For critical geographies of human rights1

Abstract

Few geographers have studied the theory, practice, and construction of international human rights. This article argues that human geographers should engage in what I term ‘critical geographies of human rights’. In essence, it argues that (a) geography is crucial to human rights claims because there is a spatial dimension to every injustice, (b) human rights are crucial to geography because they involve transnational political and legal relationships that contribute to the construction of specific landscapes, and (c) the co-constitutive nature of human rights, law, geography, and society means that scholarship in this arena can be simultaneously normative and descriptive.