The Practice of Human Rights

Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University. Professor of Anthropology and Law and Society at New York University.

• Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale; Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry; 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein; 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve; Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader; 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale; 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed; Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry; 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson; 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren; Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal; 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale; 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell; 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.

'This collection makes a compelling case for human rights as a new focus of anthropological research, evidence of a discipline in lively transition. Even more fundamentally, the range of projects and commitments expressed in the essays point to key locations - at once political, ethical, and experiential - in the new legal geography of globalism, as the contributors map the uneven horizons and pathways along which human rights are today asserted, defended, and contested.' Carol Greenhouse, Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University