In this comprehensive and engaging introduction to rights, Duncan Ivison pays particular attention to their politicalcharacter: the way arguments about rights are characterizedby disagreement and conflict and by movement between the moral and the legal and the abstract and the practical. Ivison presents three basic ways of thinking about rights - as statuses, instruments and conduits - and, drawing on the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, explores the different ways these frameworks shape particular theories of rights. He uses some of the current debates over the threat of global terrorism to explore the nature of rights, especially those civil and political rights at the heart of liberal democracy. Various critiques of rights - Marxist, postmodernist and feminist - are examined and the book concludes byexploring what, exactly, we should want from a theory ofhuman rights today and what role this theory should playin global politics.