Human Rights from Below
Achieving Rights through Community Development

This book encompasses human rights and community development, arguing that each is necessary for both understanding and practising the other.

Jim Ife (Author)

9780521711081, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 October 2009

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.36 kg

In Human Rights from Below, Jim Ife shows how human rights and community development are problematic terms but powerful ideals, and that each is essential for understanding and practising the other. Ife contests that practitioners - advocates, activists, workers and volunteers - can better empower and protect communities when human rights are treated as more than just a specialist branch of law or international relations, and that human rights can be better realised when community development principles are applied. The book offers a long overdue assessment of how human rights and community development are invariably interconnected. It highlights how critical it is to understand the two as a basis for thinking about and taking action to address the serious challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century. Written both for students and for community development and human rights workers, Human Rights from Below brings together the important fields of human rights and community development, to enrich our thinking of both.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Thinking about Community Development: 1. Community development: definitions and imperatives
2. Community development: principles and dimensions
Part II. Thinking about Human Rights: 3. Human rights: definitions and imperatives
4. Human rights: principles and dimensions
Part III. Bringing Human Rights and Community Development Together: 5. Principles of human rights from below
Part IV. Enacting Human Rights from Below: 6. Seven arenas of human rights from below
7. Practising human rights from below
Appendix 1. The human rights matrix
References.

Subject Areas: Human rights & civil liberties law [LNDC], Human rights [JPVH], Sociology [JHB], Community & outreach services [GLMX]