Full Description
This book examines human rights as political battlefields, spaces that are undergoing constant changes in which political conflicts are expressed by a translation process within networks of interactions. This translation, in turn, contributes to modifying the scope and understanding of human rights. Ultimately, these battlefields express the legitimacy encounter of different versions of human rights in contemporary political practices. The volume thus challenges both the tendency to minimize the changing nature of human rights as well as the struggles emerging from the use of human rights discourses as a legitimization tool. By shifting the focus on what stakeholders do instead of solely on the origin, nature or foundations of human rights, the authors reveal that human rights are not static objects: they are constantly transformed and, as such, affect the horizon of universal rights.
Contents
1. Introduction: Becoming Human Rights Subjects Through New Practices.- Part I The Changing Nature of Human Rights and Their Political Boundaries: New Definitions, Longstanding Debates.- 2. Human Rights As Battlefields: Power Relations, Translations and Transformations—A Theoretical Framework.- 3. The Gender of Human Rights: The French Debate Over "les droits de l'Homme".- 4. The Right to Water: The Political Function of Human Rights as an Expression of the Contradictions in Globalization.- 5. Politics of Neutrality, Human Rights and Armed Struggles: The Turkey Example.- Part II Overcoming the Frontiers of Discrimination and Structural Violence: Intersectional Struggles of Human Rights from Below and Transformations of Political Space.- 6. Child Prisoners, Human Rights, and Human Rights Activism: Beyond 'Emergency' and 'Exceptionality'—An Australian Case Study.- 7. Who is a Child? The Politics of Human Rights, the Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC), and Child Marriage in Nigeria.- 8. Forcibly Sterilized: Peru's Indigenous Women and the Battle for Rights.- 9. Politicization of Rights-Based Development and Marginalization of Human Rights from Below: The Case of Maternal Health Rights in India.- Part III Social Contestation and the Broadening of HumanRights' Meanings.- 10. Indigenous Peoples in Chile: Contesting Violence, Building New Meanings for Rights and Democracy.- 11. Improving HIV/AIDS Drugs Access: A Genealogy of the Human Right to Health from Below.- 12. Internet Access as Human Right: A Dystopian Critique from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.- 13. Conclusion: Changing Human Right Practices and the Battlefields of World Politics.
