This Research Agenda maps thought-provoking research trends for the next generation of interdisciplinary human rights scholars in this particularly troubled time. It charts the historic trajectory of scholarship on the international rights regime, looking ahead to emerging areas of inquiry and suggesting alternative methods and perspectives for studying the pursuit of human dignity.

International treaties are the primary means for codifying global human rights standards. However, nation-states are able to make their own choices in how to legally commit to human rights treaties. A state commits to a treaty through four commitment acts: signature, ratification, accession, and succession. These acts signify diverging legal paths with distinct contexts and mechanisms for rights change reflecting legalization, negotiation, sovereignty, and domestic constraints. How a state moves through these actions determines how, when, and to what extent it will comply with the human rights treaties it commits to. Using legal, archival, and quantitative analysis this important book shows that disentangling legal paths to commitment reveals distinct and significant compliance outcomes. Legal context matters for human rights and has important implications for the conceptualization of treaty commitment, the consideration of non-binding commitment, and an optimistic outlook for the impact of human rights treaties.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Written in response to the increasingly conscious effort to develop human rights on a universal scale, this seminal volume focuses on three distinct areas of human rights-public policy, criteria for comparative assessment, and NGO (nongovernmental organization) strategies. The contributors amplify and clarify what has been done in the sphere of hum

This book inductively develops a new typology that identifies and evaluates three principal strategies that have been, and are being, used to extend international human rights protections to new categories of vulnerable populations. The book explicates the evolution and ongoing utility of the three strategies: categorical enlargement, conceptual expansion, and group-conscious universal application. The strategies are elucidated by case studies of nine distinct vulnerable populations: national minorities; those oppressed on the basis of caste; people with albinism; cross-cultural migrants; members of the African diaspora; Roma/Gypsies; persons affected by leprosy; older individuals; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. The book concludes by considering the utility of the three strategies for emerging vulnerable populations. It encourages discourse about the protection of vulnerable populations to move beyond a stale fixation on the texts of treaties and towards a more proactive normative framework that prioritizes the lived experiences of human beings. Extending International Human Rights Protections to Vulnerable Populations will be of key interest to students and scholars of international human rights, to social justice advocates, to human rights practitioners, and to those working with oppressed groups, human rights law, and international relations.