Columbia University in the City of New York
CSHR Mission
Established in 1978 at Columbia University, the Center for the Study of Human Rights is committed to three core goals of providing excellent human rights education to Columbia students, fostering innovative interdisciplinary academic research, and offering its expertise in capacity building to human rights leaders, organizations, and universities around the world.
CSHR and Human Rights at Columbia
CSHR was the first academic center in the world to be founded on an interdisciplinary commitment to the study of human rights. This remains one of our most distinctive features. We recognize that on a fundamental level, human rights research must transcend traditional academic boundaries, departments, and disciplines, reaching out to the practitioners’ world in the process, to address the ever-increasing complexities of human rights in a globalized world. CSHR’s emphases on interdisciplinarity, engagement, and globalism draw from and complement the strengths that have long characterized intellectual life at Columbia.
CSHR’s distinction is also earned through its active engagement with the world of human rights practitioners. This engagement informs the academic work of Columbia’s faculty while simultaneously challenging activists to assess and evaluate their approaches to human rights in the light of academic findings. While many other universities are developing in this direction, at this point no other university center or institute in the United States has the same level of connection between the study and practice of human rights. CSHR’s connections to the Global South, particularly through the Human Rights Advocates Program and its alumni, are unrivaled.
At a time in which Columbia is increasingly focusing on global issues, all of these components form and define the educational and instructional shape of human rights education at Columbia, ensuring that it is focused on the real world challenges practitioners face, bringing voices from the Global South to CU and critically evaluating the movement from an interdisciplinary perspective.
