New Books in Human Rights

The essays in Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Brill) explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’ back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or...

In Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia (Stanford University Press) Jean Jackson narrates her remarkable journey as an anthropologist in Colombia for over 50 years. This is an extraordinary book because it shows us Jackson’s trajectory, the challenges she faced, the changes she underwent as a researcher and scholar, and even the mistakes she unknowingly ma...

In her latest book, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (Yale University Press), Kathryn Sikkink puts forward a framework of rights and responsibilities; moving beyond the language of rights that has come to dominate scholarship and activism, she makes the case that human rights cannot be truly implemented unless we also recognise that there are corresponding obligatio...

The updated paperback edition of Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press) dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. As "hate speech" has no generally accepted definition, we hear many incorr...

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and sel...

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the r...

How does the United States use immigration to suppress free speech? Should interests of “national security” take priority over individual liberties? What happens to democracy when the most vulnerable are denied their right to speak and exchange ideas? In Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2020), historian and lawyer...

The key question in The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: Sharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge, 2020), is to what extent political activists in these three domiciles have made progress in their quest to liberalize and democratize their respective polities. Taking a long historical perspective, the book compares the political trajectory in the three regions from...

People’s Tribunals, Human Rights and the Law (Routledge, 2020) gives a vital introduction to an essential but overlooked topic; the rise of People’s Tribunals, their role in truth and justice, and the contribution they make to redress the rights of survivors and victims. People’s Tribunals are independent, grassroots movements, growing from civil society which address past atrocities in spaces whe...

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020). In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. Th...

Laura A. Dean (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Millikin University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Lab) has spent many years investigating the urgent human rights issue of human trafficking in Eurasia. In her 2020 monograph Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia (Policy Press, 2020), Dr. Dean analyzes the development and effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies...

We are all familiar with the story of how in early 1919 heads of state and diplomats from around the world came to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement with a defeated Germany and its allies. Many of us are aware of how nationalists such as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, the future Hồ Chí Minh, tried to gain access to the official meetings. But far fewer of us know of the roles played of activist women such as...

Lauren Turek is an Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She earned her doctorate from the University of Virginia in 2015 and holds a degree in Museum Studies from New York University. A specialist in U.S. diplomatic history and American religious history, Dr. Turek’s first book, titled To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Righ...

Criminal responsibility is a key-organizing concept of the criminal law, but Arlie Loughnan argues that it needs re-examination. Focusing on the Australian experience, Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2020) questions assumptions about the rise and prominence of criminal responsibility from the late colonial period until recent times. The...

China is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council yet Chinese officials have been skeptical of using the powers of the UN to pressure nations accused of human rights violations. The PRC has emphasized the norm of sovereignty and rejected external interference in its own internal affairs. Yet they have supported UN intervention when states have been accused of mass human rights abuses. Why...

Hong Kong in 2019 was a city on fire. Anti-government protests, sparked by an ill-fated extradition bill sparked seven months of protest and civil unrest. Protestors clashed with police in the streets, in shopping malls, in residential buildings. Driven by Hong Kong’s young people with their ‘Be Water!’ strategy, the pro-democracy movement grew into a massive force, receiving support from all demo...

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, with a majority of Americans now supporting same-sex marriage and relations between same-sex, consenting adults. However, support for transgender individuals lags far behind; a significant majority of Americans do not support the right of transgender people to be free from discrimination in housing, emp...

“Never again!” This was the rallying cry, seemingly universal and unanimous, among liberal nation-states as they formed the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and later signed the UN Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Emerging from the ashes of a global war that took some 60 million lives, and after witnessing the atrocities o...

In China, roughly 60% of GDP and 80% of employment comes from the private sector – yet half of private entrepreneurs report that they faced expropriation of property by local governments. Yue Hou’s rich, detailed, and ambitious book documents how private entrepreneurs protect their property from expropriation by running for office – and using their public roles to advance their private economic in...

Incivility in our public discourse is limiting our ability to get things done as a nation and preventing us from expressing ourselves in workplaces and classrooms for fear of offending those with real or imagined historical grievances or even merely strongly held views. If you agree with that, then Adam J. MacLeod’s book The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal (Rowm...

In her latest book, In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2016), Nicola Lacey brings together philosophical, historical and socio-legal methods to give an account of the ever changing notion of responsibility in criminal law. She distinguishes between ideas of responsibility, which she argues are founded in notions of character, psycholo...

Reporters and scholars often focus on violence and victimization: “if it bleeds, it leads.” But unarmed civilians around the world often protect themselves against armed combatants using social processes to reduce the violence perpetrated against them. Oliver Kaplan’s case studies of Columbia – with extensions to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and the Philippines – demonstrates how, why, and when c...

The right to decision making is important for all people. It allows us to choose how to we our lives – both on a daily basis, and also in terms of how we wish to express ourselves, to live in accordance with our values and desires. However, the right to make decisions has been, and continues to be, routinely denied to people with disabilities – sometimes by family members and carers, or by institu...

After the Second World War, an Australian diplomat was one of eight people to draft the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. And in the years that followed, Australians of many different stripes—including activists fighting for Aboriginal rights and women’s rights, communists, and even anticommunists—invoked human rights in their respective political struggles. Yet, despite these Australians’ embrace...

Despite the post-Holocaust UN convention to ensure the protection of minority communities globally, the International community has failed to notice the signs of the Rohingya genocide, but what stopped them from taking subsequent action so long after the atrocity? Who really were responsible? And what impact do the continuing campaigns by the displaced Rohingya and international civil society have...