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Todd Landman, University of Essex, todd@essex.ac.uk

The 2009 Annual Meeting for the APSA will be held in Toronto and the theme for the meeting is 'Politics in Motion: Change and Complexity in the Contemporary Era'. The Human Rights Section is pleased to announce its call for papers that address this broad theme, which is particularly apt for the scholarly study of human rights. The section encourages proposals that address the three theme ideas of change, complexity, and the practical impact of our research on the promotion and protection of human rights.

While human rights are grounded in deep normative and philosophical traditions they represent a beacon for the struggle of oppressed and marginalized peoples, and they continue to be forward-looking in providing a useful framework for advancing human dignity and social justice in an increasingly changing and complex world. Human rights standards and principles laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and developed through subsequent instruments thereafter have become increasing embraced as providing practical solutions for the complexity of the world's contemporary problems.

Political science scholarship in human rights is particularly adept at capturing the complex nature of human rights problems while providing a rigorous base of argument and evidence from which to formulate policy at the local, national, and international level. The section welcomes proposals that make the link between the normative, the empirical, and the practical. The section is particularly interested in research that addresses the notion of progressive realisation of all human rights, which in our view captures the overall theme 'Politics in Motion'.