
We regularly get requests from students and activists looking for suggested readings on particular topics, so I thought it might be a good idea to supplement our critical concepts page with critical bibliographies on various important subjects for critical legal studies. With Ben Golder, Jessica Whyte and some really helpful crowd-sourcing from facebook, we have put together a first and entirely partial list of critical human rights books. Apologies for the books that we have missed. Please suggest the (no doubt many) titles that we have forgotten or missed in the comments. At some stage in the future I will revisit the page and consolidate and update, but I’m afraid it wont be very regularly. Finally, if you are interested, there are a few haphazard inclusion/exclusion notes at the end of the piece.
A
Agamben, Giorgio, Means without End
Allen, Lori, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights
Arendt, Hannah, Origins of Totalitarianism
B
Badiou, Alain, Ethics
Barreto Jose-Manuel, (ed), Human Rights from a Third World Perspective
Baxi, Upendra, Human Rights in a Post Human World
Baxi, Upendra, The Future of Human Rights
Belgrade Circle, (eds) The Politics of Human Rights
Bowring, Bill, The Degredation of the International Legal Order
Brown, Wendy, States of Injury
C
Campbell, Tom, The Left and Rights
Cheah, Pheng, Inhuman Conditions
D
Darian-Smith, Eve, Religion, Race, Rights
Davis, Benjamin P, Choose Your Bearing
Dhawan, Nikita (ed.) Decolonizing Enlightment
Douzinas, Costas, & Gearty, Conor, (eds.), The Meanings of Rights
Douzinas, Costas, Human Rights and Empire
Douzinas, Costas, The End of Human Rights
E
Eckel, Jan & Moyn, Samuel, (eds.) The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s
Englund, Harri, Prisoners of Freedom
Evans, Tony, Human Rights in the Global Political Economy
Evans, Tony, The Politics of Human Rights
G
Golder, Ben, Foucault and the Politics of Rights
Goodale, Mark, Human Rights at the Crossroad
Goodale, Mark, Surrendering to Utopia
Grear, Anna, Redirecting Human Rights
Gundogdu, Ayten, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights
H
Halme, Miia, Human Rights in Action: Learning Expert Knowledge
Halme-Tuomisaari, Miia, & Slotte, Pamela, Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, Human rights in the twentieth century
Honig, Bonnie, Emergency Politics
Hopgood, Stephen, The Endtimes of Human Rights
Hunt, Alan, Rights and Social Movements: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies
I
Ife, Jim, Human Rights From Below
K
Kateb, George, Human Dignity
Kennedy, David, Dark Sides of Virtue
Keys, Barbra, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s
L
Langlois, Anthony, The Politics of Justice and Human Rights
Lechte, John, & Newman, Saul, Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights
Lefebvre, Alexander, Human Rights as a Way of Life
Lefort, Claude, The Political Forms of Modern Society
M
Marx, Karl, On the Jewish Question
Meister, Robert, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights
Merry, Sally Engle Human Rights and Gender Violence
Moyn, Samuel, Human Rights and the Uses of History
Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia
Mutua, Makau, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique
O
O’Connell, Paul, Masking Barbarism: Human Rights in the Contemporary Global Order
O’Connell, Paul, Vindicating Socio-Economic Rights
Orford, Anne, Reading Humanitarian Intervention
P
Perugini, Nicola, & Gordon, Neve The Human Right to Dominate
R
Rajagopal, B, International Law from Below
Roberts, Christopher, The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights
Rogers,Juliet, Law’s Cut on the Body of Human Rights
S
Shivji, Issa, The Concept of Human Rights in Africa
Shuler, Jack, Calling Out for Liberty
Slaughter, Joseph, Human Rights, Inc.
Speed, Shannon, Rights in Rebellion
Strauss, Leo, Natural Law and History
V
Vaneigem, Raoul, A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings
W
Wall, Illan rua, Human Rights and Constituent Power
Whyte, Jessica, Catastrophe and Redemption
Inclusion Notes
Firstly, I excluded ‘non-critical’ works. This is a very controversial question, for instance you won’t find Benhabib’s Dignity in Adversity (although it was suggested. I’m not going to say anything more about it for fear that this will turn into some sort of interminable definitional question about ‘what is critique’. If someone wants to do a more inclusive bibliography that takes in liberal, communitarian, and deliberative accounts then that is fine, but that is not the purpose of this list. The second difficult question was whether to include books where only a small part of the topic was human rights, like Lefort’s The Political Forms of Modern Society or Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. In the end, I included books where I thought their critiques were important to subsequent debates or were overlooked gems. I excluded where the books were really about other subjects, and human rights was just a small element that was being tied into the different subject or argument. I have generally avoided edited collections as well, with a few exceptions where there were important additions to the debate. There are no articles/blogs, but this is an additional (albeit massive) project that would be well worth undertaking – volunteers please be in contact and we can try to coordinate something.
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