With special reference to current issues focussing on women in changing India.

Rebecca J. Cook and the contributors to this volume seek to analyze how international human rights law applies specifically to women in various cultures worldwide, and to develop strategies to promote equitable application of human rights law at the international, regional, and domestic levels. Their essays present a compelling mixture of reports and case studies from various regions in the world, combined with scholarly assessments of international law as these rights specifically apply to women.

Global Intersectionality and Contemporary Human Rights argues for an expansive definition of human rights, one that encompasses the harm caused by multiple, intersecting forms of subordination. Intersectionality theory posits that aspects of identity, such as race and gender, are mutually constitutive and intersect to create unique experiences of discrimination and subordination. Perpetrators of sexual violence in armed conflict, of example, often target women based on both gender and ethnicity. Human rights remedies that fail to capture the intersectional nature of human rights violations do not offer comprehensive redress to victims. This title explores the influence of intersectionality theory on human rights in the modern era and traces the evolution of intersectionality as a theoretical framework in the United States and around the world. It draws upon feminist theory and human rights jurisprudence to argue that scholars and activists have under-utilized intersectionality theory in the global discourse of human rights. As the central intergovernmental organization charged with the protection of human rights, the United Nations has been slow to embrace the insights gained from intersectionality theory. This work argues that the United Nations and other human rights organizations must more actively embrace intersectionality as an analytical framework in order to fully address the complexity of human rights violations around the world.

Women's Human Rights: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalising Age explores the emergence of transnational, UN-oriented, feminist advocacy for womens human rights, especially over the past three decades. It identifies the main feminist influences that have shaped the movement liberal, radical, third world and cosmopolitan and exposes how the Western, legalist, state-centric, and liberal biases of mainstream human rights discourse impede the realisation of human rights in womens lives everywhere. The book traces the evolution of the womens human rights movement through an examination of its key issues, debates, and practical interventions in international law and policy arenas. This includes efforts to: Develop global gender equality norms via the UN Womens Convention Frame violence against women as a human rights issue Address gender-based crimes in conflict situations, include women in conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction, and challenge new forms of militarism Highlight the gendered human rights dimensions of widening inequalities in a context of neo-liberal globalisation Develop human rights responses to anti-feminist fundamentalist movements with a focus on reproductive and sexual rights Ultimately, Women's Human Rights reaffirms a commitment to critically reinterpreted universal human rights principles and demonstrates the vital role that bottom-up, transnational movements play in making them a reality in women's lives.

Institutional and political developments since the end of the Cold War have led to a revival of public interest in, and anxiety about, international law. Liberal international law is appealed to as offering a means of constraining power and as representing universal values. This book brings together scholars who draw on jurisprudence, philosophy, legal history and political theory to analyse the stakes of this turn towards international law. Contributors explore the history of relations between international law and those it defines as other - other traditions, other logics, other forces, and other groups. They explore the archive of international law as a record of attempts by scholars, bureaucrats, decision-makers and legal professionals to think about what happens to law at the limits of modern political organisation. The result is a rich array of responses to the question of what it means to speak and write about international law in our time.

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and reproductive rights.

Bringing together some of the most respected scholars in the field, including Inderpal Grewal, Leela Fernandes, Leigh Gilmore, Susan Koshy, Patrice McDermott, and Sidonie Smith, Just Advocacy? sheds light on the often overlooked ways that women and children are further subjugated when political or humanitarian groups represent them solely as victims and portray the individuals that are helping them as paternal saviors.

This edited collection offers a transnational and comparative approach to understanding anti-gender mobilizations in Europe.

Exercising Human Rights investigates why human rights are not universally empowering and why this damages people attempting to exercise rights. It takes a new approach in looking at humans as the subject of human rights rather than the object and exposes the gendered and ethnocentric aspects of violence and human subjectivity in the context of human rights. Using an innovative visual methodology, Redhead shines a new critical light on human rights campaigns in practice. She examines two cases in-depth. First, she shows how Amnesty International depicts women negatively in their 2004 ‘Stop Violence against Women Campaign’, revealing the political implications of how images deny women their agency because violence is gendered. She also analyses the Oka conflict between indigenous people and the Canadian state. She explains how the Canadian state defined the Mohawk people in such a way as to deny their human subjectivity. By looking at how the Mohawk used visual media to communicate their plight beyond state boundaries, she delves into the disjuncture between state sovereignty and human rights. This book is useful for anyone with an interest in human rights campaigns and in the study of political images.

Since the late 1990s, development institutions have increasingly used the language of rights in their policy and practice. This special issue on feminist perspectives on politics of rights explores the strategies, tensions and challenges associated with ‘rights work’ in a variety of settings. Articles on the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, East and South Asia explore the dilemmas that arise for feminist praxis in these diverse locations, and address the question of what rights can contribute to struggles for gender justice. Exploring the intersection of formal rights – whether international human rights conventions, constitutional rights or national legislation – with the everyday realities of women in settings characterized by entrenched gender inequalities and poverty, plural legal systems and cultural norms that can constitute formidable obstacles to realizing rights. The contributors suggest that these sites of struggle can create new possibilities and meanings – and a politics of rights animated by demands for social and gender justice.