FOREWORD: THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS SCHOLARSHIP (original) (raw)
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Since 1948, the study of human rights has been dominated by legal scholarship that has sought to investigate the development of human rights law, emerging jurisprudence, regional systems, the decisions and recommendations of human rights mechanisms and institutions and to a lesser extent the 'compliance gaps' between state commitments and actions. Even so, in all of these spheres there are elements that cannot be fully understood through a purely legal lens, moreover, if we understand 'human rights' more broadly, and look into the practical world of human rights work and human rights discourse, advocacy and activism, then we need to go beyond legal analysis. Indeed, to understand the world of human rights in both theory and practice requires interdisciplinary insight, as it covers an enormous range of social, political, economic and environmental issues. In this chapter, I will outline the contributions of two disciplines that were slow to contribute to the field of human rights but which offer vitally important insights that can guide both academic research and human rights advocacy.
The international human rights movement faces a context of uncertainty due to: (i) the rise of a multipolar world with new emerging powers, (ii) the emergence of new actors and legal and political strategies, (iii) the challenges and opportunities presented by information and communication technologies, as well as (iv) the threat posed by extreme environmental degradation. The author first reviews the critical literature on human rights, highlighting how these transformations are unsettling prevailing structures and practices in the human rights field such as: the hierarchical nature of traditional human rights discourse and movement, asymmetry between North and South organisations, over-legalisation of human rights language, and the lack of concrete assessments of human rights outcomes. The author identifies two responses to these critiques among human rights practitioners: denial that defends traditional boundaries and gatekeepers, on one hand, and reflexive reconstruction that reimagines practices and boundaries to generate productive symbiosis among diverse human rights actors, on the other. Overall, the author favours the latter approach, arguing that human rights practitioners should strive to create a human rights ecosystem. This approach seeks strengthen the collective capacity of the human rights movement by harnessing its diversity. Thus, a human rights ecosystem prioritizes collaboration and symbiosis with a much more varied range of actors and issues coupled with more decentralized and network-based forms of collaboration than that of previous decades.