Human Rights at the Crossroads

• Experts from a broad range of academic fields and practices provide challenging and creative answers to difficult and pressing human rights questions
• A unique and bold interdisciplinary approach seeks to reposition the academic architecture surrounding the study and practice of human rights
• Critically confronts international problems and pathologies of power, identity construction, and legal anthropology that challenge difficult crises around the world
• Translates human rights issues into local settings, allowing readers to understand human rights enforcement and monitoring in context

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. This book 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 human rights theory and practice in all fields.

Readership: Human rights activists and practitioners, scholars in human rights theory and practice, university students and teachers, public interest researchers, members of the lay public increasingly interested in human rights issues