Introduction: contesting human rights – pathways of change

Abstract

Human rights scholarship, and human rights themselves, stand at a crossroads: expanding and contracting, deepening and collapsing. In this project, we identify fundamental changes in pathways to the realization of rights and the quest for human dignity. The volume will interrogate the decline of democracy as a guarantee and now often a threat to rights; widening issues of translation and domestication of the international regime; and the decline of a consensus on the ethos of cosmopolitan universalism that may foster backlash – but also seems to spark dialectical debates on inclusion and solidarity. Our inquiry is organized around the following questions which are pivotal to contemporary human rights scholarship: