Edited by Suzanne Egan, Associate Professor, School of Law, University College Dublin, Ireland and Anna Chadwick, Lecturer in Law, School of Law, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK This timely and insightful book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to evaluate the role of human rights in tackling the global challenges of poverty and economic inequality. Reflecting on the concrete experiences of particular countries in tackling poverty, it appraises the international success of human rights-based approaches. Drawing on insights from philosophy, history, economics and politics, contributors consider a range of questions concerning the nature of human rights and their possible relationship to poverty, inequality and development. Chapters interrogate human rights-based approaches and question whether the normative human rights framework provides a sound foundation for addressing global poverty and equitable distribution of resources. Probing practical questions concerning the extent to which international human rights institutions have been effective in combating poverty, this thought-provoking book considers possible strategies in response to the challenges that lie ahead. Offering robust and provocative guidelines for the future of human rights and development, this unique book will be indispensable for academics and researchers investigating the intersection of human rights and poverty, particularly those interested in human rights-based approaches to tackling inequality. Its practical insights will also benefit policy-makers in need of novel methodologies for promoting equality.
Edward Elgar Publishing
978 1 83910 210 3
“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
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.