This book is based upon a lecture series inaugurating the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights that took place in Winnipeg, Canada between September 2013 and May 2014. Fragile Freedoms brings together some of the most influential contemporary thinkers on the theory and practice of human rights.

The first two chapters, by Anthony Grayling and Steven Pinker, are primarily historical: they trace the emergence of human rights to a particular time and place, and they try to show how that emergence changed the world for the better. The next two chapters, by Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, are normative arguments about the philosophical foundations of human rights. The final three chapters, by John Borrows, Baroness Helena Kennedy, and Germaine Greer, are innovative applications of human rights to indigenous peoples, globalization and international law, and women.

Wide ranging in its philosophical perspectives and implications, this volume is an indispensable contribution to the contemporary thinking on the rights that must be safeguarded for all people.

Steven Lecce is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Manitoba.

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Neil McArthur is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba. He is a regular contributor to VICE and the author of David Hume's Political Theory.

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