Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores complex and critical relationship of how experiences and expectations shape ways of seeing, being and doing. It examines through the lens of human rights education (HRE) which, as a global concept and practice, has grown hugely over the last 20 years, since 1995, when the first United Nations Decade of Human Rights Education was pronounced by the United Nations. The book reveals how spaces of HRE have become transnational sites of struggle, existing in a permanent relationship of provocation between domination and resistance and caught in a dynamic relationship of power. It suggests that while HRE discourse has been used to construct and produce social structures and hierarchies, it can be a space of resistance to construct social relations. The book focuses on understanding production, distribution and consumption of the global and local discourse, and the relationship between them.