CHAUTAUQUA — The future is female.

Scholar Alison Brysk said women’s rights are the foundation of all human rights.

She explained her views to an Amphitheater audience Monday at Chautauqua Institution as part of the lecture series, “The Future of Human Rights.”

“I started out studying women’s rights as a lagging kind of human rights. Now I am convinced that women’s rights are the foundation of all human rights,” Brysk said.

The scholar noted that she is part of a research community entitled WomanStats, where 15 to 18 researchers find information on different aspects of things, including the connections between the level of women’s rights in a country, and conflict, development, democracy, and health.

“We have hard social science evidence that for example (health), a lack of reproductive rights in a country is linked to the level of domestic violence, crime, ethnic conflict, and human trafficking,” she added.

According to assembly.chq.org, Brysk is the Mellichamp Chair of Global Governance in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has authored or edited 15 books on international human rights, including 2018’s The Future of Human Rights, published by Polity Press. Brysk’s previous books have focused on global patterns of gender violence, indigenous peoples’ rights, transitional justice, and strategies for human rights campaigns. Brysk has been selected Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association; a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where she completed a project titled “Women’s Rights and Human Rights: Constructing Political Will;” a Fulbright Professor in Canada and India; and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In spring 2022, she was to hold a Fulbright at Oxford University. At UC Santa Barbara, Brysk teaches courses on human rights, global issues, and Latin American politics. She taught previously at the University of New Mexico, Pomona College, Stanford University, and the University of California, Irvine. Brysk has served as a visiting scholar and lecturer across the globe, including in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Ecuador, France, India, Spain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa, Taiwan and Japan. A graduate of Pomona College, Brysk received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, where her doctoral thesis focused on the political impact of Argentina’s human rights movement, the website noted.

“The power of human rights is not any document or court. It is movement. It is actually it is socialization,” she said.

Brysk cited a prominent First Lady in a American history, Eleanor Roosvelt, a feminine role model who focused on human rights.

“Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘Where after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places close to home. … Without concerted citizen action, to hold them close to home? We shall look in vain for progress in the larger world,'” Brysk said.

“Feminism is good for your health — everyone benefits,” the scholar added.

Brysk also discussed what she calls a citzen gap. She said there is an accountability, but once one loses citizenship, where can one claim it?

She said the human rights system was always unfortunately contingent and dependent upon having citizenship even though one is supposed to have universal human rights. If people didn’t have high quality citizenship, people are always impaired and refugees are the outstanding example, she said.

“When you lose your country and you lose your citizenship no matter how bad that country was treating you. You lose some of your standing to claim human rights,” Brysk noted.