What’s New in Doctoral Human Rights Research? A Collection of Critical Literature Reviews, Vol. II

This book collects critical state-of-the-art analyses prepared by doctoral students enrolled in the international joint programme in “Human Rights, Society, and Multi-level Governance”. The book mirrors the variety of subjects and methods that are characterising the current scientific debate on human rights, responding to a specific call: to reenact the concepts, percepts, images, narratives, emotions, stories and practices that will frame human rights in the XXI Century. Situatedness, local knowledge, context-dependent variables and predicaments prevail over normative-driven analyses and general accounts. Country-specific case studies are prioritised vis-à-vis generalisations and world-wide surveys: literature reviews are presented concerning migrants’ rights issues in Italy and in the EU, and transitional justice in the Balkans. In the same vein, inquiries addressing the determinants of the very subject of rights – the human being/human body, the individuals most affected by welfare state disruption – and tackling the “irrational” world of religions, are particularly significative, as they explore areas that the legal rationalism of human rights grammar largely neglected in the past. Similarly, a renovated attention at human rights as a persuading strategy, rather than as a set of irresistible legal obligations, underpins the interest in human rights education that crosscuts the contributions in this volume.