Böcker av Jolyon Ford

For decades, framing an issue as a 'human rights' issue carried certain power and effect in politics and international relations, one that has been challenged by the recent rise of populist political forces. Ford explores the recent impact of populist politics on the universalist human rights project, in particular, how scholars have framed and responded to this challenge.Ford offers a provocation to the human rights movement. Rather than 'what have populists done to human rights?', it asks 'how did we, the human rights movement, do this to ourselves?' How did fundamental protections for all become so easily scapegoated as 'us and them, ' as claims of small, often foreign, minorities? Did human rights lose some vital connection to ordinary people's interests, their value taken as obvious and self-explanatory?Looking forward, the book asks how - in a post-truth 'fake news' world - we might reimagine human rights as underpinning human flourishing as well as important constraints on public and private concentrations of power. Traversing relevant scholarly literature on the future of human rights and zooming out to look at wider patterns of political and diplomatic discourse, this book will speak to policymakers, diplomats, journalists, and human rights advocates - and all interested in the crisis of liberal democracies.

This book addresses gaps in thinking and practice on how the private sector can both help and hinder the process of building peace after armed conflict. It argues that weak governance in fragile and conflict-affected societies creates a need for international authorities to regulate the social impact of business activity in these places as a special interim duty. Policymaking should seek appropriate opportunities to engage with business while harnessing its positive contributions to sustainable peace. However, scholars have not offered frameworks for what is considered 'appropriate' engagement or properly theorised techniques for how best to influence responsible business conduct. United Nations peace operations are peak symbols of international regulatory responsibilities in conflict settings, and debate continues to grow around the private sector's role in development generally. This book is the first to study how peace operations have engaged with business to influence its peace-building impact.