Review Article: Human Rights Instruments and Impacts

Human rights research has begun to shift from questions of why and under what conditions repression happens to analyzing and theorizing the impact of human rights instruments like treaties and trials. Recent works still use aggregated macro-level data and gloss over important struggles over the meaning and deployment of the concept of human rights. By questioning and taking apart both the concept of human rights and the presumed unity of the actors who struggle over them, scholars could begin to provide a more satisfying account of who gains and who loses through manipulation of human rights instruments, through what mechanisms, and how these processes and outcomes differ across time and place.