liverpool, working in Oslo, Peris has lived in Southern and Eastern Africa- including in Botswana, South Africa, Kenya and, most recently, Ethiopia. He writes mainly as an academic but in an accessible style. His most recent book is Human Rights and Development (by Routledge), which provides an entry level look at how these big ideas associated with human rights and development became integral to forging a life in dignity around the world, just as they also remain contested and hard to realise.

Peris is also author of AIDS Treatment and Human Rights in Context (published by Palgrave Macmillan, New York) which is one of the first accounts of its kind of the beginning of the era when anti-retroviral medication came to local communities in South Africa. Professor and renowned AIDS expert Alan Whiteside of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa,says: "An important book. Jones skillfully argues that treatment is replete with paradoxes for both treatment programs and human rights". Sofia Gruskin,Director of the Program on International Health and Human Rights, Harvard School of Public Health says: "Challenging and thought-provoking, this deeply reflective text considers the conceptual and practical issues in the long struggle for AIDS treatment. From a human rights vantage point, this exploration offers important insights useful to all country contexts."

He also published Democratising Development: The Politics of Socio-Economic Rights in South Africa (with Kristian Stokke), an edited collection featuring leading practitioners and academics showing the importance of politics in delivering rights and development in South Africa.

Peris will also shortly complete his first work of fiction with a novel about the efforts of two youths who take very different paths to shape their lives in highly precarious situations amidst rapid urban changes in an African city.