ABSTRACT
At first sight, a concern with rights and empowerment might seem removed from the traditional domain of the human geographer. However, this is to ignore an undercurrent of geographic research that has long placed such issues at its centre. Such an interest can be traced to several sources, including the nuanced and often overlooked writings of Peter Kropotkin (1885), who both wrote on the relation among law, space and rights and appealed to a broader conception of human rights and social justice. Marxist and anarchist geographers of the 1970s also placed human rights and social justice at the centre of their moral and political vision (Harvey, 1973), whilst a concern with distributional rights underlay the work of those such as David Smith (1977). Significantly, a concern with rights has recently been revived and extended. Discussions have centered on the link between locality and rights (Smith, 1989), emancipation and public and private spaces (Rose, 1990), local conflicts between different conceptions of rights (Clark, 1990; Mitchell, 1992), citizenship (Fyfe, 1993) and the tensions between universal principles of social justice and the post–modern critique (Harvey, 1992).
