Human Rights in Global Politics developed out of a conference which brought together some of the leading theorists and activists working on human rights. We asked them to reflect on the growing disparity between the almost globally accepted standard for the protection of universal human rights and the daily denial of those basic rights to millions of people.

The Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth was an appropriate venue for the conference. After all, the first ever endowed chair in the field was instituted to advance ‘a truer understanding of civilisations other than our own’, a theme which recurs in this volume. We wanted to harness this normative ambition to new thinking in international theory. Our guide in this respect was an earlier conference entitled ‘After Positivism’ – later published by Cambridge as International Theory: Positivism and Beyond and edited by Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski – held in Aberystwyth seventy-five years after the birth of the discipline. We are delighted that Cambridge University Press is publishing the revised proceedings of this second in a series of conferences. Throughout the preparation of the volume, John Haslam has been a very encouraging commissioning editor. He attended the original conference and has stood by the project from the outset.