The Times and Temporalities of International Human Rights Law

This collection brings together a range of international contributors to stimulate discussions on time and international human rights law, a topic that has been given little attention to date. The book explores how time and its diverse forms can be understood to operate on, and in, this area of law; how time manifests in the theory and practice of human rights internationally; and how specific areas of human rights can be understood via temporal analyses.

A range of temporal ideas and their connection to this area of law are investigated. These include collective memory, ideas of past, present and future, emergency time, the times of environmental change, retrogression and non-linearity, multiplicitous time, and the connections between time and space or materiality. Rather than a purely abstract or theoretical endeavour, this dedicated attention to the times and temporalities of international human rights law will assist in better understanding this law, its development, and its practice in the present. What emerges from the collection is a future – or, more precisely, futures – for time as a vehicle of analysis for those working within human rights internationally.