Human Rights and Development

The emergence of human rights within development and the evolving relationship has increasingly been brought to bear upon key debates and policies over the last couple of decades. The book provides a critically informed, comprehensive and multi-disciplinary entry-level account and explores three over-arching questions and themes. First, why and how have human rights made this breakthrough? Second, is there agreement on human rights as a concept and how it is being used and understood within diverse development practices at global, national and local levels? Third, how we can gauge its impact upon development outcomes and what does the future hold for human rights and development?

The book will provide students and practitioners with an in-depth understanding of human rights as a development challenge, delineate the responses and alternative critical approaches. This will be done from a theoretical and practical perspective drawing on the full array of social sciences, political theory and law. Readers will be given, therefore, conceptual frameworks and analytical tools for independent investigation of key developments at the interface of the relationship between human rights and development.

The book's originality lies in bringing together a multi-disciplinary approach, and also one as practical as it is theoretically grounded. It will be wide ranging in scope, multi scalar, whether in looking at global policy initiatives or vulnerable groups such as people living with HIV/AIDS, slum dwellers, victims of extra-judicial executions, indigenous peoples and others within diverse low, middle and occasionally high income country settings.