ABSTRACT
The field of human rights has long been dominated by the discipline of law (Freeman 2001:123; 2002b:77-78), which has been dedicated to studying (and in part advancing) the normative evolution in the promotion and protection of human rights. The public international law of human rights has concentrated on the legal processes that affect the nature of state sovereignty, the degree of state obligations, the structure, function, and scope of the UN and regional systems and mechanisms established to protect human rights, and the justifiability of an increasing number of human rights that have become formally protected through the proliferation of international treaties. Alongside the long history of the commitment of law to study and advance the struggle for human rights, disciplines within the social sciences have overcome their own tendency to marginalize human rights and have grappled with a large variety of human rights problems, puzzles, and contradictions that have characterized the modern struggle for greater protection of human rights. Indeed the political sociology of the struggle for citizenship rights predates work on the modern human rights movement, while political science research has included global, small-N, and case-study analysis of the determinants of human rights protection, the analysis of foreign aid and human rights, the effect of globalization on human rights, the transmission of international human rights norms to the domestic level, and the politics of transitional justice in post-authoritarian and post-conflict countries, among many other substantive topics (see Landman 2002, 2005a). Anthropology, long seen to be diametrically opposed to human rights (see Freeman 2002a, 2002b), has reasserted its commitment to providing deep understanding of human rights problems that overcome its natural aversion to cross-cultural generalizations and the universality of concepts (Messer 1993). Moreover, rights-based approaches to development have brought economics ‘back in’ to the study of human rights as the international development policy agenda seeks to integrate human rights concerns into large-and small-scale aid and technical assistance programmes (see Human Rights Council of Australia 1995; Chapter 8 this volume).
