Citation: Hoover, J. (2015). The human right to housing and community empowerment: home occupation, eviction defence and community land trusts. Third World Quarterly, 36(6), pp. 1092-1109. doi: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1047196 This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version.
Recent critiques of rights have enabled alternative understandings of their role in contemporary politics. In this article, I focus on the emergence of a performative understanding of rights, which conceptualises rights claims as reiterative acts that remake the protections and privileges marked out by rights. This promising reconstruction of rights requires a rethinking of the ethical justification of rights claims. If rights claims are creative political acts, rather than especially important duties, a justification focused on certainty and constraint will not do. Yet, we must still ask: what is a good rights claim? I argue, first, that a performative account of rights requires an ethical justification that embraces contingency while still providing an account of good political creativity, and, second, that focusing on the use of normative claims to address specific problems, which I term a situationist ethics—drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, provides better grounding for performative rights claims.
Few theorists have done more in recent years to explore and develop our understanding of the political conflicts and struggles that lie at the heart of democratic politics than Bonnie Honig. Through books such as Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, and Democracy (2009) Politics (1993), along with numerous scholarly journal articles, Honig has sought to develop an agonistic account of democratic politics, and also sketch out a role for political theorising that alerts us to the exclusions and remainders that accompany any political order. She prompts us to be attentive to these exclusions, and to believe that political theory should provide resources for those engaged in democratic activism to challenge the existing order of things. At the same time, we are reminded to be solicitous towards democratic achievements, and to protect those institutions that make democratic life possible against the challenge of more authoritarian forms of politics. Thus we should engage in both 'combat', as we seek to render our democratic institutions more open, inclusive, and just, and also 'care' as we seek to protect the values that have been created in, and by, the --always imperfect --forms of democratic politics that we currently possess.
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