Psychology and Human Rights: Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction serves to orient the reader to this special issue of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology on the topic of psychology and human rights (HR). We provide a brief overview of the history of the concept of HR, the primary theoretical and empirical contributions to date within the field of psychology, and how various psychological organizations use the term today. We then summarize how HR fits into social psychological peace research, before explaining what kind of papers we sought and how they were selected. Finally, we provide an overview of the papers and their primary contributions, and point to some limitations of the research covered in this special issue as well as directions for future research.