Agosin, M (2001), Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press

The 1948 United Nations' (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) expresses the credo that all human beings are created free and equal. But not until 1995 did the UN declare women's rights to be human rights, and bring gender issues into the global arena for the first time.

Women, Gender, and Human Rights is the first collection of essays encompassing a wide range of women's issues, including political and domestic violence, education, literacy and reproductive rights. Most of the essays were written expressly for this volume by internationally known experts in the fields of government, bioethics, medicine, public affairs, literature, history, anthropology, law, and psychology.

Ligia Bolívar, "The Fundamentalism of Dignity," in A Human Rights Message. (1998) ed. Swedish Institute Stockholm: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden

Buergenthal, T (2002) International Human Rights in a Nutshell, 3nd ed. Minnesota: West Publishing Company, College & School Division.

Designed to both serve as a self-contained introduction to the international law of human rights and to complement other course materials by providing the reader with a concise overview of human rights norms and the institutional context within which they evolve.

Contents include: historical antecedents of international human rights law; UN human rights system; European system for the protection of human rights; inter-American human rights system; African system of human and peoples' rights; humanitarian law; US and international human rights; and non-governmental human rights organisation.

Donnelly, J (1989) Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Donnelly explicates and defends an account of human rights as universal rights.

Considering the competing claims of the universality, particularity and relativity of human rights, he argues that the historical contingency and particularity of human rights is completely compatible with a conception of human rights as universal moral rights, and thus does not require the acceptance of claims of cultural relativism.

The book moves between theoretical argument and historical practice. Rigorous and tightly reasoned, material and perspectives from many disciplines are incorporated.

Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen (1998) India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity. Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks

Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen (1989) Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Escobar, Arturo (1995) "Development Planning" in Development Studies: A Reader, ed. Stuart Corbridge. London: John Wiley and Sons, 64-77.

Bert F. Hoselitz (1995) "Non-Economic Barriers to Economic Development" in Development Studies: A Reader, op. cit., 17-27.

Human Rights Watch (1992) Individual Human Rights: The Relationship of Political and Civil Rights to Survival, Subsistence and Poverty. New York: Human Rights Watch

Draws an intimate connection between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights, on the other.

Largely through case studies, explores the topics of famine, land-tenure (including urban squatting, freedom of movement, grazing rights, landowner violence, and development), environmental protection and labour rights (such as forced labour, trade unions and migrant workers).

Ignatieff, M (2001) Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Michael Ignatieff looks at the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the UN adopted the UDHR in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation state's monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges.

Ignatieff argues that human rights activists have rightly drawn criticism from Asia, the Islamic world, and within the West itself for being over-ambitious and unwilling to accept limits. It is now time, he writes, for activists to embrace a more modest agenda and to re-establish the balance between the rights of states and the rights of citizens.

Mutua, M (2002), Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Press

This book presents a bold critique of the human rights corpus as it is currently constructed. The author argues that the human rights enterprise mistakenly presents itself as a final inflexible truth, a glimpse of utopia without which human advancement is not possible.

Mutua contends that in fact the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric formula for the reconstruction of non-Western societies and peoples through a set of culturally based norms and practices that inhere in liberal thought and philosophy.

Mutua argues that, if the human rights movement is to succeed, it must be relocated from the historical continuum of Eurocentralism as a civilising crusade and an attack on non-European peoples. Only a genuine recognition that human rights exist in the context of varied cultures can render a comprehensive approach to human rights policy possible.

McChesney, A (2000) Promoting and Defending Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A Handbook. Washington AAAS/Huridocs

This handbook is a resource for NGOs and others active in civil society who want to prevent or stop violations of economic, social and cultural rights and promote fulfilment of these rights at the national and international levels.

The handbook discusses laws and practices that can help to accomplish these aims and gives many examples of achievements by NGOs and others who are promoting and defending economic, social and cultural rights.

Pereira, W (1997) Inhuman Rights. The Western System and Global Human Rights Abuse. India: The Other India Press, Mapusa, Goa, INDIA ISBN: 8185569339It is important to place the UDHR by the UN in December 1948 in its broader political, economic and cultural context.

This book presents a sharply critical and revealing account of how the West has actually misused conventionally defined human rights set forth in the universal declaration to promote and maintain its political and economic hegemony over the rest of the world.

Ramachandran V.K. (1998) "On Kerala's Development Achievements," in Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, eds. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Delhi: Oxford India

Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (1996) From "The Right to Know, The Right to Live: People's Struggle in Rajasthan and the Right to Information," Rajasthan, India.

Sen, Amartya (1989) "Food and Freedom," World Development 17 : 769.

Scheper-Hughes N. (1992) Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press: 219-20, 229-33.

Shivji, I (1989) The Concept of Human Rights in Africa. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA

Issa Shivji's book is an attempt to reconceptualise human rights ideology from the standpoint of working people. He argues that the dominant human rights discourse in and about Africa, however well intentioned, is objectively a part of the ideology of domination.

United Nations (1995) The United Nations and Human Rights 1945-1995. New York: UN Publications

Building on the principles of its charter and the UDHR, the UN has sought since 1945 to promote, protect and to create a culture of human rights throughout the world.

This book provides an encyclopaedic account of the work of the UN in the field of human rights. It serves to illuminate the organisation's campaign for human rights and its multifaceted role as factfinder, monitor, adviser, forum of appeal and global conscience.

Wasserstrom, J, L Hunt and M Young (eds) (2000) Human Rights and Revolutions. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield

This original and important book examines the paradoxical yet fundamental relationship between revolutions and the discourse of human rights as it has developed over the last four centuries.

In a multidisciplinary collection of essays, activists and scholars compare times and places as remote from each other as 17th-century England and contemporary Kosovo, bringing to bear ideas and methodologies associated with disciplines ranging from cultural history to political philosophy.

In doing so, they seek to shed light on a crucial conundrum: on the one hand, revolutionary regimes have often been responsible for horrific human rights abuses, and yet on the other, revolutionary struggles often serve as a crucible for an increased appreciation of human rights.