Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium

A. Fields

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781403960610
• eBook ISBN: 9780230109254
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book invites people to think more deeply about human rights in an attempt to overcome many of the traditional arguments in the human rights literature. Belden Fields argues that human rights should be reconceptualized to combine philosophical, historical, and empirical-practical dimensions. The best way to understand human rights is not as a set of universal abstractions but rather as a set of past and ongoing social practices rooted in the claims and struggles of peoples against what they consider to be political, economic, or social domination. Fields aptly shows how a people's fight for recognition is often closely tied to rights claims and that these connections to identify can help bridge the gulf between universalistic and cultural relativistic arguments in the human rights debate.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Blank
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Blank
• Contents
• Blank
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Birth of the Human Rights Idea and Its Detractors
• 2 Some Twentieth-Century Reflections on Human Rights
• 3 A Holistic Approach to Human Rights
• 4 The Holders and Violators of Human Rights
• 5 Toward a Political Economy of Human Rights
• 6 The Modern State and Human Rights
• 7 Perpetual War and Human Rights in the United States
• Conclusion: A Holistic Human Rights-Driven Twenty-First Century
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index