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Vulnerability and Human Rights
160 pages | 5.5 x 8 | 2006
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-02923-8 | paper: $22.95 sh
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"Bryan Turner’s Vulnerability and Human Rights is a concise but wide-ranging discussion of cutting-edge themes in sociology, seen through the prism and oriented toward the realization of the human rights paradigm. Avoiding foundationalist fallacies, it seeks to establish a grounding for the idea of human rights in our unavoidable vulnerability. The book will make a major contribution to the growing contemporary discussion in the field.” —John Torpey, University of British Columbia
"Professor Turner's work stands as a genuine contribution to an area of human rights analysis much written about but little felt as a problem for individuals—in microscopic no less than macroscopic dimensions. He examines how the process of life-taking is the perverse reverse of life-giving. It thus merits thoughtful reading and analysis by those for whom such weighty matters still form part of the sociological vocabulary. Professor Thomas Cushman's new series for Sanford G. Thatcher and Penn State University Press merits serious at tention. If this first volume in the series is an indicator of things to come, it also deserves wide professional support." —Irving Louis Horowitz, Contemporary Sociology
In the twentieth century, the mass violence of the twoworld wars followed more recently by the decentralizationand privatization of warfare—manifested in terrorism,ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—haveled to a heightened awareness of human beings vulnerabilityto suffering and the precarious nature of the institutionsthey create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation.As something they all share amid the diversityof cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences,this common vulnerability provides a ground on which toconstruct a framework of human rights.
Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing asociology of rights from a sociology of the human body.His blending of empirical research with normative analysisconstitutes an important step forward for the disciplineof sociology, which (like anthropology) has traditionallyeschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of adiscipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the“value neutrality” of positivistic science. This expandedapproach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinarydialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine,philosophy, political science, and religion.
In arguing for a recognition of human rights as ontologicallygrounded in shared vulnerability, Turner pays specialattention to the complex relationships among the state,the social rights of citizens that the state creates, and thehuman rights of persons as individuals. The conflict betweennational sovereignty and the universalistic claims ofhuman rights is central to the struggle over human rightstoday, he shows, but while the protection offered by statesand citizenship has been declining, they neverthelessremain important for the enforcement of human rights.
Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Among his many publications are the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, and The Sage Handbook of Sociology.
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Crimes Against Humanity
2 Vulnerability and Suffering
3 Cultural Rights and Critical Recognition Theory
4 Reproductive and Sexual Rights
5 Rights of Impairment and Disability
6 Rights of the Body
7 Old and New Xenophobia
References
Index