Human Rights in Context

What Insights Can Be Drawn from Empirical Research?

7 to 8 July 2025

The programme for this activity is divided into three distinct but complementary parts.

The first part aims to familiarize participants to the genesis of the main instruments that today constitute the corpus of international human rights law. In what historical context were they formulated and who were the main protagonists who contributed to their formulation? What agendas played in the background and is it historically correct to claim that the engineering behind the formulation of human rights is exclusive to the West or to thinkers who are heirs of the Enlightenment?

The second part will be devoted to the critical literature on human rights and in particular on their claim to universal validity. Anthropology occupies a special position here, both on the conceptual and theoretical level and on the more engaged, practical level.

Finally, the third part will provide an opportunity to discuss concrete situations and to examine the extent to which human rights can be engaged either when it comes to assessing critical issues and/or contribute to resolving them. Participants will be invited to talk about their own research project and explain the extent to which they use human rights, either to outline a topic (a violation of one or more human rights, in very concrete terms), to demonstrate their limitations or, on the contrary, their potential in terms of contributing to a sustainable solution.

Where: MPI, Halle
When: Monday, 7 July to Tuesday, 8 July 2025
Register by 9 June 2025 on Moodle