Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledging the Complexity of the Human Rights Regime / Philip Alston -- 'A Very Murky Process': Embracing the Indeterminacy of International Justice and Human Rights / Richard Ashby Wilson -- Vernacularizing Rights: Indispensable but Dangerous / Jack Snyder -- Globalising the Indigenous: The Making of International Human Rights from below / César Rodríguez-Garavito -- Rites of Culture: Legal Frameworks, Indigenous Protocols, and the Circulation of Culture in Australia / Fred Myers --Vernacularization as Anthropological Ethics / Mark Goodale -- The Vernacularization of Transitional Justice: Is Transitional Justice Useful in Pre-conflict Settings? / Pablo de Greiff -- Beyond the Vanishing Point: Quantification as Rhetoric in Today's Anti-slavery Campaigns / Samuel Martínez -- The Competitive Pressures of Rankings: Experimental Evidence of Rankings' Influence on Domestic Priorities / Rush Doshi, Judith Kelley and Beth A. Simmons -- Between Conduct and Counter-conduct: Human Rights Translation at the Universal Periodic Review / Julie Billaud -- Recommendations in Words and Numbers: Thinking with Sally Engle Merry at the Universal Periodic Review / Jane K. Cowan -- Visualising the 'Women, Peace, and Security Agenda' / Hilary Charlesworth -- The Seductions of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data / Margaret L. Satterthwaite -- Strategising the World: Uncounted People in the Sustainable Development Goal on Health / Sara L.M. (Meg) Davis.

"This book provides the first systematic assessment from a human rights law perspective of the landmark contributions of the renowned legal anthropologist, Sally Engle Merry. What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to present them as a single, universal, and immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them. Merry and her colleagues transformed human rights thinking by highlighting the process of 'vernacularization', which sees rights discourse as being unavoidably dependent upon translation and interpretation. She also warned of the pitfalls of excessive reliance upon statistical and other indicators, through the process of quantification. Here the leading voices in the field assess the significance of these contributions."-- Provided by publisher.