A joint initiative between the University of Bergen
and CMI – Chr. Michelsen Institute
Welcome to a book talk on "When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality".
Cover design & collage: Lindy Kasler, photography: Adobe Stock and Shutterstock The book surveys the progress and challenges in deploying human rights to advance health and social equality over recent decades. Author Alicia Ely Yamin weaves together theory and firsthand experience in a compelling narrative of how evolving legal norms, empirical knowledge, and development paradigms have interacted in the realization of health rights. She challenges us to consider why these advances have failed to produce greater equality within and between nations.
In this revised and expanded second edition, Yamin incorporates crucial lessons learned about the state of global health equity and public health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. She demonstrates just how incompatible the current institutionalised world order—based on neoliberal, financialized capitalism—is with one in which the rights of diverse people around the globe can be realised. COVID-19 struck a world that had been shaped by decades of disinvestment in public health, health systems, and social protection, as well as privatisation of wealth and gaping social inequalities within and between countries, and the evident crisis of confidence in the capacity of democratic political institutions and global governance was deepened by the pandemic.
Yamin argues that transformative human rights praxis in health calls for addressing issues of structural inequality and political economy, and working across disciplinary silos through networks and social movements.
Yamin’s talk will be followed by a conversation with Siri Gloppen.
The seminar is part of the RDV SERIES, a collaboration between the Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism and the Centre on Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen. The RDV series is an interdisciplinary webinar where we invite national and international researchers to talk about their pioneering research on topics regarding law, democracy, and welfare.
Facebook event
Alicia Ely Yamin currently teaches law and public health at Harvard University. She has over thirty years of experience in human rights practice, living and working with advocacy organizations across the globe.
Read more
Siri Gloppen is Professor of Political Science (Department of Government), Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bergen and Co-Director of Centre on Law & Social Transformation (CMI-UiB).
Read more
Alicia Ely Yamin currently teaches law and public health at Harvard University. She has over thirty years of experience in human rights practice, living and working with advocacy organizations across the globe.
Siri Gloppen is Professor of Political Science (Department of Government), Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bergen and Co-Director of Centre on Law & Social Transformation (CMI-UiB).
She is a political scientist with a research agenda at the intersection of law and politics, combining a focus on empirical socio-legal studies and political theory. Her work spans legal mobilization and lawfare, judicial politics and the role of courts in social transformation, gender and judging, democratization, constitution making and institutionalization of accountability structures, election processes, human rights, transitional justice and reconciliation. She has broad experience in leading and participating in cross-regional and interdisciplinary research projects investigating legal mobilization and the role of law and courts in areas such as health, abortion and LGBTIQ+ politics, democratic backlash, climate change, land and water rights and child protection. Her main empirical focus is Southern and Eastern Africa.
Bergen Global is a joint initiative between the University of Bergen and Chr. Michelsen Institute that addresses global challenges.
