Human rights is an important issue in contemporary politics, and the last few decades have also seen a remarkable increase in research and teaching on the subject. This book introduces students to the study of human rights and aims to build on their interest while simultaneously offering an alternative vision of the subject. Many texts focus on the theoretical and legal issues surrounding human rights. This book adopts a substantially different approach which uses empirical data derived fr...

Accessible and engaging, The Politics of Human Rights offers a fresh, empirical approach to understanding human dignity and the global responsibility to protect it. Unlike traditional texts, this textbook moves beyond theory, using data-driven insights to explore why human rights violations occur and how they can be prevented. It emphasizes shared responsibility across borders to uphold human rights. Designed for students and educators, this fully updated edition enhances learning with dis...

Networks play a central role in the human rights field. Expert contributors in this book explain how different types of networks form and shape outcomes globally. Together, they demonstrate how connections among scholars, practitioners and activists drive knowledge sharing and collaboration across disciplines, spurring innovation to address global challenges such as inequality and injustice.Each chapter offers insights from personal experiences of building and sustaining diverse ne...

What role can US domestic courts play in the worldwide enforcement of human rights? When international courts deny hearings to individual plaintiffs who cannot obtain the sponsorship of their own government (which may well be the defendant), these plaintiffs are finding US courts increasingly willing to hear their cases. This volume considers the implications of this de facto extension of the jurisdiction of US courts, the problem of enforcing the decisions of the courts, the relationship ...

In this edited volume, leading experts of human rights measurement address the challenges scholarship of human rights face as well as explore approaches and means to overcoming them.The book seeks to further answer three specific and related questions. First, what do existing measures of human rights conditions tell us about the state of human rights? Are conditions improving or deteriorating? Second, how might scholars improve their measurement efforts and observe states’ human ri...

First Published in 2003. Of all the humanitarian impulses in world politics today, one of the most widely recognized is the need to protect refugees. However, as The Problems of Protection explores, what on the surface appears to be a simple proposition can quickly become complex and controversial. This complexity results in troubling variation in how we respond to our obligation to protect refugees--while NATO launches a major military intervention on behalf of Albanians in Kosovo amidst ...

International Law: Our Common Future offers a dynamic approach to the study of international law that actively engages students in ways that more traditional textbooks do not. One way this is achieved is by focusing on recent events, including international terrorism, extraordinary rendition, the legality of drone strikes, environmental devastation, and human rights. Another is by having students wrestle with actual court rulings rather than being given short summaries of these de...

Americans pride themselves on being an ethical people. They go to church, quote the Bible, erect statues, and discuss morality with abandon. They also trust their government to do the right thing when it comes to delivering legal justice and conducting foreign policy. Trouble is, American foreign policy has yielded some pretty spectacular ethical lapses, and (as 9/11 starkly demonstrated) the world is beginning to notice. Here, Mark Gibney lays out some of the most egregious insults the U....

In order to be able to protect human rights, it is first necessary to see the denial of those rights. Aside from experiencing human rights violations directly, either as a victim or as an eyewitness, more than any other medium film is able to bring us closer to this aspect of the human experience. Yet, notwithstanding its importance to human rights, film has received virtually no scholarly attention and thus one of the primary goals of this book is to begin to fill this gap. From an histor...

Globalization challenges fundamental principles governing international law, especially with respect to state sovereignty and international relations. This transformation has had a significant impact on the practice of trade law, financial regulation, and environmental law but relatively little effect on one area of law and regulation: human rights.Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations examines both the international and domestic foundations of human righ...

This clear and compelling textconfronts the dominant thinking on human rights, taking issue with the notion adopted by all states and even many academics that human rights obligations extend no further than their own territorial borders. Mark Gibney critiques cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, the International Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights, arguing for a much broader reading of state responsibility on the basis that current law misses most of the ways in which s...

Globalization challenges fundamental principles governing international law, especially with respect to state sovereignty and international relations. This transformation has had a significant impact on the practice of trade law, financial regulation, and environmental law but relatively little effect on one area of law and regulation: human rights.Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations examines both the international and domestic foundations of human righ...