Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai is distinguished by its commitment to field-based learning and research. It has been at the forefront of the development of the social sciences and social work education in India for seventy-five years. TISS has benefited from the continuity of leadership and widely shared core values. It has a longstanding commitment to partnering with communities throughout India, and its fieldwork projects develop realistic solution to seemingly intractable social problems.

Megaliths, burial mounds, and other remnants of ancient human civilization littered the region. No textual sources about them survived. Competing with ancient Greece and Rome, local scholars composed rival visions of antiquity that supported Swedish, Danish, or German imperial ambitions. By contrast, Major developed a distinctive approach to prehistory that served no political interests. Assuming a prehistoric state of human desperation, Major reasoned about prehistory by using the intellectual approaches of the history of learning and experimental philosophy. He developed a multiyear research project that deployed extensive excavations, purposeful travel, distinctive visual techniques, and novel note-taking methods. He identified so-called thunderstones as ancient artifacts as well as the varying deployment of stone, bronze, and iron in different time periods through the use of stratigraphy and the ordering of finds by the materials used. In 1688, he opened a public museum and conference hall where members of opposing sides in the war could discuss the history of their shared region. Although this institution did not long survive Major’s death, his archaeological approach did.

The human rights movement is by no means uniform and a series of challenges, both within the movement and in respect of its role as a political actor, have become more pronounced with the increasing power of human rights and its advocates. This development has cast the light on human rights advocates, such as NGOs, and has raised questions both of legitimacy – who are you to make claims in the name of human rights or on behalf of certain people? Are you living up to human rights principles in your own practice? – and effectiveness – are you really making the positive difference in people’s lives you claim to make? Responses to these challenges testify to a growing self-awareness and critical assessment of the nature of human rights work, which includes an evaluation of the efficacy of strategies used to promote and protect human rights. Inevitably, human rights advocates are increasingly drawn into the political domain and are faced with the difficult task of marrying principle with pragmatism. This chapter explores the tensions arising in these contexts and assesses the strategies used by human rights actors, namely documentation, human rights reporting, advocacy, awareness-raising, training and education and, where relevant, litigation

International human rights law is part of public international law and shares a number of its features, including sources, obligations (primary rules) and state responsibility (secondary rules). While international human rights law has formed within the broader setting of international law, it has developed distinctive features. Traditional international law was an order based on the sovereign interests of states as its sole subjects. In contrast, international human rights law is characterised by its emphasis on common interests that reflect the fundamental values of the international legal order. This value-based approach is evident in the concept of jus cogens, or peremptory norm, and the notion of erga omnes, obligations owed to the international community as a whole. Undoubtedly, international human rights law can form an important component of a new international order or international constitutionalism. However, unilateralism, selectivity and fragmentation, in addition to challenges of effective implementation, are restraining factors that may slow down, if not undermine, ‘constitutional’ developments at the international level. This chapter examines these dynamics and discusses the key building blocks of international (human rights) law: its sources; its rights and obligations and the scope of their application; and its implementation as well as state responsibility and enforcement.