Abstract
There is a general agreement in international human rights law that no social phenomenon is as comprehensive in its assault on human rights as poverty. Poverty is seen as an erosion of human rights and is the result of cumulative violations to economic, social, civil and political rights. The Research Handbook on Human Rights and Poverty offers both a critique and praise to this human rights approach to poverty.
The handbook starts with a foreword by former UN Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, who offers a rather critical take on the institutional efforts to address, let alone eradicate, poverty, and suggests that poverty is a ‘political choice’.
Many other authors of the book join this critique to the existing institutional setting to fight poverty, while simultaneously building on the current structural design to find innovative solutions or approaches to poverty from a human rights approach. An impressive number of leading experts in the field of human rights contribute to this research handbook by exploring the link between human rights and poverty and provide a critical look to key challenges in the field. The volume both suggests that more research needs to be done on poverty through a human rights lens and at the same time challenges assumptions of contemporary human rights concepts. It criticizes, inter alia, the marginal human rights obligations private actors bear considering their involvement in the global power dynamics and in exacerbating inequalities. Overall, the 35 chapters that compose the research handbook sketch the state of play of poverty and human rights and raise probing questions about the very same status quo.
The research handbook is divided in four parts. Accordingly, the first few chapters put into question the very foundations of a human rights approach to poverty by challenging shared definitions, measurements and standards of poverty commonly used in the international community, which are essential for crafting, implementing and assessing policy responses. The second part analyses the poverty and inequality dynamics in relation to cross-cutting issues. This second part is divided into three sub-parts that address issues linked to identity (age, disability, gender or sexual orientation), circumstantial aspects of poverty (migration or geography) and participation issues where the link between poverty and political rights is explored. Part three, in turn, turns into a discussion over the policy approaches to poverty and human rights and includes important contributions regarding housing, healthcare, privatisation, workers’ rights and taxation. The fourth and closing part of the volume is dedicated to addressing external structural barriers in governance mechanisms that have an impact on both poverty and human rights. In this part, authors examine meta-issues that exacerbate poverty and human rights violations such as climate change, corruption, conflict (zones), technological advances, and corporate/private actors’ disruptions versus their lack of (sufficient) liability. This impressive collection of chapters lacks, regrettably, a concluding section that brings together the most relevant findings. Granted, drawing concluding remarks from such a diverse and broad take on poverty and human rights is nothing short of a challenge if one wants to avoid unnecessary generalisations and over-simplifications of such sensitive issues. Regardless, a final closing chapter could have offered some needed guiding general remarks to inspire both policymakers and future research. These, however, can be found in the respective chapters.
The research handbook presents an important collection of insights on crucial ties between poverty and human rights from an impressive interdisciplinary exercise. This is an essential contribution for researchers and academics to enrich their understanding of poverty, its causes and how the phenomenon progressively transforms. It sheds light on a variety of dimensions of poverty that are currently overlooked from a human rights discourse. As a consequence, it is an important reference for future research and policymaking that should be used to inspire forthcoming contributions and avenues for pursuing the eradication of poverty. Moreover, it brings this impressive collection of contributions in a very timely manner. Amidst a global pandemic, which the authors deem one among many reasons to be pessimistic about advances towards poverty eradication, the handbook advocates for confronting poverty as the core human rights issue that it is.
Compared to other volumes on this topic, the research handbook offers a more ambitious collection that is able to address poverty and human rights from a variety of fields and disciplines. This allows the volume to cover both intersectional and structural issues. The novelty of this volume also lies in its duality: it uses the human rights approach to poverty both as a foundation and as the basis for its critique in many of its contributions.
Hopefully, this volume will serve its purpose and inspire policymakers and governments alike to confront the urgent a long-standing need to eradicate poverty and significantly reducing inequality.
