GI6071 - Human Rights and Global Justice (2025/26)
| Module specification | Module approved to run in 2025/26 | ||||||||||||
| Module title | Human Rights and Global Justice | ||||||||||||
| Module level | Honours (06) | ||||||||||||
| Credit rating for module | 15 | ||||||||||||
| School | School of Social Sciences and Professions | ||||||||||||
| Total study hours | 150 | ||||||||||||
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| Assessment components |
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| Running in 2025/26(Please note that module timeslots are subject to change) | No instances running in the year |
Module summary
You will be invited to kindly participate in critical reasoning and debate about human rights, and thereby to acquire and advance understanding of their nature and of their social and political practice. Reasoning and debate will be facilitated by lectures and (by your own reading of recommended) texts informing you of scholarship on the theory and practice of human rights, on their origin, on the ideal of their universality, on their imperfect institutionalization, and on the challenges facing their actualization in a world of injustice, rival cultural and ideological traditions, domestic populisms and international conflict.
Students who wish to graduate with BA International Relations with Human Rights must take this module.
Prior learning requirements
None.
Not available for Study Abroad.
Syllabus
The module traces the genealogy of human rights until, through and beyond their internationalization and institutionalization in the United Nations project. It explores debate about the nature and practice of both human rights and justice from the 1940s onward, critically evaluating the relation between human rights and global justice. Its practical concern is with how the ideals of human rights and global justice can be defended and advanced through what have so far proven to be the growing international crises of the 2020s. (LO 1-4)
Balance of independent study and scheduled teaching activity
This module is taught through lectures and seminars. You are expected to prepare for the seminars, both by giving and defending your assessed presentation in its allotted week and by reading on each week’s subject in order to critically engage with the lecturer and, no less importantly, with that week’s presenter. You are invited to engage with the tutor about your preparation for both the intellectually formative presentation and summative essay.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module you should be able to:
1. define human rights in a way that is rationally and empirically defensible;
2. explain institutional, political and practical obstacles to implementing universalist ideals of human rights and global justice;
3. evaluate the proposition (by John Rawls) that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought”;
4. debate the history and potential progress of human rights, describe and evaluate conflicting accounts of human rights, and use logically valid argument in justifying and promoting human rights and global justice.
The totality of outcomes will be covered through class discussion of the totality of set seminar questions
Assessment strategy
Seminar presentation answering a set question in the appropriate week, delivered after a lecture more broadly addressing the week’s subject. Although you retain the full choice of set questions for your essay, you are advised to use your presentation formatively in preparation for your essay. In designing, defending and revising your presentation’s argument, However, both presentation and essay are assessed on the cogency of their argued answer to the set question, and on their properly cited use of textual evidence in support of that argument.