Presented by Dr. Tara White, Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences (Research) and the founding director of the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience at Brown University

Neuroscientist and psychology researcher Tara White proposes that protections provided by international human rights instruments are rooted in fundamental properties of the human brain. The emerging field that she has named dignity neuroscience stems from her and others’ work in human brain science and human emotions. Dr. White proposes a framework that provides an empirical foundation to support and foster human dignity, universal rights, and their active furtherance by individuals, nations, and international law. It incorporates understandings of brain structures involved in agency, autonomy, and self-determination, the harms of privation and maltreatment, and the concept of intrinsic human dignity expressed in longstanding cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. 

Gustavo Arosemena, assistant professor at the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights, and Bart Kleine Deters, a senior researcher at ECBO, a Dutch education research center,  speak about their book chapter “Conflicts in Human Rights-Based Development”.  The authors note that it has become increasingly common to define development in terms of rights. However, they write,

What is rarely recognized is that even if development is conceptualized in terms of rights, it remains a conflictive process. Normally it is not possible to satisfy the rights or claims to development of all needy parties. Consequently, there is a need to make choices, to make trade-offs. How this squares with talk of ‘rights’ is not well understood. Existing theories of rights-based development say little about conflicts or how to solve them. (Arosemena & Kleine Deters, 2020, p. 242)