Human Rights, Geography and

Human rights touch almost every aspect of life. Taken as a whole, they suggest a way of living together in peace, dignity, and freedom. A geographical perspective of human rights attempts to answer the question of whether people have the right, literally, to a place in the world. At its core, the concept of human rights involves political, cultural, economic, social, or environmental processes where issues of oppression are central to human struggles that are inextricably tied to particular places. As such, the major themes of locality, movement, and nature-society relations in the discipline of geography play an important role in any scholarship based on human rights. The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen the emergence of human rights as a formal field ...