The volume presents a selection comprehensively toward a comparative study of civil rights action and movements, critically appraising the rich body of literature, narratives and media images that have come to light in recent years on this global phenomenon. This volume also explores how awareness of basic rights, sometimes aided by religious sensibilities, did shape civil disobedience, social protests, and civil rights activism that cut cross cultural and geographic borders, on issues such as racism, gender injustices, water-wars, rampant state violence, and ecological devastation the articles discuss. In this context, how the broadly anti-colonial agenda of Mahatma Gandhi - beginning with his experiments in South Africa on satyagraha (truth-force for justice) and ahimsa (non-violence as the strategic means), and the pan-African movement that began with WEB Du Bois in Niagara Fall in 1905, later becoming the International League of Darker Peoples under the Caribbean Marcus Garvey's leadership in 1919 - converged to engender contestations of persistent racial and ethnic stereotypes in the dominant white cultures around the world. These same stereotypical practices in "Jim Crow" America directly affected the Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanic-Latino groups, and in due course, Asians - and of course women and children across the board. The anti-colonial struggles of the Third World and their battles for national liberation, especially in the case of African nations, influenced Black Americans and their desire to achieve liberation themselves, culminating in Martin Luther King Jr's celebrated achievements, and the enactments of Civil Rights Act (1964), and other Acts. The articles proceed on a case-by-case study of major regions across the world, after the introductory article on the basics of human rights negotiated in the terms of civil and social rights, legal and positive entitlements.