Professional Affiliation

Author, The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization

Expert Bio

Alison Brysk is the Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance at UCSB. She is the author or editor of 10 books on human rights movements, globalization, transitional justice, women's rights, indigenous rights, symbolic politics, and human rights foreign policy. Brysk has been a Fulbright Scholar in Canada and India, and a Visiting Scholar at universities in Argentina, Ecuador, France, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. Her new study of communication politics in two dozen human rights campaigns, "Speaking Rights to Power," will be published by Oxford University Press.

Wilson Center Project

"Women's Rights as Human Rights: Constructing Political Will"

Project Summary

How can "communication power" in human rights campaigns mobilize political will to address previously hidden or naturalized violence against women worldwide? I will trace the varying strategies and success of information politics to gain recognition of women's human rights in foreign policy across a series of key cases: human trafficking, wartime rape, FGM, and honor killings. I will also compare the differences in response to these campaigns among different leverage points and stake-holders in the international human rights regime. The overall goal of the project is to map “best practices” for mobilizing the international human rights regime through framing different forms of violence against women as a human rights problem and designing campaigns that bridge the complex power relations of gender justice.

Alison Brysk discusses international human rights: 

Major Publications

• "Speaking Rights to Power: Constructing Political Will," Oxford University Press, 2013
• "From Human Trafficking to Human Rights: Reframing Contemporary Slavery," University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012
• "The Politics of the Globalization of Law: Getting from Rights to Justice," Routledge, 2013