Reframing cultural studies : Human rights as a site of legal-cultural struggles

In the twenty-first century, after more than 60 years of development since its rise to prominence worldwide, the modern human rights system has become a common, even popular, public and policy discourse. It has also generated a complicated matrix of legal institutions, doctrines, litigation practices, and social movements. Across the popular and legal domains, human rights have been a persistent object of analysis by well-recognized social scientists and thinkers, such as Bryan Turner, Will Kymlicka, Armatya Sen, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Martha Nussbaum, Jurgen Habermas, Janet Halley, Patricia Williams, Jack Donnelly, Malcolm Waters, and many others. Using institutional, discourse, and critical approaches, the human rights enterprise has been critiqued by sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, international relations scholars,5 and of course many legal scholars. Yet before the 1970s, almost all academic work on human rights was provided by legal scholars and lawyers, with most work appearing in law journals. Meanwhile, through the 1970s and 1980s, surveys on the teaching of human rights in universities found an overwhelming dominance of the legal perspective.