CFP: New Directions in Human Rights Theory Panel at MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory

New Directions in Human Rights Theory Panel at the 2025 MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory

Organisers: Jesse Tomalty (University of Bergen) and Kerri Woods (University of Leeds)

Human rights occupy a prominent place in international and national politics. We may be witnessing the destabilization of previously dominant global norms, including, importantly, human rights as a marker of legitimacy and as principles to be upheld universally. Yet, the purported inviolability and inherent dignity of the human person remains a powerful and inspiring idea taken up by activists and political leaders across the world. 

Over the past few decades, human rights theory has burgeoned into an important area of study, encompassing a variety of questions about the nature, justification, content, scope, and implications of human rights.

While progress has been made in articulating different positions and debates within human rights theory, many fundamental questions about human rights remain unanswered, notably concerning their normative source and authority, and the connection between human rights theory and practice.

Furthermore, despite its global relevance, human rights theory has so far been dominated by Western scholars working mainly in the liberal, analytic tradition. This represents an important limitation on our understanding of human rights, which may be challenged as well as renewed by engagement with and between diverse and global philosophical perspectives. 

This panel will bring together researchers from different theoretical traditions and positions with the dual aim of taking stock of human rights theory to date and reflecting on its future. To this end, we welcome contributions that advance ongoing debates within human rights theory, as well as those that identify and take up questions and perspectives that have been overlooked or underexplored.

Questions to be addressed may include:

●      What is the normative source of human rights? In virtue of what do we have human rights and what, if anything, gives them authority?

●      How should we theorise about human rights? What is the relationship between theory and practice, and which practice(s) should guide our theorising?

●      Can the importance of a special class of human rights be sustained, especially in an era of mass extinction and climate catastrophe, but potentially also in light of developments in artificial intelligence?

●      Do new challenges necessarily give rise to new human rights claims, e.g., in relation to new technologies? To what extent do emerging human rights, such as environmental human rights, or rights that have been largely neglected by political theorists, such as the rights of disabled people or LGBTQ+/SOGIE human rights, prompt a reexamination of existing human rights and human rights theory?

●      On what basis, if any, can we argue for the universality of human rights? Are human rights inevitably implicated in legacies of colonialism and mechanisms of oppression? Might human rights be redeemed and retained as tools to fight injustice?

We encourage submissions on these and related questions from scholars at any career stage. Please send an abstract of not more than 500 words to Jesse Tomalty ([email protected]) and Kerri Woods ([email protected]) by 15th April 2025.

This workshop will take place as part of MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory at the University of Manchester, UK, 3rd-5th September. Please note the workshops are fully in person (there is no hybrid facility).

Registration for MANCEPT is £295 for academics and £165 for postgraduate students (plus £40/£25 for the conference dinner). A limited number of fee-waiver bursaries are available for presenters, applications for bursaries will be open until 4th June.