The book is a collaborative project. We became interested in exploring the relationship between property and human rights while co-teaching the Contemporary Issues in Property Law Module at the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast. The project then started as a panel we organised on ‘The Engagement between Property and Human Rights in a Global Context’in the 26th World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, held at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in July 2013. We wish to acknowledge with thanks, Professor Sally Wheeler, Head of the School of Law at Queen’s University, for providing funding for our participation in the Congress.

We wish to thank contributors to that panel, Elena Beltrán, Alison Clarke, Jane Dine, Martin Dumas, Wei Gong and Leonardo Machado Pontes, for making ours a successful and fruitful panel. Shortly after the Congress, this book project took shape and developed with more people engaging with the topic: Tom Allen, David Cowan, Belachew Fikre, Fiona Macmillan, Walters Nsoh, Bruce Wardhaugh, and Sally Wheeler. We thank them for this intellectual engagement and support for the project. Our collaboration continues through ongoing conversations among the authors and editors, and we are pleased to see that this project has opened a conversation between human rights lawyers and property lawyers, through which we are able to explore analytical approaches to an emerging field of study—the engagement between property (from aspects of real property to intellectual property and cultural property) and human rights at the global/transnational level with its theoretical and policy implications. While working on this edited volume, Ting received an award from the British Academy International Mobility and Partnership Scheme 2014–17 to fund the project ‘Diversifying Ownership of Land?: Communal Property in the UK and China’. With the support of the funding, she has established a research network on the study of communal property, which has now expanded from the initial 15 participants from six universities in the UK and four universities in China to 40 scholars worldwide including several contributors to this book. Several chapters in this volume engage with communal property and its interaction with human rights. Ting wishes to thank the British Academy for its support.