Human rights work takes place everywhere, every day, and in every way, but good intentions don’t always bring the intended results. Messy Ethics in Human Rights Work invites readers into a series of overlapping conversations, as activists, researchers, and others consider the complex messiness of ethics in practice and the implications for human rights work in academia and beyond. Although formal ethics guidelines can be useful, their focus on seeing the “messiness” as a problem rather than reality often misses the point. Human rights work entails intricate relationships of social, political, and economic power and responsibility that emerge only in the process of doing the work itself. Contributors share their ethical dilemmas: How did they evaluate a situation and the options to resolve it? Where did or didn’t they seek guidance? What would they do differently next time? This thoughtful work proposes that personal reflection and sometimes uncomfortable discussions are essential components of critical human rights practice.

Providing a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary analysis of key issues in the field, this topical Research Handbook explores asylum and migration policy in a global context. Chapters consider national, regional and international responses to refugees and forced migration, examining the evolution of asylum and refugee policies and why gaps remain in protection.

Tony Coady explores the challenges that morality poses to politics. He confronts the complex intellectual tradition known as realism, which seems to deny any relevance of morality to politics, especially international politics. He argues that, although realism has many serious faults, it has lessons to teach us: in particular, it cautions us against the dangers of moralism in thinking about politics and particularly foreign affairs. Morality must not be confused with moralism: Coady characterizes various forms of moralism and sketches their distorting influence on a realistic political morality. He seeks to restore the concept of ideals to an important place in philosophical discussion, and to give it a particular pertinence in the discussion of politics. He deals with the fashionable idea of 'dirty hands', according to which good politics will necessarily involve some degree of moral taint or corruption. Finally, he examines the controversial issue of the role of lying and deception in politics. Along the way Coady offers illuminating discussion of historical and current political controversies. This lucid book will provoke and stimulate anyone interested in the interface of morality and politics.

Human rights work takes place everywhere, every day, and in every way, but good intentions don’t always bring the intended results. Messy Ethics in Human Rights Work invites readers to engage in a series of overlapping conversations about the complex messiness of ethics in practice, and the implications for human rights work in academia and beyond. Contributors share their ethical dilemmas. How did they evaluate a situation and ways to resolve it? Where did or didn’t they seek guidance? What might they have done differently? This thoughtful work proposes that personal reflection and sometimes uncomfortable discussion are essential components of critical human rights practice.

In recent years ever-increasing concerns about ethical dimensions of fieldwork practice have forced anthropologists and other social scientists to radically reconsider the nature, process, and outcomes of fieldwork: what should we be doing, how, for whom, and to what end? In this volume, practitioners from across anthropological disciplines—social and biological anthropology and primatology—come together to question and compare the ethical regulation of fieldwork, what is common to their practices, and what is distinctive to each discipline. Contributors probe a rich variety of contemporary questions: the new, unique problems raised by conducting fieldwork online and via email; the potential dangers of primatological fieldwork for locals, primates, the environment, and the fieldworkers themselves; the problems of studying the military; and the role of ethical clearance for anthropologists involved in international health programs. The distinctive aim of this book is to develop of a transdisciplinary anthropology at the methodological, not theoretical, level.

Now in its third edition, Human Rights and Social Work explores how the principles of human rights inform contemporary social work practice. Jim Ife considers the implications of social work's traditional Enlightenment heritage and the possibilities of 'post-Enlightenment' practice in a way that is accessible, direct and engaging. The world has changed significantly since the publication of the first edition in 2000 and this book is situated firmly within the context of present-day debates, concerns and crises. Ife covers the importance of relating human rights to the non-human world, as well as the consequences of political and ecological uncertainty. Featuring examples, further readings and a glossary, readers are able to identify and investigate the important issues and questions arising from human rights and social work. Now more than ever, Human Rights and Social Work is an indispensable resource for students, scholars and practitioners alike.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.