The uniqueness of human rights activism (original) (raw)

Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era

2021

In a turbulent era, with illiberal nationalism on the rise and international laws and institutions under persistent threat, this book asks what future the international human rights system has. It rejects the claims of those who view human rights law and advocacy as ineffective or worse in challenging injustice. Instead, it presents an experimentalist account of human rights which emphasizes the ongoing engagement between domestic activists and international and domestic institutions and actors in promoting rights-based change. Rather than the monolithic movement depicted in some academic critiques, it discerns a rich and diverse human rights movement which has helped significantly to challenge injustice and advance progressive change in many contexts. Drawing on case studies of gender justice, disability rights, children’s rights and reproductive justice from Pakistan, Argentina and Ireland, the book argues that the human rights movement has made an important difference around the ...

Towards an Empathic Human Rights: Applications and Evaluations in Re-Asserting the Human

Left History, 2018

Drawing on the work of scholars such as Lynn Hunt, Samuel Moyn, Talal Asad, Fabian Klose, Brian Drohan and Paul Gilroy, 'Towards an Empathic Human Rights: Applications and Evaluations in Re-Asserting the Human' reaffirms the dangers of technocratizing human rights. The work traces and contests exclusionary histories, origins and uses of human rights which fall silent in the face of, or even legitimize, violation. Envisioning human rights as a tool rather than an ideology, the work suggests human rights engagements powered by dynamism as well as reevaluation, supported by humility and an ethic of collaboration predicated upon empathic impulses; in effect, to operationalize empathy. The article complicates and challenges tendencies to overemphasize legalism, dominant interpretations of property rights as well as the primacy of the state in human rights protection. This includes the myth of corporate social responsibility, the (neo)conservative and limited nature of legalism and its manipulation by violators, and the relationship between the inadequate scope of assignment of responsibility in human rights protection with the unequal valuation of life according to passport. Additionally, the article historicizes, problematizes and reevaluates human rights-related institutions while highlighting the need to support other models, languages and philosophies. Finally, a less professionalized, more democratic conceptualization of human rights is promoted.

'Human Rights do not exist': thinking about and beyond the existence of human rights

Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2023

This article examines the critical positions taken by two prominent figures of the twentieth-century philosophical tradition, Panajotis Kondylis and Gilles Deleuze, regarding the existence of human rights. In their ways, both thinkers identify a problem with the (non)existence of human rights, particularly with human rights' invocation of universal or eternal values. According to Deleuze, this all-encompassing, universalist language of human rights promotes a problematic way of thinking that 'thinks' in abstraction. For Kondylis, human rights do not exist, as their universalist claims are a matter of political exploitation and/or conceptual confusion. By focusing on the interplay between nonexistence and 'sham' or 'abstract existence', this article aims to critically examine our ways of thinking, in terms of human rights or beyond them, and how such a problematisation may pave the way for further discussions regarding the (non)place of human rights in our contemporary and future state of affairs.

Activism in the Shadows of Universalism: Where Is Human Rights, Then and Now?

2016

First I want to thank the Human Rights Research and Education Centre for inviting me up here to give this talk and to all of you for coming. I'm tremendously excited about the opportunity to strengthen my connections with this particular network. Recently, Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights at the UN declared: "There is a struggle for the soul of the human rights movement, and it is being waged in large part through the proxy of genealogy." 1 What does he really mean by this? Why is history the battleground for the soul of human rights? In the first part of my talk today, before I get into my own research and argument, I want to talk in general terms about history's very recent engagement with human rights, relative to philosophy, political science, anthropology, and law. I'd like to explain why these dynamic historical arguments emerging over the last ten years are so critical to our present-day understanding of human rights. And then I will tell you how I am using historical inquiry to contribute to solving the problem of human rights today. But first, what is the problem with human rights? In a general assembly a couple years ago, John Packer declared the Human Rights Research and Education Centre to be shamelessly for human rights. The problem is, it's getting harder to make a bold declaration like that, especially in the academy. Critical scholarship on human rights and humanitarianism has proliferated in recent years, seeming even to outpace positive, normative scholarship. A lot of folks seem unsure about what it means, or should mean, to be "shamelessly for" human rights.