Human Rights at the Crossroads

Mark Goodale is Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University, and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author or editor of seven other books, including, most recently, Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (2010, with Kamari Maxine Clarke), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (2009), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (2007, with Sally Engle Merry). Professor Goodale is currently at work on two new books: the first is a study of constitutional revolution and radical social change based on research in Bolivia since 2005; the second is a set of essays that explore the role of moral creativity within the practice of human rights.

• Acknowledgements ; Chapter 1: Human Rights After the Post-Cold War (Mark Goodale) ; Part I: Regrounding the Idea of Human Rights ; Chapter 2: Human Rights and the Politics of Contestation (Michael Goodhart) ; Chapter 3: Why Act Towards One Another "In a Spirit of Brotherhood"?: The Grounds of Human Rights (Michael J. Perry) ; Chapter 4: An Overlapping Consensus on Human Rights and Human Dignity (Ari Kohen) ; Chapter 5: The "Right to Have Rights" to the Rescue: From Human Rights to Global Democracy (Eva Erman) ; Part II: Human Rights and the Problem of the State ; Chapter 6: Prosecuting Human Rights Violations: Universal Jurisdiction and the Crime of Torture (Tobias Kelly) ; Chapter 7: Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights (Karen Faulk) ; Part III: Politics and the Practice of Human Rights ; Chapter 8: Whose Vernacular?: Translating Human Rights in Local Contexts (Daniel Goldstein) ; Chapter 9: Sacred Graves and Human Rights (Adam Rosenblatt) ; Chapter 10: Human Rights Monitoring and the Question of Indicators (Sally Engle Merry) ; Part IV: Confronting Pathologies of Power ; Chapter 11: The Paradox of Perpetration: A View From the Cambodian Genocide (Alexander Laban Hinton) ; Chapter 12: "Why We Care": Constructing Solidarity (Alison Brysk) ; Chapter 13: Historical Amnesia, Genocide, and the Rejection of Universal Human Rights (Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann) ; Part V: Reproduction in the Age of Human Rights ; Chapter 14: The Law's Legal Anthropology (Ronald Niezen) ; Chapter 15: Cutting Human Rights Down to Size (Harri Englund) ; Chapter 16: Acceptable Uses of People (Pheng Cheah) ; Index

We are challenged to identify, specify the possibilities, the constraints and indeed the contradictions that may arise when we are asked to put our Human Rights rhetoric to the test within economic frameworks, some of which may be unaccountable. In the human rights discourse old issues have been joined by new ones, challenging yet full of promise for scholarship and practice. Among the scholars is Professor Mark Goodale, who edited a recent work that carries the title 'Human Rights at the Crossroads'. That work shows that the issues have not gone away. They remain, they extend and they become more complex.