From December 1-2, 2017, the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies’ Governance and Human Rights Hub convened thirteen leading scholars of the norms, institutions, and practice of human rights to interrogate the following, pivotal questions related to contemporary human rights scholarship:
1) Pathways of influence: How do human rights circulate and gain traction? What do we know about the dynamics of attention, diffusion, translation, horizontal ties, and grassroots localization as possible pathways of rights?
2) Social norms and responsibilities of human rights: How do publics, leaders, and international organizations perceive and define their rights and duties? What does scholarship reveal about the political impact and behavioral influence of norms and responsibilities?
3) Human rights regime development: What does recent scholarship tell us about the diversification of the human rights regime to new treaty bodies and processes, regional courts, multi-purpose multilateral bodies, local implementation and other venues of rights adjudication beyond criminal tribunals?
4) Emerging contradictions: Where and why do we see contradictions in the logics or impact of the human rights regime: human rights foreign policy, humanitarian action, and NGO campaigns? How can human rights advocates cope with backlash and stagnation in the rights won in the past generation?
Workshop participants sought to identify fundamental directions of research that can shed light on the dynamics of change in the quest for human dignity. Papers developed for the workshop be published in Human Rights and Human Dignity: Norms, Institutions and Practice to be published by Edgar Elgar in early 2019. This volume builds on the Governance and Human Rights Research Hub’s ongoing work, which thus far has published Expanding Human Rights: 21st Century Norms and Governance, co-edited by Alison Brysk and Michael Stohl in 2017 and Contracting Human Rights: Crisis, Accountability, and Opportunity to be published in February 2018.
Link for Contracting: http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/contracting-human-rights
