Collective cultural rights are commonly perceived as the most neglected or least developed category of human rights. Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective endeavours to challenge this view and offers a comprehensive, critical analysis of recent developments in distinct areas of international law and jurisprudence, from every region of the world, in relation to the scope, legal content, and enforceability of such rights. Leading international scholars explore the conceptualisation and operationalisation of collective cultural rights as human rights, encompassing community rights, and discuss the ways in which such rights may collide with other, mostly individual, human rights. As such, Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective offers a cross-cutting and original overview on how the protection, recognition and enforcement of collective cultural rights affect the development, changes and formation of general international law norms.

An analysis of the relationships between law, custom, gender, marriage and justice among northern Tanzania’s Maasai communities. When, where, why, and by whom is law used to force desired social change in the name of justice? Why has culture come to be seen as inherently oppressive to women? In this finely crafted book, Dorothy L. Hodgson examines the history of legal ideas and institutions in Tanzania—from customary law to human rights—as specific forms of justice that often reflect elite ideas about gender, culture, and social change. Drawing on evidence from Maasai communities, she explores how the legacies of colonial law-making continue to influence contemporary efforts to create laws, codify marriage, criminalize FGM, and contest land grabs by state officials. Despite the easy dismissal by elites of the priorities and perspectives of grassroots women, she shows how Maasai women have always had powerful ways to confront and challenge injustice, express their priorities, and reveal the limits of rights-based legal ideals. “This is a book that only Dorothy Hodgson could have written, with her decades of work in Tanzania, vast networks in Maasailand, and deep ethnographic knowledge, combined with her deftness in working through more theoretical work on gender and human rights. Closely argued, conceptually sharp, and engagingly written.” —Brett Shadle, author of Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890-1970 “Dorothy Hodgson asks a number of important and clearly articulated questions, and provides thoughtful answers to them using a hybrid of historical and anthropological methodologies that combine in-depth case studies with more empirically-informed macro-level reflection. A concise and useful resource in the undergraduate as well as the graduate classroom.” —Priya Lal, author of African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World “Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture makes a significant contribution to the study of law in East Africa and elsewhere among colonized peoples, and it should be required reading not only for academics interested in such matters but for activists and policymakers.” —American Anthropologist “Hodgson’s book is both rich in detail and broad in its implications for understanding struggles for justice for marginalised groups. It deserves the attention of students and scholars of African studies, anthropology, history, political science and women’s and gender studies.” —Journal of Modern African Studies

Drawing from a comprehensive review of legal instruments, practice, jurisprudence and literature, and using a multidisciplinary approach, this unique book brings forth the full spectrum of cultural rights, as individual and collective human rights, and offers a compelling vision for public policy.

Challenging questions arise in the effort to adequately protect the cultural rights of individuals and communities worldwide, not the least of which are questions concerning the very understanding of ‘culture’. In Cultural Rights in International Law and Discourse: Contemporary Challenges and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Pok Yin S. Chow offers an account of the present-day challenges to the articulation and implementation of cultural rights in international law. Through examining how ‘culture’ is conceptualised in different stages of contemporary anthropology, the book explores how these understandings of ‘culture’ enable us to more accurately put issues of cultural rights into perspective. The book attempts to provide analytical exits to existing conundrums and dilemmas concerning the protections of culture, cultural heritage and cultural identity.

A collection on cultural law that demonstrates efficacy of comparative, international, and indigenous law in the context of culture-related issues.

Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in the scale and importance of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights), culminating in the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in December 2008. The Protocol gives individuals and groups the ability to bring complaints about rights violations before the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Against this background, this book focuses on the question of how fundamental socio-economic human rights enshrined in international law are defined, interpreted, understood, and implemented. It assesses how effective efforts to realize ESC rights have been and investigates the contemporary challenges obstructing their protection. It sets out the impact of the global financial crisis and austerity measures, the human rights responsibilities of corporations, and trends in the justiciability of those rights at the national and international level. The interrelationship between ESC rights and other legal regimes such as trade and investment law, environmental law, international criminal law, and international humanitarian law is also thoroughly examined. After an introduction by the editors the book contains seventeen chapters looking at the main questions which shape the progressive realization of ESC rights and their monitoring mechanisms. The authors of the chapters, both scholars and practitioners, adopt interdisciplinary approaches that move beyond traditional analyses of ESC rights. In doing so, they clarify and illuminate multiple aspects of the law by bringing together the different aspects of ESC rights, restating the challenges they face, and assessing the progress that has been made in expanding their adoption.

This book provides an innovative contribution to the emerging field of culture and development through the lens of cultural rights, arguing in favour of a fruitful dialogue between human rights, development studies, critical cultural studies, and concerns about the protection and preservation of cultural diversity. It breaks with established approaches by introducing the themes of aesthetics, embodiment, narrative and peace studies into the field of culture and development, and in doing so, proposes both an expanded conception of cultural rights and a holistic vision of development that not only includes these elements in a central way, but which argues that genuine sustainability must include the cultural dimension, including the notion of cultural justice as recognition, protection and respect extended to the many expressions of human imagination in this world.