Role of Law in Human Rights Education

This book demonstrates how legal knowledge is a vital, empowering tool in human rights education.Despite the centrality of international human rights law to the global rights framework, its role in teaching and learning about human rights in schooling is deeply contested in the scholarship of human rights education (HRE). Tackling this phenomenon head-on, the book examines how legal knowledge is framed, valued, or rejected in the theory and practice of HRE, engaging critically with the prevailing trends in the field: one that gestures toward law but avoids depth, and another that disavows its perceived centrality in subjugating local conceptions of human rights. Through a close reading of scholarship and policy, combined with insights from educational and political theory, as well as socio-legal studies, the book argues for law’s role as a form of ‘powerful knowledge’ in HRE. It contends that access to and understanding of legal norms and mechanisms are essential to meaningful rights education, enabling learners to claim and exercise their rights in practice.The book will be of interest to scholars and students of human rights, legal pedagogy, and education policy, as well as practitioners developing HRE programs. It offers a timely, nuanced intervention into a field grappling with deep epistemological tensions, and reasserts the value of law in the struggle for rights.