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Measuring Human Rights

By Todd Landman, Edzia Carvalho

Published November 4th 2009 by Routledge – 163 pages

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Description

The measurement of human rights has long been debated within the various academic disciplines that focus on human rights, as well as within the larger international community of practitioners working in the field of human rights.

Written by leading experts in the field, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on how to measure human rights.

Measuring Human Rights:

    • draws explicitly on the international law of human rights to derive the content of human rights that ought to be measured

    • contains a comprehensive methodological framework for operationalizing this human rights content into human rights measures

    • includes separate chapters on the methods, strengths and biases of different human rights measures, including events-based, standards-based, survey-based, and socio-economic and administrative statistics

    • covers measures of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights

    • includes a complete bibliography, as well as sources and locations for data sets useful for the measurement of human rights.

This volume offers a significant and timely addition to this important area of work in the field of human rights, and will be of interest to academics and NGOs, INGOs, international governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and national governments themselves.

Reviews

"An indispensable resource for scholars seeking to build and test theories about why governments violate human rights and for policymakers looking for ways to evaluate the human rights consequences of policies." - David Cingranelli, Binghamton University, SUNY

"This work will be a crucial resource for comprehending massive violations of human rights in the real world of incomplete, often biased data. Landman and Carvalho deftly explore the debates and tradeoffs between different data collection schemes and levels of analysis, giving the reader an in-depth view of the current state-of-the-art in academic and NGO research. Strongly recommended!" - Patrick Ball, Director of the Human Rights Program, Benetech Initiative

Contents

1. Introduction 2. The Content of Human Rights 3. Measuring Human Rights 4. Events-Based Measures 5. Standards-Based Measures 6. Survey-Based Measures 7. Socio-Economic and Administrative Statistics 8. Conclusion

Author Bio

Todd Landman is Professor in the Department of Government and a Member of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. He is author of many books, including Studying Human Rights (2006), Protecting Human Rights (2005), and Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics (2000, 2003, and 2008).

Edzia Carvalho is currently researching her PhD on public health policy in India in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. She has an MA in Human Rights (Essex 2006), and an MA in International Relations (Mumbai 2003).