How does culture make a difference to the realisation of human rights in Western states? It is only through cultural politics that human rights may become more than abstract moral ideals, protecting human beings from state violence and advancing protection from starvation and the social destruction of poverty. Using an innovative methodology, this book maps the emergent `intermestic` human rights field within the US and UK in order to investigate detailed case studies of the cultural politics of human rights. Kate Nash researches how the authority to define human rights is being created within states as a result of international human rights commitments. Through comparative case studies, she explores how cultural politics is affecting state transformation today.
• Develops novel concepts and an innovative methodology to study a new phenomenon of ‘intermestic’ rights • Analyses the human rights movement in the context of state transformation from within states in order to assess the varieties of nationalism which are now emerging.

Contents
Preface; 1. What does it matter what human rights mean?; 2. Analysing the intermestic human rights field; 3. Sovereignty, pride and political life; 4. Imagining a community without `enemies of all mankind`; 5. Global solidarity: justice not charity; 6. Conclusion.

"The author brilliantly shows us how laws need to wire themselves into the material and ideational practices of groups, societies, institutions, and imaginaries. Her particular focus for exploring this large question is the centrality of the cultures of a place and a time for making human rights effective. New laws need to be embedded. But it also means that even very old laws can be re-embedded in novel institutional and political settings and become effective." (Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University)

"Against the narrow conventions of institutionalism, Kate Nash brings culture to the analysis of global human rights, just as she challenges its moralizing idealism with a refreshing dose of hard-headed, comparative sociology. A welcome intervention." (Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University)