Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges

About the Author

Pardis Mahdavi is Dean of Social Sciences in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, USA. She is a non-fiction writer with 20 years of experience as an anthropologist, public health researcher, and expert in sexual politics across the globe. She is the author of five books, including the first book on the sexual politics of modern Iran, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution (2008). A former journalist turned academic, she has written for Ms. Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The Conversation, The Huffington Post, Jaddaliyya, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her work has been covered in documentaries, radio shows, podcasts, and media outlets, including CNN, PBS, NPR, and Publishers Weekly.

Hussein Banai teaches in the Department of International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, USA.

Product Description

At a time when states are increasingly hostile to the international rights regime, human rights activists have turned to non-state and sub-state actors to begin the implementation of human rights law. This complicates the conventional analysis of relationships between local actors, global norms, and cosmopolitanism.

The contributions in this open access collection examine the “lived realities of human rights” and critically engage with debates on gender, sexuality, localism and cosmopolitanism, weaving insights from multiple disciplines into a broader call for interdisciplinary scholarship informed by practice. Overall, the contributors argue that the power of human rights depends on their ability to be continuously broadened and re-imagined in locales around the world. It is only on this basis that human rights can remain relevant and be effectively used to push local, national and international institutions to put in place structural reforms that advance equity and pluralism in these perilous times.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Review

“This book offers a rich repertoire of theoretical and pragmatic tools to address mounting economic, social, political, cultural, and environmental challenges and crises. It makes a compelling call for the need of innovation, experimentation, cross-sectoral collaboration, and multidisciplinary approaches. A must-read for anyone in civil society, academia, or subnational, regional, and national governments grappling with the need for new solutions and analytical frames. Besides constituting a practical toolkit, the case studies and snapshots from across the globe are also a timely and compelling case for the potential utility of human rights on the ground at a moment in which their relevance and impact are questioned.” ―Claudia López Hernández, Mayor of Bogotá

“This volume assembles a diverse array of experience and expertise that compels a re-imagination of human rights to help analysts and practitioners escape conventional boundaries imposed by powerful groups working to divide communities and otherwise preserve the status quo. By questioning state-centrism and the issue silos that compartmentalize policy processes and social movements, contributors address the structural foundations of human rights and point to productive and novel solutions. A range of timely cases shows how human rights advocates are engaging in innovative and replicable strategies to build power, using the largely untapped normative and institutional resources of human rights to respond to deep-seated problems like structural racism, COVID-19, climate change, and austerity.” ―Jackie Smith, Professor of Sociology University of Pittsburgh, USA, and Co-ordinator of the U.S. Human Rights City Alliance

“This volume aims high in terms of both substance and structure. And it achieves. The through-lines of “intersections” and “transformations” link chapters grouped ar