The Contributions of Professor Amartya Sen in the Fieldof Human Rights

This paper analyses the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist ProfessorAmartya Sen from the perspective of human rights. It assesses the ways inwhich Sen’s research agenda has deepened and expanded human rightsdiscourse in the disciplines of ethics and economics, and examines how hiswork has promoted cross-fertilisation and integration on this subject acrosstraditional disciplinary divides. The paper suggests that Sen’s development of a‘scholarly bridge’ between human rights and economics is an important andinnovative contribution that has methodological as well as substantiveimportance and that provides a prototype and stimuli for future research. It alsoestablishes that the idea of fundamental freedoms and human rights is itself animportant gateway into understanding the nature, scope and significance ofSen’s research. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of the challenges tobe addressed in taking Sen’s contributions in the field of human rights forward.[...]