Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with a conference organized by the Human Rights Initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the spring of 2005. The "crisis" that threatens human rights can also be the "crisis" that floods hearts with compassion; in this way, the culture of crisis is bound up with the culture of human rights. The book also presents the political grounding of human rights institutions in a way that makes clear that the divide between state's rights and individual rights is written into the history of human rights. It explores the effort on the part of Doctors without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres to reorient humanitarian intervention from acute to chronic situations and the problems entailed in such an endeavour. The book describes uneasy juxtaposition of the ideals of human rights, the realities of state sovereignty, and the cultural contingency of politics.