Is The Rights’ Future writing’s future too?
A perennial problem in academic writing is the lack of feedback along the way. Academics can run ideas by other academics and in class; works in progress can be presented at research seminars; and published papers can provoke published replies. In response, the original idea can be refined, and the process of iterative development can continue. One way to short-circuit the process is to publish ideas in early draft form on blogs and similar sites (and many of the posts on this site are well on their way to incorporation into academic articles). Conor Gearty (pictured right) has come up with a really interesting way to go further, a collaborative means by which he can garner, engage with, and incorporate significant online feedback on his writing during the course of the writing.
Moreover, what he will write by this means is very important: a book entitled The Rights’ Future in which he will consider nothing less than the future of human rights. In his view, they are
…the only potentially radical and genuinely universal idea available to us in this post-socialist world of fear, money and lost souls. Too important to be left to lawyers but too subversive to be handed over to the politicians alone, human rights need the intellectuals, the workers and the streets if their model of a new kind of society has any chance of beginning to be built.
