Statsvetenskap och studiet av mänskliga rättigheter

Abstract

Political science and the study of human rights. This article contains an overview of how the study of human rights issues has developed into a separate multidisciplinary field of academic study and education in Sweden. Its relationship to the different fields of political science is outlined, as well as general problems of a multidisciplinary subject. Three contributions to an edited volume containing Swedish and foreign scholarship on human rights issues drawn from the Swedish Forum for Human Rights, a biannual gathering of practitioners and scholars, are discussed. Those contributions deal with the tensions between universalist and relativist approaches to the character of human rights, the tensions between the development of international law and power relations in international politics, and, thirdly, tensions between group rights and individual rights.