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The contributions to this volume eschew the long-held approach of either dismissing human rights as politically compromised or glorifying them as a priori progressive in enabling resistance. Drawing on plural social theoretic and philosophical literatures - and a multiplicity of empirical domains - they illuminate the multi-layered and intricate relationship of human rights and power. They highlight human rights' incitement of new subjects and modes of political action, marked by an often unnoticed duality and indeterminacy. Epistemologically distancing themselves from purely deductive, theory-driven approaches, the contributors explore these linkages through historically specific rights struggles. This, in turn, substantiates the commitment to avoid reifying the 'Third World' as merely the terrain of 'fieldwork', proposing it, instead, as a legitimate and necessary site of theorising. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
List of contents
Introduction: The power of human rights/the human rights of power: an introduction, The question concerning human rights and human rightlessness: disposability and struggle in the Bhopal gas disaster, Struggles, over rights: humanism, ethical dispossession and resistance, Who is the subject of neoliberal rights? Governmentality, subjectification and the letter of the law, The human right to housing and community empowerment: home occupation, eviction defence and community land trusts, Producing the subjects of reconciliation: the making of Sierra Leoneans as victims and perpetrators of past human rights violations, Disciplining the human rights of immigrants: market veridiction and the echoes of eugenics in contemporary EU immigration policies, Border politics, right to life and acts of dissensus: voices from the Lampedusa Borderland, The Endriago subject and the dislocation of state attribution in human rights discourse: the case of Mexican asylum claims in Canada, Between learning and schooling: the politics of human rights monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review, Power, privilege and rights: how the powerful and powerless create a vernacular of rights, Human rights and power amid protest and change in the Arab world, The power effects of human rights reforms in Turkey: enhanced surveillance and depoliticisation, Promoting health or securing the market? The right to health and intellectual property between radical contestation and accommodation, Appropriation and the dualism of human rights: understanding the contradictory impact of gender norms in Nigeria,
About the author
Louiza Odysseos is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex and Deputy Director of the Sussex Rights and Justice Research Centre. She is the author of
The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (2007) and numerous articles on ethics, rights and resistance. She has also co-edited
Gendering the International (2002),
The International Political Theory of Carl Schmitt (2007) and
Heidegger and the Global Age (2017). She is currently researching a monograph entitled
The Reign of Rights in Global Politics.
Anna Selmeczi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her current research focuses on knowledge dynamics in urban social movements, particularly the pedagogical aspects of grassroots political practices.
