The Role of Law in Human Rights Education

This book demonstrates how legal knowledge is a vital, empowering tool in human rights education. Despite the centrality of international human rights law to the global rights framework, its role in human rights education (HRE) – particularly in schools and community settings – has been sidelined, dismissed as either too technical or too politically problematic. This book challenges that marginalisation head-on. It examines how legal knowledge is framed, valued, or rejected in the theory and practice of HRE, engaging critically with the prevailing trends in the field: one that gestures toward law but avoids depth, and another that disavows law entirely in favour of culturally embedded alternatives. Through a close reading of scholarship and policy, combined with insights from educational theory and socio-legal studies, the book argues for law’s role as a form of “powerful knowledge” in HRE. It contends that access to and understanding of legal norms and mechanisms are not only essential for meaningful rights education but are themselves enabling rights in practice. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of human rights, legal pedagogy, and education policy, as well as practitioners developing HRE programs. It offers a timely, nuanced intervention into a field grappling with deep epistemological and political tensions, and reasserts the value of law in the struggle for rights.