Abstract

Critical Perspectives on Human Rights provides cutting-edge interventions into contemporary perspectives on rights, ethics and global justice. The chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, make a significant and timely contribution to critical human rights scholarship by interrogating the significance of human rights for critical theory and practice. While the contributions engage sensitively yet thoroughly with the regulatory, disciplinary, and exclusionary effects of human rights, they do so without giving up on the transformative potential of human rights. By thinking productively through the exclusions, paradoxes and aporias of human rights, Critical Perspectives on Human Rights is a key reference text for students and scholars in this important area of inquiry.
Birgit Schippers is Senior Lecturer in Politics at St Mary’s University College Belfast.

This outstanding collection of critical essays about human rights, beautifully curated by Birgit Schippers, is a must-read both within the field and across the disciplines. Among other things, the essays are animated by an interest in forms of activism and contestation that transcend minimalism and moralism in the face of the rising crises of our time.

There is a rich critical literature interrogating the rights of human rights. What distinguishes this collection is the additional attention directed at the figure of the human, and the willingness to trouble this. This makes for an often exhilarating read.