Global Rights? Human Rights in Complex Governance

What is the place of human rights law within global governance? How can we safeguard human rights in various sites of global governance? What is the role of the state, non-state actors, and global governance institutions in all this? Global Rights?: Human Rights in Complex Governance interrogates how human rights and global governance interact with various sub-fields of international and transnational regulation to answer these foundational questions.

The volume offers a detailed exploration of the role of human rights in global governance contexts, such as the sovereign debt regime, global value chains, development assistance, international food governance, and the laws of war. Through an in-depth study of several global governance regimes based on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, this volume challenges the mainstream discourse on the evolution of human rights law and its limits. As a result, issue areas that are rarely in conversation with each other--such as the World Bank's practices and the law on the use of force--are examined through a common analytical framework that is both rich and flexible enough to shed new light on individual areas of concern and simultaneously reflect on cross-cutting themes.

Bringing human rights experts together with leading scholars in the law of international organizations, public finance, corporations, and use of force, Global Rights? thus serves as a contemporary reflection and set of arguments on how to study and productively think about human rights in complex governance settings.

Nehal Bhuta, Chair of Public International Law, Edinburgh Law School,Rodrigo Vallejo, Assistant Professor, Amsterdam Law School

Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at the University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Iuropean Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series in The History and Theory of International Law.


Rodrigo Vallejo is Assistant Professor at Amsterdam Law School and researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law. He specialises on the interactions between economic law, socio-political theory, and regulatory policies at the national and international levels. Rodrigo has been recently granted a Marie Curie fellowship to develop a research project on transnational law and market valuations at the Centre for Private Governance of Copenhagen Law School. He previously was an affiliate researcher to the European Regulatory Private Law (European University Institute) and Global Administrative Law (New York University) projects under a Hans Kelsen and a Fulbright scholarship respectively.

1. Human Rights in Global Governance, Nehal Bhuta and Rodrigo Vallejo2. Contesting Austerity: Genealogies of Human Rights Discourse, Matthias Goldmann3. From Corporate Personality to Corporate Governance: The Transformation of International Human Rights Through Corporate Practice, Anna Beckers4. Beyond Accountability? Human Rights, Global Governance, and the World Bank Inspection Panel, Guy Fiti Sinclair5. The International Political Economy of the Right to Food, 1960-2019, Michael Fakhri6. Self-Defence against Non-State Actors and the Myth of the Innocent State, Eliav Lieblich