Human Rights at the Crossroads

Description

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a dramatic expansion in both the international human rights system and the transnational networks of activists, development organizations, and monitoring agencies that partially reinforce it. Yet despite or perhaps because of this explosive growth, the multiple statuses of human rights remain as unsettled as ever. Human Rights at the Crossroads brings together preeminent and emerging voices within human rights studies to think creatively about problems beyond their own disciplines, and to critically respond to what appear to be intractable problems within human rights theory and practice. It includes essays that rethink the ideas surrounding human rights and dignity, human rights and state interests in citizenship and torture, the practice of human rights in politics, genocide, and historical re-writing, and the anthropological and medical approaches to human rights. Human Rights at the Crossroads provides an integrative and interdisciplinary answer to the existing academic status quo, with broad implications for future theory and practice in all fields dealing with the problems of human rights theory and practice. Cover Contents Acknowledgment Notes on Editor and Contributors 1. Human Rights After the Post-Cold War PART I: REGROUNDING THE IDEA OF HUMAN RIGHTS 2. Human Rights and the Politics of Contestation 3. Why Act Towards One Another “In a Spirit of Brotherhood”?: The Grounds of Human Rights 4. An Overlapping Consensus on Human Rights and Human Dignity 5. The “Right to Have Rights” to the Rescue: From Human Rights to Global Democracy PART II: HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE PROBLEM OF THE STATE 6. Prosecuting Human Rights Violations: Universal Jurisdiction and the Crime of Torture 7. Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights PART III: POLITICS AND THE PRACTICE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 8. Whose Vernacular? Translating Human Rights in Local Contexts 9. Sacred Graves and Human Rights 10. Human Rights Monitoring and the Question of Indicators PART IV: CONFRONTING PATHOLOGIES OF POWER 11. The Paradox of Perpetration: A View from the Cambodian Genocide 12. “Why We Care”: Constructing Solidarity 13. Historical Amnesia, Genocide, and the Rejection of Universal Human Rights PART V: REPRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 14. The Law’s Legal Anthropology 15. Cutting Human Rights Down to Size 16. Acceptable Uses of People INDEX A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z