An Unfinished Enterprise: Visions, Reflections, and an Invitation

Abstract

The field of human rights is entering uncharted waters in the early years of the twenty-first century. This Journal is born out of a conviction that such a radical change calls for new forums to help map its contours and set a course for the future. As the practical application of the human rights framework has grown exponentially over the last decade, so has academic interest in the field. Critical assessment of documentation, campaigning, advocacy, mobilization, capacity-building techniques, and programming (as articulated by international and local practitioners and their organizations) is now a crucial component of what might be described as an emerging academic curriculum around human rights practice. Activism ‐ its ethical imperatives, its particular constituencies, its social and political impact, and even its organizational structure ‐ has become the subject of rigorous scrutiny. Currently, the catalogue of academic journals does not offer a dedicated forum to engage with the curriculum of human rights practice. This Journal aims to fill this gap. For the inaugural issue of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, we have asked contributors to reflect from their own particular vantage point on the landscape of contemporary human rights practice. As we write, the human rights mainstream is facing a number of challenges and opportunities. Security concerns and the ‘war on terror’ have meant that human rights groups worldwide are seeking ways to contest the rolling back of hard won civil liberties ‐ as well as ways of addressing abuses by nonstate armed groups. The movement is also exploring ways of using human rights mechanisms to hold a broader range of non-state actors accountable ‐ from multi-national corporations to the World Bank. Such work is driven by globalization, the proliferation of sites of power and what Bauman (1998: 9) terms a ‘disconnection of power from obligations’. International agencies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have extended their remit to consider economic and social rights ‐ an area where there are clear lessons to be learned from local human rights groups and development agencies. Often work in this terrain involves developing complex relations with states, building capacity, and even delivering services as well as monitoring and potentially critiquing performance. It revisits a traditional tension in human rights work, namely the shifting and sometimes double-faced role of the state as both a violator and a protector of human rights. Further examples of this tension include crime and responses to crime, which are increasingly providing a challenge for human rights thinking. Responses need to address both over-policing, when the state