Introduction: Social Science and Human Rights
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Description
A considerable gap remains between the international human rights regime’s aspirations and its achievements. Narrowing this gap is one of the central challenges for legal and policy actors, and it animates a growing body of scholarship. International lawyers and policy experts have been central to this effort, naturally enough. But our contention is that this gap cannot be closed with the tools of traditional legal and policy analysis alone. So we set out to find leaders in a wide range of disciplines to help us identify innovative research that could have a major and lasting influence on the study and promotion of human rights. The concept for this book began with a question: could recent social scientific study of individual and organizational behavior—research that has had a transformative impact on many disciplines, including politics, economics, communications, psychology, sociology—similarly transform the field of human rights? We sought specifically to tap into cutting-edge empirical research that has generally not addressed human rights as a descriptive matter nor converted descriptive analyses into policy recommendations. Of course, it has long been recognized that human rights issues cut across many facets of life. The field of human rights studies is, according to some schools of thought, a quintessential humanist subject. Many human rights issues have seen rich expression in film, art, and literature—currently on the syllabi of many human rights courses. But our aim was not to add to the considerable scholarship about the inherent interdisciplinary nature of human rights as a subject. Instead, we began with the assumption that the challenges faced by the human rights regime demand reflective advocacy and institutional design crafted with the benefit of the academy’s most robust empirical insights. We were accordingly interested in research insights on topics such as cognitive errors in decision making, psychological and evolutionary pressures for good and evil, the influence of social structure on collective beliefs, effects of social marketing campaigns in creating individual preferences, and modes of governance in effectuating resistance and compliance. A group of extraordinary, leading scholars from across the academy agreed to participate in this initiative. This book is the result. All the contributors accepted our challenge to present research related to the book’s core objectives, yet many of their chapters do not include the words “human rights.” This is by design. The chapters in this volume were selected because they suggest new avenues for human rights research, and could lead to important advocacy tools or policy reforms in the human rights arena. In order to capture the benefit of research that does not directly deal with human rights, we did not ask the authors to extend their work to that topic artificially. The authors employ different empirical methodologies and exhibit different areas of specialized knowledge. Those differences explain, in significant part, how explicitly each author chose to analyze implications for the human rights field. To expand the potential reach of each contribution, we drafted an editors’ Coda for each chapter. The Codas take the findings from the relevant chapter as inspiration for potential human rights regime designs. In short, our aim in this volume is to provide readers with an overview of the exciting range of empirical insights drawn from the social sciences and with a deep sense of the implications for the human rights regime. The volume can therefore be read as a basis for future academic exploration and for developing new tools for promoting human rights. We view this project as another step toward an interdisciplinary revolution in human rights scholarship and practice.
Source Publication
Understanding Social Action, Promoting Human Rights
Source Editors/Authors
Ryan Goodman, Derek Jinks, Andrew K. Woods
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Goodman, Ryan; Jinks, Derek; and Woods, Andrew K., "Introduction: Social Science and Human Rights" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 741.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/741
