Futures

Anticipating future challenges and opportunities

Rapid and simultaneous changes in technology, geopolitics, ecology, and beyond are forcing the human rights movement into a moment of uncertainty and transition. This section delves into promising innovations in human rights thought and practice in response to those challenges, as well as ways that human rights actors might learn from other fields and disciplines as they orient their work towards possible futures.

Backsliding on children’s participation rights within a protection discourse

By: Tracey Holland & Yeonjae Hwang
Español

Victimhood can easily disempower children and silence their voices as well as their claims to human rights, particularly their participation rights.

More than human rights: What can we learn from trees, animals, and fungi?

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

Changing the focus from a human-centric approach to human rights will help the movement advance on environmental agendas with an inter-species recognition.

Children’s right to climate justice

By: Belinda Walzer
Español

The landmark case of 2019 where sixteen children and young people from twelve different countries opened the door to think about guaranteeing rights now and in ...

A tech accountability campaigner's guide to genuine change

By: Jane Chung
Español

In constructing new paradigms, our visioning should not be limited to our definition of the problem.

The (science) fiction of human rights

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

How a particular kind of science fiction resonates with a wide audience and can enrich human rights thinking and practice

The eight-year decade that will determine the fate of the planet and human rights

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

If slowing climate change is a game, how is it going and what's left to accomplish?

An interview with practitioners on the front lines of datafication

By: Juan Ortiz Freuler
Español

A conversation with Grace Mutung’u on the growing adoption of digital ID in Kenya and how it is changing people’s relationship with the government.

Creating a scenario from the future

By: Juan Ortiz Freuler
Español

This fictional scenario draws on real signals of change to construct a future scenario around the impacts of datafication on the human rights movement.

What a datafied worldview means for human rights

By: Juan Ortiz Freuler
Español

Understanding how datafication affects the rights and interests of people, and power relationships at large, is key for an effective defense of human rights.

Future’s past: in search of human rights histories

By: Steven L. B. Jensen
Español | Français | العربية

A new series explores different approaches to the temporalities of human rights history and how this relates to their past, present, and future

Litigating the future: climate rights before the German Constitutional Court

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

Human rights analysts and practitioners will recognize in the decision of the German Court an important turn in the evolution of rights.

Why foresight should be in the DNA of the social change field

By: OGR Admin

An OGR and JustLabs Guide on futures thinking

Of crystal balls, pandemics, and resilience: why foresight should be in the DNA of the social change field

By: Krizna Gomez
Español

"Is it not quite odd that for a field dedicated to 'social change,' we often do not engineer change but usually just adapt to it?"

Five existential challenges to human rights

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

A look at the key geopolitical, ecological, technological and socio-economic challenges to human rights.

From Barbuda to the World: Love (and Peace and Happiness) in the Time of Climate Emergency

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito & Elizabeth Donger
Español

Barbuda is a microcosm of larger trends and issues from climate-induced displacement and disaster capitalism, to the greenwashing of policies that undermine climate ...

Anti-capitalist human rights for the 21st Century

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
العربية | Español

In addition to asking whether or not human rights reinforce the status quo, we should address the following question: can human rights contribute to imagining non-capitalist ...

For human rights to have a future, we must consider time

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español | العربية

Obsessed with pushing spatial boundaries, the human rights community left aside concerns about time. It now must refine its long-term goals as well as its short-term ...

Climate change and human rights: lessons from litigation for the Amazon

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

Lawsuits have become an increasingly frequent route for urgent action on climate change, but the impact of this litigation depends on citizens’ mobilization

Reimagining human rights as a frame of justice

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

The future of human rights as a frame of justice depends on our capacity to create, detect, and foster bridges with other frames.

Trump’s victory could push the human rights movement to transform

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

Donald Trump’s victory is a threat to human rights, but could it also push the movement to transform and strategize with greater urgency?

Against reductionist views of human rights

By: César Rodríguez-Garavito
Español

César Rodríguez-Garavito responds to Stephen Hopgood and Aryeh Neier, criticising both sides of the debate for an all too simplistic view of the actors, the content ...