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...