Beyond Physical Integrity

Over the last two decades, the social sciences have made impressive strides in understanding human rights. The law-and-social science interdisciplinary revolution—combined with advances in data availability, research design, and computational tools—have made rights an even more fruitful subject for academic research. While much of this new research has taken place in the social sciences, scholars in the humanities are increasingly studying rights as well. For example, historians took less interest in human rights per se until after the events of 9/11 and the ensuing wars in the Middle East, but many are now studying the origins of rights institutions, such as treaties, constitutions, and informal norms. This concluding Article to the “Future of Human Rights Scholarship” special issue outlines how political scientists could draw on developments in law and insights from history to take up a set of thus-far under-explored questions. While political science has made important advances in studying human rights, the field’s focus has been rather narrow. The bulk of human rights scholarship— especially recent empirical scholarship—has focused on respect for physical integrity rights: government-imposed torture, extrajudicial killing, unjust imprisonment, and other violations of bodily integrity.