The Prism of Human Rights

 'Karin Friederic’s critical approach to human rights practice draws on a wealth of ethnographic data collected across decades of ethically and politically committed research. Her nuanced reading of the interactions between the state, the law, rights-based interventions and women’s lives, in contexts of extreme gender-based violence, is a key contribution to understanding the limits and paradoxes of human rights. This is a hard but necessary lesson to advance a responsible fight for women’s dignity.'  Silvana Tapia Tapia, author of Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador

Karin Friederic's The Prism of Human Rights is a compelling, emotional, and ethnographically rich read. Friederic's ethical delivery of Gabi's story, the punctuated narrative driving the book, is a reminder that Friederic is describing real people in real time. Using political economy and the best of interpretivist anthropology, Friederic seamlessly weaves scales of violence in and through Las Colinas, a place that is richly described, in loving detail, serving as a reminder that abstract notions like 'human rights' and 'development' have real human consequences. Hillary J. Haldane, co-author of Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence: Global Responses, Local Practices

Karin Friederic’s beautifully rendered ethnography on gender violence breaks new ground. Through intimate storytelling only made possible by her two decades of fieldwork and activism in La Colinas, Ecuador, she reveals how supposedly universal human rights discourses unfold in sharply contradictory ways in the lives of real women.'  Sarah J. Hautzinger, author of Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Bahia, Brazil