Human Rights and International Relations

Over the last few centuries, the idea of human rights has influenced the practice of international politics in numerous ways, for better and for worse. This course examines this phenomenon in two main parts. In the first part of the course, we will investigate what human rights are. We will focus on exploring how state and non-state actors have used the idea of human rights to pursue certain objectives, including empire building, the weakening of strategic rivals and the pursuit of material self-interest. This section of the course will look at a variety of historical and contemporary cases. In the second part of the course, we will take a close look at transnational human rights campaigns. We will focus on the mobilization of supporters for distant causes, the organizational design of a campaign, the identification of effective policy solutions, and the methods used to pressure governments to act.