International human rights law is a discourse with a rich and nuanced connection to time. As with other areas of law, it does more than exist in time but, rather, can be understood to create complex times and temporalities through its everyday discourse and practices (see Greenhouse 1989; Grabham 2016). However, sustained attention by human rights scholars, international legal theorists, and political theorists to the forms, patterns, and possibilities of these times and temporalities remains limited (see Johns 2016; McNeilly 2018). As a result, much scope remains to investigate the connections between time and this area of law. This is particularly so in the contemporary period where understandings of past, presents and futures; temporal rhythms; crises; rights; and how all these ideas exist in our geopolitical context have grasped academic and wider public audiences in new ways. Time and rights demand our attention, and do so in an ever-evolving manner.

Against such a backdrop, this edited collection aims to bring together a diverse group of scholars across jurisdiction, discipline, and expertise to undertake a dedicated exploration of the various temporal aspects of international human rights law. Through such exploration international human rights law may be better understood, even understood anew.

Editors Dr Kathryn McNeilly (Queen’s University Belfast) and Dr Ben Warwick (University of Birmingham) invite expressions of interest from potential contributors across the following indicative areas:

• International human rights law pasts, presents and futures.
• Time as a component of progression and retrogression in international human rights law.
• Urgency/crisis/emergency and international human rights law.
• Discourses of linearity and cyclicality in the theory and practice of international human rights law.
• Times of neoliberalism and of capitalism and international human rights law.
• Ecological times and international human rights.
• The speeds, rhythms, and temporal distortions of international human rights law, including technological developments.
• Non-Western, colonial, or queer temporalities and international human rights law.
• International human rights law and the philosophy of time.

Those interested should email a title, a 500 word abstract, and 300 word biography to k.mcneilly@qub.ac.uk and b.t.warwick@bham.ac.uk by 1^st April 2019.

Final chapters should be 8,000 words in length, inclusive of footnotes. Critical and interdisciplinary contributions are particularly welcome. Successful abstracts will be invited to participate in a workshop to take place in early 2020 in advance of the final submission of completed chapters in Autumn 2020. Contract for the collection will be sought with Oxford University Press on the basis of the selected abstracts.