The Complexity of Human Rights

From Vernacularization to Quantification

Philip Alston editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:8th Feb '24

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Complexity of Human Rights cover

In a paradigm-shifting collection, experts assess the contribution and use of ‘vernacularization’ to fully understand the complexity of human rights, uniquely from a law perspective.

This book provides the first systematic assessment from a human rights law perspective of the landmark contributions of the renowned legal anthropologist, Sally Engle Merry. What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to present them as a single, universal, and immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them. Merry and her colleagues transformed human rights thinking by highlighting the process of ‘vernacularization’, which sees rights discourse as being unavoidably dependent upon translation and interpretation. She also warned of the pitfalls of excessive reliance upon statistical and other indicators, through the process of quantification. Here the leading voices in the field assess the significance of these contributions.

ISBN: 9781509972906

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

304 pages