“How and why are rights used for aggressive purposes?” (p. 2). This is the central question Clifford Bob sets out to answer in Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power. The author answers this question by providing a typology for classifying various tactics in which actors use rights in offensive, aggressive, defensive, and calculated ways against opponents. The breakdown is thorough and analytically useful beyond the cases he uses for empirical assessment.
Bob, a professor of political science at Duquesne University, has focused his career on the study of transnational civil society and has made important contributions to this field with previous works such as The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (2012) and his earlier book The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism (2005), both published by Cambridge University Press. Throughout his work, analysis of rights-based advocacy has been consistently highlighted....
University of California Press