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  JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH 
 

 
 

Review of Global Urban Justice:  The Rise of Human Rights Cities 
 
Barbara Oomen, Martha F. Davis, and Michele Grigolo, eds., Global Urban Justice:  The 
Rise of Human Rights Cities. 2016.  New York: Cambridge University Press. 336 pages, ISBN 
978-1-1071-4701-0 Cloth ($110.00). 
 
Global Urban Justice:  The Rise of Human Rights Cities highlights the urbanization of human 
rights struggles simultaneous with the urbanization of humanity in the 21st century. Despite the 
ongoing polarization of wealth and power in the global system, the language of human rights 
continues to shape public discourse and political practices. In her “Introduction:  The Promise and 
Challenges of Human Rights Cities,” Barbara M. Oomen provides a useful overview of the state 
of play. With the continued urbanization of the global system, there are a host of initiatives, such 
as the World Human Rights Cities Forum in 2014, where some 500 participants came together in 
Gwangju, South Korea, legendary for its role in that state’s democratization, to discuss a “Global 
Alliance of Human Rights Cities for All.” At a time when the majority of the world’s population, 
for the first time in history, lives in cities, and the numbers and proportion of the urban population 
is expected to significantly increase in the next quarter century and beyond, the potential role of 
cities in forwarding emancipatory human rights struggles and discourses is critical.  
 The question here is framed in the context of the larger human rights revolution since World 
War II, as well as the related question of what is often called “the right to the city.” Of special 
importance here, are struggles to localize human rights in urban spaces.  While recognizing salient 
features of the present urban moment, Oomen is simultaneously sensitive to the historical 
importance of cities, from the birth of democracy in Athens to subsequent protest movements in 
Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa, and to the expansion of human rights discourse 

ISSN: 1076-156X   |   Vol. 24   Issue 1  |  DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2018.773   |   jwsr.pitt.edu 

 

      

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from civil, political and social rights to the rights of children, migrants and women, including the 
right to be free from domestic violence. 
 Quite a few chapters in the volume examine the North American and Western European 
experiences.  Martha F. Davis, in “Cities, Human Rights and Accountability: The United States 
Experience,” looks at various grassroots initiatives to hold the U.S. government accountable for 
human rights monitoring and implementation, localizing this trend with examples from Chicago, 
Boston, Eugene, Oregon and Berkeley, California. In her chapter, “From Principles to Practice:  
The Role of US Mayors in Advancing Human Rights,” Joann Kamuf Ward underscores the lack 
of commitment on the part of the U.S. to human rights as a whole, and the strategic possibilities 
for political action at the municipal level. She pays special attention to the formation of the U.S. 
Coalition of Cities Against Racism and Discrimination formed in 2013. Members of the Coalition 
draw on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 
interpreting it in ways that forward an intersectional approach to questions of racial domination 
and injustice. She also discusses the U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing populations of cities 
with 30,000 or more persons.  
 Esther Van Den Berg, in “Making Human Rights the Talk of the Town:  Civil Society and 
Human Rights Cities, a Case Study of the Netherlands,” and Benoit Frate, in “Human Rights at 
the Local Level:  The Montreal Experience,” round out the first part of the book, focusing on actors 
and their shifting capabilities by highlighting  two very different experiences, including cities such 
as Utrecht, the Hague, and Amsterdam in developing the human rights agenda, and Montreal’s 
development of its Charter of Rights and Responsibilities.   
 One question that is not fully explored here is the potentially powerful role of cities in 
independent and transformative political initiatives that expand the realm of rights for all of 
humanity. For example, before becoming a Senator and then Democratic Presidential contender in 
2016, Bernie Sanders, an independent Socialist candidate, pioneered what he called “socialism in 
one city” as mayor of Burlington, Vermont (home to the radical ice cream makers, Ben & Jerry’s). 
Sanders’ book, Our Revolution:  A Future to Believe In, chronicles his experiences in Burlington 
as part of a larger narrative about the rise of the progressive movement.  The fact that Sanders is 
now considered the most popular politician in the U.S. suggests that a younger generation has a 
more favorable view of the possibilities for socialism today as compared with actually existing 
capitalism.  
 The second part of the book focuses on renegotiating rights in urban space.  Eva Garcia 
Chueca, in “Human Rights in the City and the Right to the City:  Two Different Paradigms 
Confronting Urbanization,” explores the intersections and differences between these frameworks, 
one coming from the international human rights movement and international law, and the other 



 

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coming from the work of Henri Lefebvre and urban social movements across the time and space 
of the global system, most especially in what is today called the Global South.  In the latter view 
of the city as battleground, contestation over urban space and development takes the foreground. 
Though it would strengthen the arguments forwarded here, unexplored is the language of urban 
music, from the classic words of the high priestess of soul, Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” (“cause 
the city’s dying, and they don’t know why. Oh Baltimore, ain’t it hard just to live, just to live?”) 
to the contemporary sound of the prophets of the hood, such as one-time Baltimore resident, Tupac 
Shakur, to the Middle Eastern bard of revolution in North Africa that Tupac helped inspire, El 
Général, who provided the musical soundtrack of urban uprising in Tunisia (“Your People Are 
Dead”), and helped inspire the wave of protests in 2011 that became the Arab Spring.  
 Jonathan Darling, “Defying the Demand to ‘Go Home’:  From Human Rights Cities to the 
Urbanization of Human Rights,” deals with the increasingly important question of immigrants, 
refugees, and asylum seekers across the globe, at a time when we see the resurgence of racism, 
xenophobia and quasi-fascist movements targeting the most vulnerable of city-dwellers.  Darling 
here deals with questions of citizenship, rights and social change, echoing David Harvey’s 
argument that the right to change ourselves by changing our cities may be among the most 
important of human rights. Catherine Buerger, in “Contested Advocacy:  Negotiating Between 
Rights and Reciprocity in Mima and Maamobi, Ghana,” highlights the importanceof African cities 
for human rights struggles, especially salient given the degree to which Africa is a key site of 
future urban population growth. Here, she draws on the United Nations’ important reports on 
slums, highlighted too by Mike Davis.  There is also a focus on implementing human rights in 
cities, with Cynthia Soohoo exploring “Human Rights Cities:  Challenges and Possibilities,” and 
Michele Grigolo, in  “Towards a Sociology of the Human Rights City,” highlighting the 
relationship between the making of cities and the making of human rights. 
 This book is an important intervention in debates about urban social justice, urbanization and 
cities in the world-system, as well as the question of human rights and human rights cities.  The 
quality of scholarship is consistently high throughout. At the same time, there are serious lacunae, 
as might be expected, given the proliferation of issues and movements in our urbanizing world.  
One especially large gap is the lack of attention to religion generally from liberation theology to 
contemporary populist Islam in the rise of urban social moments, something explored by a host of 
authors, including the powerful work of Asef Bayat. There is also not much theorization of the 
combination of urbanization and industrialization that produced the emancipatory social 
movement theorized by Marx and others, and the decoupling of this today, or the intersection of 
this with uneven processes of secularization or religious revival.  This is unfortunate because for 



 

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world-systems scholars, such comparative world-historical analysis is critical for grasping the 
possibilities of the present moment.  As Mike Davis (2004: 30) wrote in “Planet of Slums,”  

 
Indeed, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed 
and the Holy Ghost.  If God died in the cities of the Industrial Revolution, he has 
risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.  The contrast 
between the cultures of urban poverty in the two eras is extraordinary.  

 

Such theorizations, drawing on a more historical sociological approach, are largely absent 
from the book, and the important empirical materials assembled thus suffer from a lack of 
comparison and contrast that the world-systems perspective, at is best, offers.  The book would 
have also benefited from engaging much more centrally with the intersection of debates 
surrounding Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens, regarding the 
growing global crisis of refugees, internally displaced persons, and immigrants in the context of 
the resurgence of narrow forms of nationalism.  Another area worthy of further exploration is the 
whole question of what Robert Sampson and others have termed neighborhood effects. Missing, 
too, is engagement with Saskia Sassen’s emphasis on the intersections of globalization and 
urbanization, and work by a host of recent authors articulating the intersection of race, space and 
what is called punishment’s place. Practices such as stop and frisk, and related modes of urban 
policing that give rise to movements such as Black Lives Matter, are setting off urban uprisings in 
the U.S. and across the world, but the volume provides very limited discussion of this. Despite 
these missing themes, many of which are deserving of future exploration in subsequent works, the 
volume offers an important introduction to rethinking the state of cities in the world-system. Such 
rethinking ought to be on the top of the agenda for world-systems scholars and activists, and more 
generally for all humans working for a more just, sustainable future for our urban dwellings and 
planetary inhabitants. 

 
 

References 
Benhabib, Seyla. 2005. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. New York: 

Cambridge University Press. 
Davis, Mike. 2004. “Planet of Slums.” New Left Review 26 (March-April): 5-34. 
Sanders, Bernie. 2016. Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. 
Sassen, Saskia. 2010. The Global City:  New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ:  

Princeton University Press. 



 

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jwsr.pitt.edu  |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2018.773 

 
 
 
  Thomas Ehrlich Reifer 

Department of Sociology and Affiliated Faculty, Ethnic Studies, Women & Gender 
Studies, Latin American Studies, and Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies 

  University of San Diego 
reifer@sandiego.edu 
 
 

 
 

 

mailto:reifer@sandiego.edu

	Journal of World-Systems Research
	Review of Global Urban Justice:  The Rise of Human Rights Cities
	Vol. 1 |  DOI 10.5195/JWSR.1