The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local edited by Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry

The Shady Side of Consultation and Compensation: ‘Divide‐and‐Rule’ Tactics in Bolivia's Extraction Sector

“…We have shown in detail how the indigenous rights to consultation and compensation, which are embedded in the larger power relations at play, have become skewed. These insights add to previous research into the practice of human and indigenous rights (see Goodale and Merry, ; Wilson, ). After decades of legally recognizing indigenous rights, much literature has been produced about the ‘implementation gap’ and about the ambiguous effects of indigenous rights in practice, especially in Latin America (Anthias and Radcliffe, ; Gustafson, ; Hale, ; McNeish, ; Sieder, ).…”

Mark Goodale. Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights

“…Mark Goodale, Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University, unravels the uncomfortable relationship created by these fundamental differences in his latest work: Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights. The book continues his earlier work on the anthropology of human rights and local encounters with the law in Bolivia (Goodale 2006;Goodale and Merry 2007;Goodale 2008).…”

Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice

“…For this article, though, we foreground another domain in which the expressive potential of embroidery can be observed, namely that of formulating ideas about justice and rights. As such, we situate this article in scholarly traditions that study how people experience and express their rights in practice and how they give meaning to them (Goodale & Merry, 2007;Levitt & Merry, 2009;Martínez, 2018;Merry, 2006). These scholarly traditions often revolve around concepts such as vernacularization, (g)localization, and contextualization, which study how people make sense of what their rights are, based on their pre-existing understanding of what (in)justice looks like.…”

“…When working with people who have experienced trauma, the “complex textures that wove time and space in a fashion that was not necessarily linear” should be acknowledged as elements defying streamlined protocols, structures and categorizations, as well as linear understandings of time (Castillo‐Cuéllar, 2013, 16; De Haan & Destrooper, 2021; Hinton, 2018). Although these non‐linear narratives might be distinctly different in content and form, it is crucial to acknowledge them because rights‐holders often understand their rights in more pertinent ways that can then inspire the formal human rights architecture (Goodale & Merry, 2007).…”