Description

This handbook on women’s human rights is an integrated set of fourteen teaching and learning units. Together, they are designed to identify key issues in women’s human rights, define concepts, outline different methodologies for achieving women’s human rights, and offer a wide range of activities to facilitate teaching, learning, and discussion of women’s human rights challenges.

Included in every chapter are a statement of key objectives, background information, discussion questions, special issue boxes, strategies and examples for taking action, and learning activities. Also included are key UN documents and international law bearing on women’s human rights. Handouts, checklists, assessment forms, and activist organizations round out the range of reference materials provided.

User-friendly, jargon-free, authoritative, and packed with hands-on information, the handbook is an essential resource for anyone working in the field, human rights professionals, scholars, students, and activists.

• Is an integrated set of fourteen teaching and learning units. Together, they are designed to identify key issues in women's human rights, define concepts, outline different methodologies for achieving women's human rights, offer a wide range of activities to facilitate teaching, learning, and discussion of women's human rights challenges
• Is relevant to everyone interested in the human rights of women and girls, not just the academic or activist
• Includes great depth of analysis--Each chapter defines an issue, analyzes its impact on women, and surveys how women are addressing it using the human rights framework
• Incorporates a user-friendly language
• Relates global issues to every reader's personal experience through interactive exercises integrated into every chapter
• Serves as both a general introduction to women's human rights and as an activist's handbook for strategizing action to achieve those rights

Author Info

Julie A. Mertus is Associate Professor and Codirector of the MA program in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs at American University. She has worked on human rights education in more than 20 countries and has authored numerous publications on human rights. Her book Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy (Routledge 2004) was named “human rights book of the year” by the American Political Science Association Human Rights Section.

Nancy Flowers is a writer, editor, and human rights consultant. Recent publications include Compasito, a manual for children’s human rights education (Council of Europe 2007) and Human Rights. YES! Action and Advocacy on the Rights of People with Disabilities (University of Minnesota Human Rights Center 2007).

Reviews

“Provides a wide range of women’s human rights training exercises from around the world.”
—The People’s Movement for Human Rights Education

“Together we must find ways to turn the vision of human rights into action, leading to meaningful change in our lives and in the world. As this book seeks to demonstrate, through local action, we can bring global change.”
—Charlotte Bunch, from the Foreword

“This is an essential handbook for international organizations, NGOs, governments, judiciary and law enforcement entities--especially for training purposes. The most important aspect is the ACTION orientation which will enable women and their allies to make concrete moves in their communities and nations for change.”
—Nancie Caraway, Director, Women's Human Rights Projects, University of Hawaii-Manoa

“A comprehensive, well conceived, thoughtfully designed handbook…an indispensable tool for human rights trainers and activists around the globe.”
—Mahnaz Afkhami, Founder and President, Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace

“Local Action/Global Change provides activists and advocates with the most comprehensive and practical approaches to understanding and articulating human rights of women. It is a critical tool to move us forward.”
—Krishanti Dharmaraj, Co-Founder of Women’s Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights

“This book provides a clear, systematic, thoughtful approach to help navigate through the many diverse and complicated issues associated with how we understand and apply human rights for women. For someone who wants to make sense of it all and find conceptual clarity beyond the confusion we have seen in the past related to this important subject matter, this book is a must.”
—Matthew Friedman, UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking

“The contemporary global struggle for progressive, positive social change for women and their communities needs tools such as those found in the human rights education manual Local Action/Global Change. The revised manual directly engages with more than a decades’ accumulation of engaged theory and practice in human rights education and global justice work. It sets out the concepts and tools needed to make rights real for diverse women around the world, whether advocates are struggling in the home, community, national capital or international policy forum.

Importantly, the authors confront the tensions as well as the potentials in using human rights as the grounding for action for justice for women and all persons, and carefully assemble an invaluable collection of practical and politically informed steps to build accountable advocacy within and across women’s and other social justice movements.”
—Alice M. Miller, past co-Director, Center for the Study of Human Rights, University of California-Berkeley School of Law