Human Rights

Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide...

This book champions social movements as one of the most influential agents that shape our conceptions of human rights. It argues that human rights cannot be understood outside of the context of social movement struggles. It explains how much of the...

Young seventeen-year-old Joelito Filartiga was taken from his family home in Asuncion, Paraguay, brutally tortured, and murdered by the Paraguayan police. "Breaking Silence" is the inside story of the quest for justice by his father - the true...

In the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from...

Do we want to live in a world without birdsong? The pesticides, the coal mines, the clear-felling forestry industry, the industrial farmers are destroying the earth with their insistence on profit. But what point is profit on a dead and silent planet? ...

While nominally protected across Europe, the human rights of vulnerable migrants often fail to deliver their promised benefits in practice. This socio-legal study explores both the concrete expressions and possible causes of this persistent deficit. For...

Polarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that...

While gender has become a cornerstone of the current human rights framework on violence against women (VAW), a new theoretical concept has been gaining ground and becoming increasingly visible: intersectionality. In response, this book clarifies three...

Since its establishment the work of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has been subject to many interpretations, with differing theories proffered and conclusions drawn. This comprehensive guide, from an author with an intimate knowledge of the...

In Kissinger and Latin America, Stephen G. Rabe analyzes U.S. policies toward Latin America during a critical period of the Cold War. Except for the issue of Chile under Salvador Allende, historians have largely ignored inter-American relations during...

Although child soldiers have received considerable media and policy attention, they remain poorly understood and inadequately protected. This Research Handbook addresses this troubling gap by offering a reflective and nuanced review of the complex issue...

The scale and variety of acts of religious intolerance evident in so many countries today are of enormous contemporary concern. This 2005 study attempts a thorough and systematic treatment of both Universal and European practice. The standards applicable...

Human rights organizations have grown exponentially across the globe, particularly in the global South, and the term human rights is now common parlance among politicians and civil society activists. As international donors pour money into global human...

The massacres that spread across Algeria in 1997 and 1998 shocked the world, both in their horror and in the international community's failure to respond. In the years following, the violence of 1990s Algeria has become a central case study in new...

"Torture has ceased to exist," Victor Hugo claimed, with some justification, in 1874. Yet more than a century later, torture is used routinely in one out of every three countries. This book is about torture in Western society from earliest times to the...

Islamophobia and the Law is a foundational volume of critical scholarship on the emerging form of bigotry widely known as Islamophobia. This book brings together leading legal scholars to explore the emergence and rise of Islamophobia after the 9/11...

It is commonly assumed that slavery came to an end in the nineteenth century. While slavery in the Americas officially ended in 1888, millions of slaves remained in bondage across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East well into the first half of the...

Human rights violations are perpetrated in all parts of the world, and the universal reaction to such atrocities is overwhelmingly one of horror and sadness. Yet, as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im and his contributors attest, our viewpoint is clouded and...

Through war crimes prosecutions, truth commissions, purges of perpetrators, reparations, and memorials, transitional justice practices work under the assumptions that truth telling leads to reconciliation, prosecutions bring closure, and justice prevents...

This book, newly available in paperback, tells the story of the emergence of the concept of crimes against humanity. It examines its origins, the ethical assumptions underpinning it, its legal and philosophical boundaries, and some of the controversies...

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Rights: Concepts and Contexts contains the central works of recent scholarship on the nature of rights, with contributions by some of the most prominent contemporary theorists in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including Joseph Raz, Robert...

This book provides a clear and concise explanation of the central principles of international humanitarian law (or the law of armed conflict) while situating them in a broader philosophical, ethical and legal context.The authors consider a range of wider...

In the past, violations of human rights were commonly portrayed as atrocities perpetrated by tyrannical dictatorships. Today, the images of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, put the lie to this assumption...

How can we understand and contest the global wave of violence against women? In this book, Alison Brysk shows that gender violence across countries tends to change as countries develop and liberalize, but not in the ways that we might predict. She shows...

By reconsidering the definitions of human trafficking, slavery, servitude and forced labour, Vladislava Stoyanova demonstrates how, in embracing the human trafficking framework, the international community has sidelined the human rights law commitments...

We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the purposeful infliction of cruelty by public officials, and we assume that lawyers and clinicians are best placed to speak about its causes and effects. However, it has not always been so. The category of...

Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights contributes to the development of that field of study called 'psycho-social' that is presently more and more committed to providing understanding of social phenomena, making use of the explicative perspective of...

Autonomy is one of the core concepts of legal and political thought, yet also one of the least understood. The prevailing theory of liberal individualism characterizes autonomy as independence, yet from a social perspective, this conception is glaringly...

Few topics in human rights have inspired as much debate as the right to health. Proponents would enshrine it as a fundamental right on a par with freedom of speech and freedom from torture. Detractors suggest that the movement constitutes an impractical...

A global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today.Hailed as the "first freedom," free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian...

Mind and Rights combines historical, philosophical, and legal perspectives with research from psychology and the cognitive sciences to probe the justification of human rights in ethics, politics and law. Chapters critically examine the growth of the...

The first of its kind, this book provides a unique inside look into the hidden world of ordinary North Koreans. Mike Kim, who worked with refugees on the Chinese border for four years, recounts their experiences of enduring famine, sex-trafficking, and...

Inspired by a 1988 trip to El Salvador, Michael J. Perry's new book is a personal and scholarly exploration of the idea of human rights. Perry is one of our nation's leading authorities on the relation of morality, including religious morality, to...

From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change...

In May 2009, American B-1B bombers dropped 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs in the village of Garani, Afghanistan following a Taliban attack. The dead included anywhere from twenty five to over one hundred civilians. The U.S. military went into damage...

Core Socio-Economic Rights and the European Court of Human Rights deals with socio-economic rights in the context of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The book connects the ECtHR's socio-economic case law to an...

The calls for an international treaty to elaborate the human rights obligations of transnational corporations and other business enterprises have been rapidly growing, due to the failures of existing regulatory initiatives in holding powerful business...

Finance is the evil we cannot live without. It governs almost every aspect of our lives and has the power to liberate as well as enslave. With the worldas total financial assetsavalued at a staggering $300 trillionabeing four times larger than the...

This book is a five-country empirical study of the causes and consequences of social and economic rights litigation. Detailed studies of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa present systematic and nuanced accounts of court activity on...