Human rights are declared as one of the European Union's founding principles and are a collection of universal rights inherent to all human beings, without regard to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, colour, religion, political opinion, birth or other status. Their purpose lies in preserving the equality, freedom, dignity and safety of all people. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. This treaty was the first legal document that enshrined fundamental human rights to be universally protected. Since then, human rights scholarship has grown as an interdisciplinary field but currently stands at a crossroads – it is contracting in some directions while expanding in others.

A Research Agenda for Human Rights presents an accumulation of the historic path of scholarship in this field and the emergence of new practices, ideas and alternative methods and perspectives for future research. This 208-page publication is divided into an introduction, which provides an overview of the included topics and the applied methods, followed by 11 articles by acclaimed professionals in the field of human rights.

In the first article, ‘The study of human rights history: A corpus-based linguistic approach to “human rights” in the nineteenth-century British press’, Eetu Vento illustrates how the use of language plays a significant role in understanding the development of human rights ideas. He analyses the term ‘human rights’ using different methodologies and with that adds to the expanding literature dealing with the European provenance, meaning, dissemination and reception of principles regarding human rights. In ‘Humanitarianism: Coping in the void’, David Forsythe highlights human rights in connection with war crimes, the difficult dividing line between humanitarian values and politics and the resulting need for humanitarian help.

In the third article, Champa Patel outlines the need for more research in regard to internationally displaced persons (IDPs). She calls for more reliable and accurate data, a better understanding of the exact situations that cause the sizable amount of IDPs, a greater insight into multi-faceted and multi-staged displacement and the impact it has on host communities.