Short description:

This book considers the complex and contradictory role of the United Nations when it comes to human rights around the world. It depicts the United Nations as a global arena in which state and non-state actors continuously contest issues around human rights.

Long description:

This book considers the complex and contradictory role of the United Nations when it comes to human rights around the world. It depicts the United Nations as a global arena in which state and non-state actors continuously contest issues around human rights. This ongoing contestation simultaneously produces both advances and setbacks when it comes to the rights of stateless populations, women, Indigenous peoples, and racialized people, as well as rights related to health and the environment.

Since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and throughout various subsequent expansions, conventions and declarations, the United Nations has been central to the development and advancement of human rights as a primary, stated goal of global governance. However, there are various inherent contradictory tensions and challenges embedded in the United Nations promise for human rights. This timely collection investigates the United Nations? role as knowledge producer, its relation to non-state actors, and the United Nations? role as a system for grouping sovereign states, where there is uneven buy-in within non-binding agreements and tensions between national sovereignty and human rights. At a time when the world faces existential challenges from climate change to pandemics which disproportionately impact the world?s most vulnerable populations, this book addresses future challenges and possibilities for the United Nations.

Human Rights and the United Nations: Paradox and Promise will be an important read for researchers and students across the fields of human rights, political science, international relations, and global development, as well as for United Nations and governmental policy analysts and advisors.

?Indispensable for understanding the contributions and disappointments arising from the UN?s treatment of human rights. This carefully edited book depicts both the structural underpinnings of the UN double identity when it comes to human rights and its concrete experience with the realization of specific rights as analyzed by a gathering of talented experts.?

Richard Falk, Professor of International Law emeritus, Princeton University

?Both study and the operation of the United Nations have been too often stifled by legal and bureaucratic technocracy. This volume reinvigorates the topic by treating this unique institution in a properly political manner. Here, the UN and its related Human Rights apparatus are addressed as sites of contestation, contradiction, and struggle, where the stakes are high and the challenges daunting. The collection is moreover exemplary in examining the UN 'from below'. Sweeping aside the bureaucrats and diplomats, we listen here to the cries, demands, ideas, and dreams of Indigenous movements, feminisms of the Global South, stateless peoples, migrant workers, and others who toil to transform these institutions into tools of emancipation. A vital contribution.?

Robert Nichols, Professor of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz

?This edited volume provides readers with a critical take on the work of the UN in the area of human rights from the standpoint of international relations and political science. Its added value is to examine the subject from more than just a state-centric point of view, introducing new perspectives to the debate over whether the Organization is fit for purpose today.?

Ardi Imseis, Professor of International Law, Queen?s University

?This edited volume offers a deeply critical examination of the foundational paradox embodied by the UN as a knowledge producer constructed by and for sovereign state actors, while seeking to uphold the promise of universal human rights. Through ten insightful chapters expertly framed by editors Abigail B. Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, the book highlights the enduring tensions of a UN caught between promise and practice. By addressing this profound paradox, each contribution compels the reader to face the inequities unravelling through and within the UN, while centering vulnerable non-state actors such as stateless populations, women, indigenous and racialized communities. A highly timely read for practitioners and students of human rights and the UN, as the latter enters its 8th decade amidst complex, intersectional, global crises.?

W. R. Nad?ge Compaoré, Assistant Professor of International Relations, University of Toronto

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Thinking About the Paradox and Promise of Human Rights and the United Nations Abigail B. Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban  Part 1: The United Nations as Knowledge Producer  1. Knowledge Production: Gender, Race, Indigenous Peoples and Politics and the UN Abigail B. Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban  2. Towards Reproductive Justice in the Global Gender Equality Agenda: The UN and Canadas?s Compliance and Non-Compliance with Beijing and Beyond Nariya Khasanova  3. Human Rights for Human Remains: How International Frameworks Facilitate Transnational Knowledge Production Nicole Anderson  Part 2: Stateless and Non-State Actors  4. Statelessness as a Window on the Paradox of the United Nations Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan  5. The Paradox of Visibility and the ILO?s Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention Annie Chau  6. The Paradox of Indigenous Peoples? Participation at the UN: The Dance of Meaningful Change Against State Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity Sheryl Lightfoot and Utkarsh Khare  Part 3: Global Challenges and Sovereign States  7. The UN?s Contradictory Impact and Failure to Protect Women in Humanitarian Settings: Racist Frames in Post-Earthquake Haiti Célia Romulus  8. Mandating Global Health to Foster Health Security: Spotlighting the Africa Health Strategy (2007-30) and the United Nations Christopher Isike  9. Will a Human Right to a Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment Address the Wrongs of Environmental Degradation? Karen Morrow  10. The UN Human Rights Paradox During the Interregnum: Yemen and Myanmar as Case Studies W. Andy Knight  Afterword: Naming and Framing Paradox Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan