The mechanisms by which the global human rights regime is constructed and embedded are a core research focus for CCRJ. By examining how authority and legitimacy are created for impartial global norms, and how those norms are made tangible in rights campaigns, international law, international justice, and forms of humanitarian practice (from relief and development to the Responsibility to Protect), CCRJ aims to give sociological depth to the world of human rights.

Stephen Hopgood holds a three-year Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to lead research on this project. Leslie Vinjamuri holds a Smith Richardson Foundation Grant to investigate the politics that have shaped the construction of a global legal accountability norm. CCRJ member Tom Young is undertaking research (with David Harris) on the international politics of social transformation focusing on Sierra Leone.

Rahul Rao is currently working on a project (with Andrew Hurrell) on non-Western conceptions of order and justice called Provincializing Westphalia. His book Third World Protest: Between Home and World is published by Oxford University Press. His next project will use queer struggles as a vantage point from which to explore questions about the construction and consolidation of postcolonial boundaries and identities. Mark Laffey is currently researching the relations between liberal and Eurocentric accounts of the history of the international human rights regime and the evolution of social and economic rights, in particular labour rights with reference to China.