Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights collects thirteen new essays that analyze how human agency relates to poverty and human rights respectively as well as how agency mediates issues concerning poverty and social and economic human rights. No other collection of philosophical papers focuses on the diverse ways poverty impacts the agency of the poor, the reasons why poverty alleviation schemes should also promote the agency of beneficiaries, and the fitness of the human rights regime to secure both economic development and free agency. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 considers the diverse meanings of poverty both from the standpoint of the poor and from that of the relatively well-off. Part 2 examines morally appropriate responses to poverty on the part of persons who are better-off and powerful institutions. Part 3 identifies economic development strategies that secure the agency of the beneficiaries. Part 4 addresses the constraints poverty imposes on agency in the context of biomedical research, migration for work, and trafficking in persons.

I strongly recommend this collection to anyone interested in present philosophical debates on global poverty and human rights. * Sean Aas, Australasian Journal of Philosophy *
The volume Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights is an important contribution to the fields of global ethics and justice. ... The volume is, thus, deeply concerned about practical issues in nonideal theory. We believe that this represents a significant improvement over several of the earlier contributions to global ethics and justice. * Julian Culip, Ethics *
Human rights practitioners have been stressing the importance of community participation and stakeholder engagement for some time, so it is helpful to see... what a philosophical argument for incorporating these considerations would look like.

Diana Tietjens Meyers is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She has held the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Social Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago and the Laurie Chair in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She works in three main areas of philosophy - philosophy of action, feminist ethics, and human rights theory. She is currently writing a monograph, Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights.