The Complexity of Human Rights: From Vernacularization to Quantification
Philip Alston
Feb 2024 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
304
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
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.
About the author
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.
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