Poverty, Human Rights and Development (LAWS70430)

Human rights, community development and poverty are three areas that demand both critical academic scholarship as well as committed practical intervention. The three areas are distinct yet also overlapping, and this subject will explore the personal, political, programmatic and conceptual dimensions of theories and practice in all three areas.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this subject will explore how human rights have been invoked to challenge development practices that produce or exacerbate extreme poverty and how international development institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have incorporated human rights principles in their poverty alleviation initiatives. Throughout, this subject will take a historical and critical perspective, working with case studies to interrogate the efficacy of human rights practices to challenge the underlying geopolitical dynamics that produce and perpetuate global poverty. This subject will be grounded in the lived experiences of people in different contexts around the world, to localise the conceptual discussions within the dynamic realities of everyday life.

Principal topics include:

• Concepts of human rights
• Law and legal consciousness in everyday life
• Scope, distribution and socio-political dynamics of global poverty
• Questions of measuring development and monitoring economic and social change
• Representation and social mobilisation of human rights, development and poverty concerns.
• Overview of major international organisations charged with poverty alleviation (World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations Development Program)
• Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to human development
• History and theory of the right to development and rights-based development
• Concept of poverty as a human rights violation
• Human rights conditionalities on development projects (for example, related to economic management or social inclusion)
• The pragmatic use of rights rhetoric and tools to build social movements to fight poverty
• Thematic case studies on areas including health (focusing on HIV), gender equality, education, food security and civic participation in local and national decision-making processes.