School of Architecture and Planning

This course provides a rigorous and critical introduction to the foundation, structure and operation of the international human rights movement. It begins with leading conceptual and theoretical discussions, moving on to the institutions and functioning of the international human rights mechanisms, including non-governmental and inter-governmental ones. It covers cutting-edge human rights issues – gender and race discrimination, religion and state, national security and terrorism – placing them in the context of current political conflict. In addition to relevant case-studies from all over the world, the course zooms in on human rights in Israel-Palestine, with a special focus, through the human rights perspective, on Jerusalem as a city of political, religious, ethnic, social, economic and institutional conflict.

This course is open to all students at MIT, both graduate and undergraduate. There are no prerequisites for the course, but students are expected to have interest in international and public affairs. The course will adopt a double focus – both theory and practice. That is to say, we will address the philosophical fundamentals of human rights while emphasizing the practical aspects of human rights work, the purpose being to enable students to understand the ways in which human rights scholars, activists, and international and governmental officials argue about human rights and their implementation.