The Routledge Handbook of Human Rights in Southeast Asia analyses some of the region’s most pressing human rights issues, while also giving attention to those actors and institutions that work towards improvement.

Chapters by international experts in the field provide readers with a background on some of Southeast Asia’s most pressing human rights concerns. The book builds on, and contributes to, existing analyses of human rights in Southeast Asia to further enhance our understanding of what sits behind the region’s ambivalent human rights track record. Following an introduction, the handbook is structured in eight parts. The chapters cover a wide range of human rights issues including human rights debates at political and regional levels, and how human rights are experienced every day, such as the rights to food, water, and work:

Advancing Human Rights through ASEAN

Refugees: Protecting Rights and Strengthening Agency

Transitional Justice in Southeast Asia: Confronting the Past

Balancing Moral Perspectives: Ideologies and Human Rights

Intersections between Workers’ Rights, Corporations and the State

Accessing and Maintaining Rights to Water, Food, and Health

On the Frontline: Human Rights Defenders

Promoting Human Rights in Southeast Asia: New Directions and Strategies

The handbook considers the political and social contexts in which human rights emerge, the dynamics of their contestation and violation, and how rights are claimed. It demonstrates that human rights are a practice and goes beyond considering human rights as formal structures in laws, regulations, and meeting rooms. A timely overview and analysis of the situation of Human Rights in Southeast Asia, this handbook will be a valuable reference work for scholars and practitioners in human rights, the field of Asian Law, Asian Studies in general and Southeast Asian Studies in particular.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.