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Until recent years the study and, to a considerable extent, the practice of human rights was dominated by lawyers. The cause of human rights owes a great debt to them. There is a danger, however, that excessive attention to human-rights law distorts our understanding of human rights. This book seeks to put law in its place by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. The concept of human rights has a history marked by philosophical controversies. Knowing that history and understanding those controversies illuminate the state of human rights today. Since the end of the Second World War, the concept has been incorporated into a large body of international and national law, but it has also been at the heart of political conflicts. The law is important, but understanding human rights requires us to understand its politics. Law and politics do not exhaust the human-rights field. The other social sciences – such as sociology, anthropology, international relations and economics – are essential to our appreciation of human-rights problems and their possible solutions. Human rights is an interdisciplinary concept par excellence.

We begin this inquiry by tracing, in chapter two, the historical emergence of human rights. The story continues in chapter three by examining its gradual acceptance by the international community. Chapter four investigates the principal theoretical justifications of and debates about the concept. The distinctive contribution of the social sciences is then surveyed in chapter five. In chapter six the place of human rights in national and international politics is analysed, and the respective roles of international institutions, governments and NGOs evaluated. The political economy of human rights forms the subject of chapter seven, with special attention to development, globalization, business corporations, international financial institutions, climate change, new technologies and pandemics. Much-debated questions about the supposed universality of human rights and its relation to actual human differences are addressed in chapter eight, with particular emphasis on cultural minorities, indigenous peoples, and the rights of women, children, sexual minorities, disabled persons, migrants and refugees. We conclude, in chapter nine, with reflections on the history of human rights, their current status and their likely future. One of the few certainties is that understanding human rights will be essential to understanding the world that we live in for a long time to come.