The Complexity of Human Rights: From Vernacularization to Quantification

This book provides the first systematic assessment from a human rights law perspective of the landmark contributions of the renowned legal anthropologist, Sally Engle Merry.

What impact does over—simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to present them as a single, universal, and immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them.

Merry and her colleagues transformed human rights thinking by highlighting the process of 'verna...