Prof Monika Krause

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Human Rights. This course is available on the MSc in Gender, Peace and Security. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

This course has a limited number of places. Students who have this course as a compulsory course are guaranteed a place. For all other students, places are allocated based on a written statement.

For information on how to apply for a place on this course, including deadlines, please see Courses offered and related information.

The course will introduce a range of sociological approaches to human rights practices and institutions. We will discuss foundations of sociological analysis of human rights in the context of debates in political philosophy and law and examine contemporary analytical frameworks and research strategies. Empirical case studies engage cases in a range of geographical areas and historical contexts with a view to key contemporary debates.

Topics may include the impacts and unintended consequences of NGO practices and social movements, the role of states as providers of rights frameworks and as perpetrators of human rights abuses, the different ways in which we can examine the relationship between human rights and culture and the way in which knowledge about human rights is produced and circulated. 

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course is usually delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars. There will be two hours or more of teaching each week in WT. There will also be a revision session in early ST.

There is no formative assessment for this course. 

• Arendt H. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Shocken.
• Bartley, T. 2018. Rules Without Rights. Land, Labor and Private Authority in the Global Economy. Oxford University Press.
• Krause, M. 2021. How NGO Practices Mediate International Human Rights. In International organizations revisited : agency and pathology in a multipolar world (267-285) edited by Dennis Dijkzeul and Dirk Salomons, Berghahn Books.
• Luft, A. 2015. “Toward a Dynamic Theory of Action at the Micro-Level of Genocide: Killing, Desistance, and Saving in 1994 Rwanda.” Sociological Theory. 33(2): 148-172.
• Moon, C. 2012. What one sees and how one files seeing: reporting atrocity and suffering. Sociology, 46 (5). pp. 876-890.
• Morris, A. 2015. “Theorizing Ethnic and Racial Movements in the Global Age: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity January Vol. 1, No. 1, 105–126.
• Roychowdhury, P. 2024. Capable Women, Incapable States. Negotiating Violence in India. Oxford University Press.

Exam (85%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period.

Course participation (15%).

Attendance at all seminars and submission of all set coursework is required.