Collective Equality

In recent decades international and regional human rights norms have been increasingly applied to constitutional provisions, revealing significant tensions between primary political arrangements, such as power-sharing institutions, and human rights norms. This book argues that these tensions, generally framed as a peace versus justice dilemma, are built on an individualistic conception of justice that fails to account for the empirical reality in places characterized by ethnically based political exclusion and inequalities. By introducing the concept of 'Collective Equality' as a new theoretical basis for the law of peace, this timely book proposes a new approach for dealing with the tensions between peace-related arrangements and human rights norms. Through principled, pragmatic, and legal reasoning the book develops a new paradigm that captures more accurately what equality and human rights mean and require in the context of ethno-national conflicts, and provides potent guidance for advancing justice and peace in such places.

Limor Yehuda is a lecturer at the faculty of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and researcher at the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Van-Leer Institute. Previously Yehuda clerked for President Aharon Barak at Israel's Supreme Court and practiced human right law at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) where she directed the Department for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.