Dr Anna Chadwick
Human Rights, Poverty and Capitalism
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“In this chapter, I examine the interplay between state obligations to eradicate extreme poverty and realize socio-economic rights under International Human Rights Law (IHRL) and some of the legal regimes and economic paradigms that sustain global capitalism. Advocates of rights-based solutions to poverty tend to focus on how mechanisms to advance relevant categories of human rights, above all socio-economic rights, can be strengthened. Their analyses typically ignore questions of how other legal rights and legal regimes may function as obstacles to the eradication of poverty and the realization of human rights. I contest the long-standing assumption of IHRL that the goal of realizing human rights—and socio-economic rights in particular—is compatible with the operations of global capitalism, and I seek to demonstrate that the legal regimes necessary to sustain capitalist political economy are, in fact, routinely productive of poverty and of violations of socio-economic rights.”
GCILS Working Papers
Law and the Political Economy of Hunger
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This book is an inquiry into the role of law in the contemporary political economy of hunger. In the work of many international institutions, governments, and NGOs, law is represented as a solution to the persistence of hunger. This presentation is evident in the efforts to realize a human right to adequate food, as well as in the positioning of law, in the form of regulation, as a tool to protect society from 'unruly' markets. In this monograph, Anna Chadwick draws on theoretical work from a range of disciplines to challenge accounts that portray law's role in the context of hunger as exclusively remedial.