The complex legal situations arising from the coexistence of international law, state law, and social and religious norms in different parts of the world often include scenarios of conflict between them. These conflicting norms issued from different categories of ‘laws’ result in difficulties in describing, identifying and analysing human rights in plural environments. This volume studies how normative conflicts unfold when trapped in the aspirations of human rights and their local realizations. It reflects on how such tensions can be eased, while observing how and why they occur. The authors examine how obedience or resistance to the official law is generated through the interaction of a multiplicity of conflicting norms, interpretations and practices. Emphasis is placed on the actors involved in raising or decreasing the tension surrounding the conflict and the implications that the conflict carries, whether resolved or not, in conditions of asymmetric power movements. It is argued that legal responsiveness to state law depends on how people with different identities deal with it, narrate it and build expectations from it, bearing in mind that normative pluralism may also operate as an instrument towards the exclusion of certain communities from the public sphere. The chapters look particularly to expose the dialogue between parallel normative spheres in order for law to become more effective, while investigating the types of socio-legal variables that affect the functioning of law, leading to conflicts between rights, values and entire cultural frames.

This book addresses conflicts involving how law relates normative orders. The assumption behind the book is that law no longer automatically claims supremacy, but that actors can pick and choose which code to follow. The book covers conflicts between legal orders and conflicts involving law and honor, self-regulation, lex mercatoria, local social practices, bureaucracy, religion, professional standards, and morality.

Human rights have transformed the way in which we conceive the place of the individual within the community and in relation to the state in a vast array of disciplines, including law, philosophy, politics, sociology, geography. The published output on human rights over the last five decades has been enormous, but has remained tightly bound to a notion of human rights as dialectically linking the individual and the state. Because of human rights’ dogged focus on the state and its actions, they have very seldom attracted the attention of legal pluralists. Indeed, some may have viewed the two as simply incompatible or relating to wholly distinct phenomena. This collection of essays is the first to bring together authors with established track records in the fields of legal pluralism and human rights, to explore the ways in which these concepts can be mutually reinforcing, delegitimizing, or competing. The essays reveal that there is no facile conclusion to reach but that the question opens avenues which are likely to be mined for years to come by those interested in how human rights can affect the behaviour of individuals and institutions.

This book uses comparative law and comparative international law approaches to explore the role of human rights ombuds, classic-based ombuds and other types of ombuds institutions in human rights protection and promotion, their methods of application of international and domestic human rights law and their roles in strengthening good governance. It highlights the increasing importance of national human rights ombuds institutions globally and their roles as national human rights institutions (NHRIs).

Both India and Europe have been undergoing a difficult process of negotiating cultural, religious and ethnic diversity within their democratic frameworks. In fact, recent incidents of xenophobic backlash against multiculturalism and minority communities in Europe, as well as myriad movements for constitutional recognition of castes, tribes and languages and the emergence of Islamophobic terror in India, question the conventional idea of democracy as the idyllic preserver of diversity. This volume contests the simplistic connection between democracy and diversity by proposing that democracy, in fact, produces, sediments and reinforces cultural heterogeneity. It argues that in democratic polities, disparate cultural practices are often converted into identity categories, with disturbing implications for national identity, constitutionalism, political governance and citizenship. While mobilizations on the plank of cultural differences are typically viewed as being born in undemocratic spaces with little toleration for diversity, they also find fertile soil in democracy insofar as democracy celebrates diversity and allows cultural dissent to thrive. Such dissent, while essential for democracy, has difficult consequences. Examining the fundamental conflict between constructions of particular cultural identities and mandates of a unifying democratic ethos, the book brings forth the complexities underlying the politics of identity recognition and national integration. In making a radical intervention in the discourse, this volume offers a critique of existing paradigms of multiculturalism. It will interest scholars and students of political science, sociology, and postcolonial and comparative studies.

This book explores recent developments in the concept of hybridity through a multi-disciplinary perspective, bringing ideas about legal plurality together with the fields of peace, development and cultural studies. Analysing the concepts of hybridity and hybridization, their history, their application in law and legal studies, and their implications for thinking and rethinking legal plurality, the book shows how the concept of hybridity can contribute to an understanding of the processes that occur when different normative or legal orders or frameworks confront each other.

The text makes the case for a revival of general jurisprudence in response to globalisation.

The second volume of the series "Key Concepts in Interreligious Discourses" points out the roots of the concept of ''human rights'' in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It shows how far the universal validity of ''human rights'' opposes in some crucial points with religious traditions. The volume demonstrates that new perspectives are introduced to the general discussion about human rights when related to religious traditions. Especially the interreligious viewpoint proves that a new kind of debate about human rights and its history is necessary.

As Multilateral Development Banks increasingly gained influence in shaping global development, transnational social movements pushed to hold them accountable for their human rights impact towards communities. Leon Valentin Schettler presents a novel causal mechanism of movement advocacy towards MDBs, combining disruptive and conventional tactics. Systematically comparing the evolution of human rights standards and complaint mechanisms over the last three decades, he reveals how the combination of 1) declining US hegemony, 2) counter-mobilization by China and 3) movement cooptation by the World Bank bureaucracy led to a dilution of human rights accountability in the 2010s.

1 2 Andreas Follesdal and Thomas Pogge 1 The Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the Faculty of Law and ARENA Centre for 2 European Studies, University of Oslo; Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, and Oslo University; Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University, Canberra This volume discusses principles of global justice, their normative grounds, and the social institutions they require. Over the last few decades an increasing number of philosophers and political theorists have attended to these morally urgent, politically confounding and philosophically challenging topics. Many of these scholars came together September 11–13, 2003, for an international symposium where first versions of most of the present chapters were discussed. A few additional chapters were solicited to provide a broad and critical range of perspectives on these issues. The Oslo Symposium took Thomas Pogge’s recent work in this area as its starting point, in recognition of his long-standing academic contributions to this topic and of the seminars on moral and political philosophy he has taught since 1991 under the auspices of the Norwegian Research Council. Pogge’s opening remarks — “What is Global Justice?” — follow below, before brief synopses of the various contributions.