This book provides the first systematic assessment from a human rights law perspective of the landmark contributions of the renowned legal anthropologist, Sally Engle Merry.
What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to present them as a single, universal, and immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them.
Merry and her colleagues transformed human rights thinking by highlighting the process of ‘vernacularization’, which sees rights discourse as being unavoidably dependent upon translation and interpretation. She also warned of the pitfalls of excessive reliance upon statistical and other indicators, through the process of quantification. Here the leading voices in the field assess the significance of these contributions.
Edited by:
Philip Alston (New York University School of Law USA)
Imprint: Hart Publishing
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781509972869
ISBN 10: 1509972862
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 08 February 2024
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
1. Introduction Philip Alston PART I: VERNACULARIZATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS 2. “A Very Murky Process:” Embracing the Indeterminacy of International Justice and Human Rights Richard Ashby Wilson 3. Vernacularization as Anthropological Ethics Mark Goodale 4. Vernacularizing Rights: Indispensable but Dangerous Jack Snyder 5. Globalizing the Indigenous: The Making of International Human Rights from Below César Rodríguez-Garavito 6. Rites of Culture: Legal Frameworks, Indigenous Protocols, and the Circulation of Culture in Australia Fred Myers 7. The Vernacularization of Transitional Justice: Is Transitional Justice Useful in Pre-conflict Settings? Pablo de Greiff 8. Human Rights Don’t Travel by Boat: Responding to Koskenniemi’s Critique of Rights Philip Alston PART II: QUANTIFICATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS 9. Beyond the Vanishing Point: Quantification as Rhetoric in Today’s Antislavery Samuel Martínez 10. The Competitive Pressures of Rankings: Experimental Evidence of Rankings on Domestic Priorities Rush Doshi, Judith Kelley and Beth A. Simmons 11. Visualizing the ‘Women, Peace and Security Agenda’ Hilary Charlesworth 12. The Seductions of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data Margaret Satterthwaite 13. Strategizing the world: Deciding who will be left behind in the Sustainable Development Goal on health Sara L.M. Davis 14. Recommendations in Words and Numbers: Thinking with Sally Engle Merry at the Universal Periodic Review Jane K. Cowan 15. Between Conduct and Counter-Conduct: Human Rights Translation at the Universal Periodic Review Julie Billaud
Philip Alston is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, USA, and a former UN Special Rapporteur on both extreme poverty and human rights, and on extrajudicial executions.
