Human rights and the borders of the human

Abstract

Notions of human rights and the technologies deploying those notions, legally, institutionally, in advocacy and social discourse, enact a tangled knot of contesting and asserting borders. Universalist assertions of human rights seek to transcend national borders, appealing to a wider grasp of the human, but the formal pursuit of rights establishes rights as mutually constitutive with the state. In advocacy, calling on human rights is a way of recognising people’s political, economic and socio-cultural needs, dignity and suffering, beyond state borders. The idea of the human and the universal implicit in prevailing notions of human rights, however, reproduces dominant Eurocentric ontologies of individual and collective life, and patrols a narrowly conceived territory of the universal. These ontologies can be profoundly counterproductive in practice. Because notions of human rights are one of the few internationally available tools for working against the systemic imposition of suffering, we need to work with them in ways that are more open to different ways of being human and of grasping our individual and collective lives. The discussion concludes by sketching a more relational, dialogic conception of human rights.