Non-Human Rights: Critical Perspectives

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.