In human wrongs and human rights

The study seeks to explore some con temporary vicissitudes manifest in human rights thought and action. The volume offers 'rights-friendly' critiques of theories and practice of human rights; such critiques are both necessary and desirable, especially from the salient standpoint of suffering of victims of rights-violations. The need to feminize human rights discourse stands reiterated, with poignant urgency. While the human rights dilemmas confronting power, posing as itself sovereignty, emerge rather sharply, the volume also addresses similar dilemmas faced by human rights movements as they marshal counter-power through endeavours at resistance to tyranny. The book also addresses some new themes: for ex ample, the relationship between memory of politics and protection of human rights, the practice of politics as productive of evil, the impact of globalization paradigms on human nights imagination. The legitimacy of capital punishment has always posed, as were, a limit-situation for human rights consciousness; this theme is also visited.

The companion volume Mambrino's Helmet? Human Rights for a Changing World carries these explorations further, with special reference to the explosion of rights-enunciations at the international level.