The Struggle for Human Rights

Abstract

Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and critics of human rights from a variety of disciplines, this book of essays takes as its inspiration and provocation, the forty-year career of Professor Philip Alston as an international human rights advocate, scholar, teacher, and influential participant in the making of the contemporary human rights system. Alston has recently contended that the challenges facing human rights today require us to ‘urgently rethink many of [our] assumptions, re-evaluate [our] strategies, and broaden [our] outreach, while not giving up on the basic principles’. The essays in this volume all engage with this challenge, following the long arc of Alston’s career as a prism to evaluate and critically reflect upon some of the themes that have come to define international human rights practice and scholarship in the past decades. The collection examines foundational debates at the heart of the evolution of the human rights project, contemporary efforts to shape and renew the human rights agenda, and critique and reform of human rights institutions; and reflects on the place of human rights practice in contemporary struggles. The book’s multifaceted and eclectic approach to human rights—its practice and its theory—addresses some of the most urgent questions posed to human rights today.