Human Rights in Transition

At a time of intense polarisation about the value of human rights, this edited volume brings together leading scholars in international law and international human rights to reflect upon the present, the recent and distant past, and the future of human rights.

Human Rights in Transition combines rich theoretical reflections with practice-informed observations about human rights and their potential futures. The book eschews the polarized and one-sided approach which can too easily dominate either side of the debate. Instead, drawing on deep learning and a range of engagements with human rights institutions, the authors develop a prognosis for contours of human rights law and politics, and its impacts, in the current conjuncture.

The book charts new ways to consider human rights in the concrete areas of specific rights such as social and economic rights, institutional settings (the EU and the UN treaty bodies), and agendas, namely feminism and climate change. The results are a very rich set of essays which delve deeply into specific topics in human rights law and practice, and work outwards from a rigorous analysis of the past and present, to an argument about how to think about the future.

Sensitive and thought-provoking, this book will fast become a defining volume on questions about the role of human rights in the past, present, and future and will remain valuable to anyone interested in understanding, diagnosing, and ultimately acting to help bring about, the possible futures of human rights.

Nehal Bhuta, Chair of Public International Law, Edinburgh Law School

Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute’s Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations, and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press series in The History and Theory of International Law.