Methods of Human Rights Research

In academic human rights research, especially legal human rights research, little attention tends to be devoted to questions of methodology. One reason for this may be that human rights scholars often are (former) human rights activists. Dispensing with methodological niceties enables them to engage in wishful thinking and to come up with the conclusions they were hoping to find in the first place. Furthermore, although much emphasis continues to be put on the need to carry out human rights research from a multidisciplinary perspective, the methods to be applied in such research remain far from clear. Which criteria can be identified to qualify a piece of human rights research as a methodologically sound piece of work? Are there aspects and considerations that are typical for human rights research? What are good practices in human rights research? The book addresses these questions from the perspective of different scholarly fields relevant for human rights research: law (including international law and criminal law); social sciences (including criminology, political science, comparative politics, international relations and anthropology); and philosophy and history (the humanities). This book is essential reading for any Ph.D. candidate embarking on a dissertation in the field of human rights and any human rights scholar wishing to critically reflect on the quality of her/his own methods of work.

Fons Coomans holds the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Peace at the Department of International and European Law at Maastricht University.Since July 2009 is the Head of the Department of International and European Law. He is also the coordinator of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights, and Senior Researcher at the Netherlands School of Human Rights Research. His fields of research include the international protection of economic, social and cultural rights in general and the right to education and food in particular, as well as international supervisory mechanisms in the field of human rights.He is the coordinator of the courses on economic, social and cultural rights of the European Masters Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation in Venice. He is also a consultant for UNESCO, an adviser to Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) and a member of the Dutch Section of the International Commission of Jurists (NJCM). Since 2014 he has become a member of the board of the School of Human Rights research (SIM).Menno T. Kamminga is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Maastricht University and former Director of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights (2000-2014). He has a PhD from Leiden University (1990) and Master degrees in international law and international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1974) and Groningen University (1973). He was (Senior) Lecturer in International Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam (1987-2000) and Legal Adviser at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London (1978-1987). He served as member of the Netherlands Government's Advisory Committee on Human Rights, of the Board of Editors of the "Netherlands International Law Review" and of the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International. Besides that he was trustee of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, chair of the Netherlands Government's Advisory Committee on International Law and chair of the Netherlands School of Human Rights Research.