View article

In the 21st century, the human rights repertoire established during the post-war years is necessary but not sufficient for global governance of an expanding range of abuses. In the second generation, human rights is caught between realist, structural and multicultural critiques that rights are not enough. On the one hand, critics contend that the classic corpus of rights does not attend to the most vulnerable populations and emerging forms of exploitation–and conversely, that even conventional rights cannot be enforced or fulfilled. To meet these challenges, this project analyses dynamic expansions of the norms and mechanisms of human rights that have emerged in practice. We will chronicle the mobilization of new actors, new rights claims, new institutions and channels of leverage, and new modes of accountability.

We respond to the challengers with affirmative evidence of new mechanisms for enforcing existing rights and new strategies for claiming rights for new populations and processes. As we examine the potential and limitations of these expansions of the horizon of human rights, we will assess how an expanded notion of human rights can lead to new possibilities for reform–and where it still falls short. Our analysis is multi-disciplinary, multi-method, with balanced attention to civil-political and social-economic rights, and draws from a full range of global experience, including cases from Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America.