This collection makes a compelling case for human rights as a new focus of anthropological research, evidence of a discipline in lively transition. Even more fundamentally, the range of projects and commitments expressed in the essays point to key locations - at once political, ethical, and experiential - in the new legal geography of globalism, as the contributors map the uneven horizons and pathways along which human rights are today asserted, defended, and contested.

A compelling book. The anthropologists here are also interdisciplinarists. The reconfiguration of institutions, resistance movements and everyday expectations brought about by the very idea of human rights demands a reconfiguring of approaches from the social observer. The authors shrink from neither the questions nor the answers thrown up by human rights efforts in practice. By focusing on issues of violence, power, vulnerability and people's ambivalence, they offer insights that mould a new kind of realism.

"Human rights" has become one of the key ideas of contemporary world-making. This book places it in an open intellectual landscape, where well-informed scholars come together to engage in close scrutiny of its translation into political and legal practice, in a wide range of settings from the Chiapas of the Zapatistas to the Myanmar of the military junta. Their global reach and theoretical sophistication contribute impressively to the vitality of the idea itself, and to the growth of understanding of its uses.

This volume will introduce the reader to some of the main issues and approaches in contemporary thinking on human rights being done in social science circles, primarily, but not exclusively, by anthropologists, and among the latter primarily, but not exclusively, those concerned with the anthropology of law.

Human rights offer the prevailing global approach to social justice, but how they work is far less clear. Through ethnographic case studies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this volume of essays by leading scholars offers a rich and varied overview of human rights in practice.