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This landmark publication is the first to assess the foundational contribution of Sally Engle Merry from the human rights law perspective. What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to regard them as one universal immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them.The ''vernacularization'' of rights; ie a language open to translation and interpretation, the ground-breaking approach of legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry, transformed human rights debates. Here the leading voices in the field assess this approach and show how it is relied on when analysing rights data, under the stewardship of one of the most renowned lawyers of his generation.>
List of contents
1. Introduction
Philip Alston
PART I: VERNACULARIZATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS2. "A Very Murky Process:" Embracing the Indeterminacy of International Justice and Human Rights
Richard Ashby Wilson
3. Vernacularization as Anthropological Ethics
Mark Goodale
4. Vernacularizing Rights: Indispensable but Dangerous
Jack Snyder
5. Globalizing the Indigenous: The Making of International Human Rights from Below
César Rodríguez-Garavito
6. Rites of Culture: Legal Frameworks, Indigenous Protocols, and the Circulation of Culture in Australia
Fred Myers
7. The Vernacularization of Transitional Justice: Is Transitional Justice Useful in Pre-conflict Settings?
Pablo de Greiff
8. Human Rights Don't Travel by Boat: Responding to Koskenniemi's Critique of Rights
Philip Alston
PART II: QUANTIFICATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS9. Beyond the Vanishing Point: Quantification as Rhetoric in Today's Antislavery
Samuel Martínez
10. The Competitive Pressures of Rankings: Experimental Evidence of Rankings on Domestic Priorities
Rush Doshi, Judith Kelley and Beth A. Simmons
11. Visualizing the 'Women, Peace and Security Agenda'
Hilary Charlesworth
12. The Seductions of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data
Margaret Satterthwaite
13. Strategizing the world: Deciding who will be left behind in the Sustainable Development Goal on health
Sara L.M. Davis
14. Recommendations in Words and Numbers: Thinking with Sally Engle Merry at the Universal Periodic Review
Jane K. Cowan
15. Between Conduct and Counter-Conduct: Human Rights Translation at the Universal Periodic Review
Julie Billaud
About the author
Philip Alston is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, USA, and a former UN Special Rapporteur on both extreme poverty and human rights, and on extrajudicial executions.
