Non-human rights are a reality today: this book unpacks their paradoxes as well as their significance for our historic crucible. As animals, rivers, mountains, rainforests, ecosystems, and synthetic entities such as machines, AI, and robots gain recognition as subjects of rights in different parts of the world, non-human rights become part of our ordinary legal landscape and vocabulary. This timely book provides a critical outlook on this rising trend at the crossroads of two of the main concerns of the 21st century: climate change and automation.

In seeking to address the foundations, genealogies, philosophies, and impacts of non-human rights, the contributors to this volume examine both their potential and limitations. Are non-human rights just a mere extension of the liberal human rights discourse or, as some suggest, something else and new based on different principles? Are they a 'revolution' or just 'more of the same'? Are they a practical solution that could 'save us' from climate disaster and self-destruction through automation or part of the problem and obstacle for social change?

This book will be a vital resource for scholars and students of human rights, environmental law, animal rights, law and technology studies, legal theory, socio-legal studies, constitutional law and public international law. Providing an accessible overview of the changing patterns of the rights discourse in contemporary societies, it will also benefit anthropologists, climate and animal rights activists, political scientists, international relations scholars, policy makers and sociologists.

About the Author
Edited by Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa, Lecturer and IHSS Fellow, Queen Mary University of London and Costas Douzinas, Emeritus Professor, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Reviews
'This book is exceedingly timely, with courts the world over assigning rights to non-humans with increasing liberality. Do animals, rivers, robots have rights? Should they? In this intensely insightful volume, gathering some of the legal world's most innovative scholars, Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa and Costas Douzinas have given us a treasure of legal intrigue, a cascade of new thinking about "rights", coupled with a fearless critical refusal to assume that more rights is always better. A must read for scholars of the posthuman, the cyborg, the ecosphere, and, indeed, the future of law.' -- Stephen Humphreys, The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
'How and why do non-human rights reproduce and entrench the human exceptionalism they are supposed to challenge? From different perspectives and with different accents, this incisive set of essays explores how animals, nature, and robots are excluded from humanity in the very process of being included as rights-holders, while also critically probing the notion of humanity that would define what counts, residually, as non-human. The volume will be an essential companion to scholarly research for which the "non-human" is a cypher of our times and the problems it must come to terms with.' -- Hans Lindahl, Tilburg University, the Netherlands and Queen Mary University of London, UK



Book Information
ISBN 9781802208511
Author Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa
Format Hardback
Page Count 274
Imprint Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd
Publisher Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd