Sandra Fredman

Shreya Atrey

Associate Professor in International Human Rights Law Shreya Atrey

This thoughtfully edited volume explores the operation of equality and discrimination law in times of crisis. It aims to understand how existing inequalities are exacerbated in crises and whether equality law has the tools to understand and address this contingency. Experience during the COVID-19 crisis shows that the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for 'exponential inequalities' related to racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, and ableism. Yet, the field of equality law (which is meant to be addressing such discrimination or inequality) has had little immediate relevance in mitigating these exponential inequalities. This is despite the fact that countries like the UK have a rather recent and state-of-the-art legislation in the field, namely the Equality Act 2010. Exponential Inequalities offers readers an understanding of how these inequalities came to be and how crises such as the global pandemic, the climate emergency, or the economic downturn, can exacerbate an already untenable situation. It illuminates both the structural and the conceptual, as well as the practical and doctrinal difficulties currently experienced in equality law, and discusses whether or not equality law even has the tools to both understand and then address this contingency. Written by a team of internationally recognized experts, Exponential Inequalities provides a comparative perspective on the functioning of equality laws across a range of contexts and jurisdictions and represents an essential read for scholars and policy makers alike.

Equality Law in Times of Crisis

Exponential Inequalities

This volume in the Brill Research Perspectives in Comparative Discrimination Law addresses intersectionality from the lens of comparative antidiscrimination law. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989. As a field, intersectionality has a longer history, of nearly two hundred years. Meanwhile, comparative antidiscrimination law as a field may be just over a few decades old. Thus, intersectionality’s tryst with antidiscrimination law is a fairly recent one. Developed as a critique of antidiscrimination law, intersectionality has had a significant influence on it. Yet, intersectionality’s logic does not seem to have infiltrated the logic of antidiscrimination law completely. Comparative antidiscrimination law continues to develop with intersectionality in sight, but rarely, in step. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Crenshaw’s seminal article that coined the term in the context of antidiscrimination law, Shreya Atrey explores this irony. Her article provides a meta-narrative of the development of the two fields with the purpose of showing what appear to be orthogonal trajectories.

The Tale of Two Citadels

Intersectionality and Comparative Antidiscrimination Law

This book examines the concept of intersectional discrimination and why it has been difficult for jurisdictions around the world to redress it in discrimination law. 'Intersectionality' was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. Thirty years since its conception, the term has become a buzzword in sociology, anthropology, feminist studies, psychology, literature, and politics. But it remains marginal in the discourse of discrimination law, where it was first conceived. Traversing its long and rich history of development, the book explains what intersectionality is as a theory and as a category of discrimination. It then explains what it takes for discrimination law to be reimagined from the perspective of intersectionality in reference to comparative laws in the US, UK, South Africa, Canada, India, and the jurisprudence of the European Courts (CJEU and ECtHR) and international human rights treaty bodies.

Intersectional Discrimination

Peter Dunne

This collection of essays analyses how diversity in human identity and disadvantage affects the articulation, realisation, violation and enforcement of human rights. The question arises from the realisation that people, who are severally and severely disadvantaged because of their race, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, class etc, often find themselves at the margins of human rights; their condition seldom improved and sometimes even worsened by the rights discourse. How does one make sense of this relationship between the complexity of people's disadvantage and violation of their human rights? Does the human rights discourse, based on its universal and common values, have tools, methods or theories to capture and respond to the difference in people's lived experience of rights? Can intersectionality help in that quest? This book seeks to inaugurate this line of inquiry.

Shreya Atrey

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