International relations

The Global Politics of Human Rights: History, Theory and Practice

Module code: L2140
Level 6
30 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Seminar
Assessment modes: Coursework, Essay

What role do prisons play in our everyday economy? Do borders resemble a global form of apartheid? Should the police be abolished?

Taking the 2020 George Floyd uprisings as a starting point, we examine the relationship between racial capitalism and different forms of state violence. Drawing on the black radical tradition, anticolonial theory, feminism and critical disability studies, we explore the racial, sexual, ableist and colonial histories of borders, prisons, police, psychiatric institutions and family surveillance.

By moving from the local to the global and back again, we probe what an abolitionist world without prisons, police and other forms of state violence might look like.

Module learning outcomes

• Develop a systematic and critical understanding of human rights as a political artefact, a sociological category, a mode of structuring political action, as a means of subject formation in global politics.
• Develop a detailed conceptual understanding of the historical, theoretical and political challenges associated with human rights.
• Develop an empirical grasp of international practices and politics of human rights across a range of inter- and transnational fields.
• Effectively synthesise and communicate in written work the empirical and theoretical uncertainties, ambiguities and limits of ESS human rights in global politics, as well as the political discourses, material conditions and subject positions which generate claims about and against human rights.