The measurement of human rights has long been debated within the various academic disciplines that focus on human rights, as well as within the larger international community of practitioners working in the field of human rights. Written by leading experts in the field, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on how to measure human rights. Measuring Human Rights: draws explicitly on the international law of human rights to derive the content of human rights that ought to be measured contains a comprehensive methodological framework for operationalizing this human rights content into human rights measures includes separate chapters on the methods, strengths and biases of different human rights measures, including events-based, standards-based, survey-based, and socio-economic and administrative statistics covers measures of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights includes a complete bibliography, as well as sources and locations for data sets useful for the measurement of human rights. This volume offers a significant and timely addition to this important area of work in the field of human rights, and will be of interest to academics and NGOs, INGOs, international governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and national governments themselves.

On the occasion of the 60 anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this special issue of the OECD Journal on Development focuses on robust methods and tools for assessing human rights, democracy and governance.

In this edited volume, leading experts of human rights measurement address the challenges scholarship of human rights face as well as explore approaches and means to overcoming them. The book seeks to further answer three specific and related questions. First, what do existing measures of human rights conditions tell us about the state of human rights? Are conditions improving or deteriorating? Second, how might scholars improve their measurement efforts and observe states’ human rights practices given efforts by governments to hide human rights abuses and to make them essentially “unobservable”? Finally, what challenges might scholars encounter in the future as the conceptualization of human rights develops and changes, and as new methods and technologies (e.g., natural language processing, machine learning) are introduced into the study of human rights? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of human rights politics, power, development, and governance. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Human Rights.

This book draws on key theories and methods from the social sciences to develop a framework for the systematic study of human rights problems. It argues that solid empirical analysis of human rights problems rests on examining the observable practices from state and non-state actors that constitute human rights violations to provide plausible explanations for their occurrence and provide deeper understanding of their meaning. Such explanations and understanding draws on the theoretical insights from rational, structural and cultural approaches in the social sciences. This book includes: an outline of the scope of human rights the terrain of key actors that have an impact on human rights a summary of the social science theories, methods and measures for studying human rights a separate treatment of global comparative studies, truth commissions, and human rights impact assessment. Studying Human Rights is the first book to use the synthesis of social sciences approaches to studying human rights and its quantitative and qualitative approach provides useful insights. This book makes a unique contribution to the existent literature on human rights and is an invaluable tool for both scholars and practitioners of this area.

Comparative politics often involves testing of hypotheses using new methodological approaches without giving sufficient attention to the concepts which are fundamental to hypotheses, particularly the ability of these concepts to ‘travel’. Proper operationalising requires deep reflection on the concept, not simply establishing how it should be measured. Conceptualising Comparative Politics – the flagship book of Routledge’s series of the same name – breaks new ground by emphasising the role of thoroughly thinking through concepts and deep familiarity with the case that inform the conceptual reflection. In this thought- provoking book, established academics as well as emerging scholars in the field collect (and invite) scholarship in the tradition of conceptual comparative politics. The book posits that concepts may be used comparatively as ‘lenses’, ‘building blocks’ and ‘scripts’, and contributors show how these conceptual tools can be employed in original comparative research. Importantly, contributors to Conceptualising Comparative Politics do not simply use concepts in one of these three ways but they apply them with careful consideration of empirical variation. The chapters included in this volume address some of the most contentious issues in comparative politics (populism, state capacity, governance, institutions, elections, secularism, among others) from various geographic regions and model how scholars doing comparative politics might approach such subjects. Concepts make possible scholarly conversations including creative confrontations across paradigms. Conceptualising Comparative Politics will challenge you to think of how to engage in conceptual comparative inquiry and how to use various methodologically sound techniques to understand and explain comparative politics.

This volume features papers written in honor of Mauro Bussani, and celebrates the work and contributions of this renowned scholar of comparative law. The content reflects the various theoretical and practical areas in which he has already left a lasting mark. The essays explore the theory and practice of comparative law in different areas and contexts, and highlight innovative approaches to a large variety of hot-topic private and public law subjects. The authors include young scholars, lawyers, legal consultants, human rights activists, and practitioners, all of whom Professor Bussani has trained, supervised, and supported throughout their careers. The contributions emphasize the many ways in which Professor Bussani’s teaching and scientific output have enriched, revolutionized, and challenged both theory and practice. They cover e.g. the law of secured transactions, Western law and legal pluralism, fashion law, contract law in China and in the Arab World, contract and tort in the West, scientific evidence, risk regulation, global finance, human rights indicators, anti-discrimination laws, democracy and climate change law.

Presenting a range of philosophical debates, policy analyses, and first-hand accounts, this text offers a comprehensive set of readings on the major themes and issues in the field of international human rights.