ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the relevance of legal theory to human rights research, a dimension that is often left unarticulated and unacknowledged. It begins by reflecting on the relationship between the type of research questions to which researchers are drawn and the underlying theoretical assumptions that those questions engage. It then moves on to introduce a number of popular perspectives that are often invoked in the human rights context, including naturalism, positivism, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, feminism and other critical approaches. In doing so, it challenges readers to recognize, externalize and critique the theories engaged by their work, in order to encourage more methodologically rigorous and self-aware scholarship.
