Dr. Mark Gibney

Mark Gibney, UNC Asheville Belk Professor of Humanities, was recently named Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Law at Lancaster University in Lancaster, England. Gibney will remain a full-time faculty member at UNC Asheville and will travel to Lancaster University to deliver a lecture once a year and to collaborate with faculty.

"For my part, it provides me with the opportunity to continue my work in human rights with one of the most renowned human rights programs in the world," Gibney said.

Gibney is a widely respected international human rights expert. Each year he produces the Political Terror Scale, which ranks 175 countries according to their levels of human rights violations. The scale has received wide acclaim and is featured prominently in the recent book "Human Security Report" (New York: Oxford University Press). Gibney is also the author and editor of numerous journal articles and books, including "The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past" (University of Pennsylvania) and "Five Uneasy Pieces: American Ethics in a Globalized World" (Rowman & Littlefield). In 2006, he was named the 2006 winner of the International Human Rights Award by the Human Rights Coalition of North Carolina. Gibney holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan and has taught previously at Purdue University and served as a guest professor at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Bergen.

Gibney’s international collaborations will extend to the Netherlands next week when he travels there to present a paper at the international conference on "Transnational Human Rights Obligations in the Field of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights." In the last decade, he helped formalize the concept of transnational state obligations, which focuses on human rights obligations that states have to individuals outside their territorial borders.

"The effort here is to completely re-think the entire human rights enterprise," Gibney said. “The ultimate goal is the recognition that states have human rights obligations not only to their own citizens, but to people all over the world as well.”

This cutting-edge topic is also the theme of Gibney’s forthcoming book, "International Human Rights Law: Returning to Universal Principles" (Rowman & Littlefield).