Reinventing Human Rights offers a bold argument: that only a radically reformulated approach to human rights will prove adequate to confront and overcome the most consequential global problems. Charting a new path―away from either common critiques of the various incapacities of the international human rights system or advocacy for the status quo―Mark Goodale offers a new vision for human rights as a basis for collective action and moral renewal.
Goodale’s proposition to reinvent human rights begins with a deep unpacking of human rights institutionalism and political theory in order to give priority to the “practice of human rights.” Rather than a priori claims to universality, he calls for a working theory of human rights defined by “translocality,” a conceptual and ethical grounding that invites people to form alliances beyond established boundaries of community, nation, race, or religious identity.
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This book will serve as both a concrete blueprint and source of inspiration for those who want to preserve human rights as a key framework for confronting our manifold contemporary challenges, yet who agree―for many different reasons―that to do so requires radical reappraisal, imaginative reconceptualization, and a willingness to reinvent human rights as a cross-cultural foundation for both empowerment and social action.
“Reinventing Human Rights is a major original statement that transcends old debates and opens tremendous new possibilities. Mark Goodale’s ambitious, intrepid move is to neither embrace nor vilify human rights but to demand a new vision of them, for a translocal and transformative politics in a diverse and unequal world.”
Samuel Moyn, Yale University, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
“Reinventing Human Rights captures the emergent conditions we must address―whether we want to or not. Mark Goodale opens us up to settings often overlooked, but that increasingly signal their presence.”
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
Mark Goodale 