New Area Studies, Global IR and International Human Rights

This article uses the study of international human rights to examine the potential of New Area Studies (NAS) to enhance the efforts of scholars in Global International Relations (GIR) in their quest to re-vision international relations theory. GIR, which was founded as an explicit commitment to de-centering Western-dominated IR theory, embraces interdisciplinary knowledge from and about different areas of the world as a key part of its effort to understand the complexities of – and relations among – multiple localities, states and regions. Yet, while successful as a critique of dominant theory, GIR has not fared as well in cumulating insights across different localities, states and regions. Nor has it managed to go much beyond engaging with its original home discipline, political science. Both of these limitations are evident in recent scholarship on international human rights. This article shows how NAS can help GIR scholars move past these limitations while also illuminating hidden aspects of the discourse and practice of human rights across various regional settings. This is evident in three defining features of NAS: its commitment to area-specific expertise (broadly defined and reconceptualized beyond traditional categories); its emphasis on eliminating disciplinary silos to encourage conversations that span geographic space and area expertise; and its insistence on full inclusion of non-elite communities of scholars in the production of knowledge.