Books in the Stanford Studies in Human Rights series

Considers the legal, moral and pragmatic issues at stake when international standards of human rights are trumped by culture and politics, and proposes new approaches to fill the gaps in current human rights theories and practice, namely relational sovereignty, reciprocal adjudication, and regional human rights courts.

This work critically examines standard assumptions of transitional justice through the lens of survivors' standpoints, and argues for more responsive and place-based approaches to social reconstruction after mass violence and egregious human rights violations.

This book examines the beliefs of law enforcement officers who support the use of torture and the implications of these beliefs for officers' responses to human rights activism and education.

We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights. Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.

Stones of Hope shows how African human rights activists have opened new possibilities for justice in the everyday lives of the world's most impoverished peoples.

Examining the ways in which "rights talk" is used and adapted locally by groups in Argentina, this book explores the relationship between ideas of human rights, rights of citizenship, and the concrete and envisioned social relationships that form the basis for social activism in the wake of neoliberal restructuring.

Stones of Hope shows how African human rights activists have opened new possibilities for justice in the everyday lives of the world's most impoverished peoples.

A broad and ambitious reexamination of anthropology's potential and obligation to transform human rights theory and practice.

This book looks closely at those who do humanitarian work in New Delhi to consider why people engage in humanitarian work and to urge a rethinking of giving and belonging in a global context.

Through an examination of the pharmaceutical industry and access to medicine in Central America, this book considers whether health is a human right or a commodity, and whether human rights advocacy is an antidote to the advance of neoliberal social policy or the very vehicle through which it now advances.

This work critically examines standard assumptions of transitional justice through the lens of survivors' standpoints, and argues for more responsive and place-based approaches to social reconstruction after mass violence and egregious human rights violations.

"A wide-ranging critique of legal and transnational approaches to sexual violence in armed conflict and how rape, in particular, developed as a central focus within the women's human rights movement"--

This book explores the organizational culture of the largest international development organization-the World Bank-and addresses the question of why the Bank has not adopted a human rights policy or agenda.

In the aftermath of violence and war, justice for crimes committed may be the only possibility for restoring and healing communities. This book documents both the strengths and limitations of truth commissions and international criminal law in reconciling divided societies.

Examines the effectiveness of national human rights institutions in promoting and protecting human rights through a series of comparative case studies.

"This multidisciplinary volume explores the relationship between human rights and the subject. Each chapter considers how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the non-human world, drawing on the best work on human rights in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy"--

The Subject of Human Rights is the first book to systematically address the "human" part of "human rights." Drawing on the finest thinking in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, and literary studies, this volume examines how human rights¿as discourse, law, and practice¿shape how we understand humanity and human beings. It asks how the humanness that the human rights idea seeks to protect and promote is experienced. The essays in this volume consider how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the nonhuman world. They investigate what kinds of institutions and actors are subjected to human rights and are charged with respecting their demands and realizing their aspirations. And they explore how human rights shape and even create the very subjects they seek to protect. Through critical reflection on these issues, The Subject of Human Rights suggests ways in which we might reimagine the relationship between human rights and subjectivity with a view to benefiting human rights and subjects alike.

Explores the strategies behind some of the most innovative human rights campaigns and exciting human rights victories of recent years.

Explores the dialectic of cynicism and hope and the role of human rights in the production of rule in the occupied Palestinian territories.