ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the concept of human rights and presents the history of how it became established as a global imperative. It traces the trajectories of history, thought, and practice leading up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations, and focuses on the primary articles from it that have animated human rights efforts since that time. The chapter introduces the primary tensions in the study and practice of human rights: universal versus culture-specific; global governance versus the sovereignty of states; legal/juridical versus ethical; aspirational versus practical. It presents how human rights work requires insights from multiple areas of knowledge. Human rights work is ongoing, its legal protocols and geopolitical realities continually shifting, and its interventional value regularly contested. The chapter engages the profound impact of human rights discourse and practice in certain locations as well as its problematic disruptive and destabilizing consequence in others.
