The Human Rights State

Gregg, Benjamin

doi:10.9783/9780812292671

Cited by 48 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…This metaphysical limbo only 'works against the human rights project by leading to positions that exclude some groups of people from human rights'. 10 Consider five examples.…”

Section: Breaking Through the Metaphysical Limbo Of Legitimation: Hummentioning

confidence: 99%

A realistic utopia? Critical analyses of The Human Rights State in theory and deployment: Guest editors’ introduction

Wolfsteller

Gregg

2017

The International Journal of Human Rights

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We introduce this special issue on Benjamin Gregg's recent theory of a human rights state by contextualising it within current human rights scholarship and explicating its core claims, before we provide an overview of the eight contributions. We argue that the concept of a human rights state addresses two interrelated problems within human rights research by bridging the significant disconnect in the literature between human rights theory and practice. First, it conceives human rights as socially constructed norms whose reach and validity are historically contingent, depending on their free embrace and effective implementation by their local addressees. In this way it dispenses with the ever fruitless, even counterproductive attempts to advance human rights by claims about their putative, ultimate normative foundation. Second, it overcomes the limitations and failures of the top-down, generally unenforceable international human rights regime with a bottom-up alternative: the human rights state as a metaphorical polity in which activists promote human rightsfriendly change within the corresponding nation state. In each case of such a metaphorical polity, a network of self-selected activists within the nation state promotes the free embrace of self-authored human rights through incorporating those rights in the nation state's legal and political system. Subsequently, aspirations to an international human rights law would finally be redeemed as effective norms through the overlapping agreement among more and more political communities that have freely embraced their self-authored human rights and institutionalised them at local levels.

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“…This metaphysical limbo only 'works against the human rights project by leading to positions that exclude some groups of people from human rights'. 10 Consider five examples.…”

Section: Breaking Through the Metaphysical Limbo Of Legitimation: Hummentioning

confidence: 99%

A realistic utopia? Critical analyses of The Human Rights State in theory and deployment: Guest editors’ introduction

Wolfsteller

Gregg

2017

The International Journal of Human Rights

Self Cite

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“…27 To solve this puzzle, Gregg argues that traditional views of the nation state should be supplemented by the idea of a human rights state offering a 'space' to reconcile universal human rights and particularistic national citizenship rights. 28 Gregg 31 Human rights take their full force when backed by law, and generally only nation states make and enforce law. The human rights state does not replace the nation state but rather acts as a provocation to it, challenging it to recognise and respond to the human rights, as cosmopolitan demands, that the participants in the human rights states have claimed for themselves and constructed together in community.…”

Section: Affirming Human Rights: Gregg's Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Inspired by Jacques Rancière's work, Gregg imagines the politics he offers as 'opening up a dispute' 43 , that is 'politics as robust openness to possibilities never before realised' 44 and capable of transforming the nation state. This radical ideal runs up against the fact of his insistence that there can be no normative foundations beyond the community itself; not even in a dissensual claim to a transcendent equality.…”

Section: Affirming Human Rights: Gregg's Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One authority may come to replace another, but there is a structure to the subversive claim, to Forst's conception of dissensus, that transcends any particular authority, that is, the claim of a right: 'not to be ruled without justification' 75 ; A claim that can be reconstructed as nothing other than a claim to non-authoritarian 'self-authorship'. 76 For Forst, reason, understood as 'the faculty of criticising bad justifications and of instead offering justifications that could possibly hold among free and equal persons' 77 is fundamental to critique, and to the logic of dissensus.…”

Section: From Affirmation To Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The project that Gregg advances with the idea of the human rights state is intended to contribute to the achievement of 'a realistic utopia of universal human rights'. 4 He makes it clear that his project is not driven by a prior commitment to any particular construal of human rights. It starts with 'the bare idea of human rights' 5 as an initially quite indeterminate rhetorical conception capable of carrying different meanings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Achieved not given’: human rights, critique and the need for strong foundations

McKernan

2017

The International Journal of Human Rights

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In this article we focus critically on the normative foundations of the project outlined by Benjamin Gregg in The Human Rights State (2016). In developing our analysis of Gregg's project, we consider it in context of the inspiration it draws from the work of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. We argue that Arendt does not give Gregg any robust support for his anti-foundationalism, and that Rancière's politics of dissensus makes an uneasy ally for Gregg's constructivism. We argue that we need strong moral foundations to motivate critique and ground valid construction, and that they need not draw us back into the authoritarianism so often associated with classical foundations on which human rights claims have sometimes relied. We suggest that the right kind of thin but strong moral foundations are most clearly articulated in the work of the critical theorist Rainer Forst, and that Forst's constructivism and his emphasis on dissensus makes his perspective particularly compatible with Gregg's project. In the final parts of the paper, we expose what we see as the unacknowledged normative foundations of Gregg's position. We conclude by briefly examining the practical significance of his neglect of those foundations and the moral context that are crucial for tackling the governance gap in business human rights issues.

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Global Media Ethics and Human Rights: Roles, Responsibilities, and Rehumanizing Journalism

Breit

2021

Handbook of Global Media Ethics

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The Human Rights State

Cited by 48 publications

References 0 publications

A realistic utopia? Critical analyses of The Human Rights State in theory and deployment: Guest editors’ introduction

A realistic utopia? Critical analyses of The Human Rights State in theory and deployment: Guest editors’ introduction

‘Achieved not given’: human rights, critique and the need for strong foundations

Global Media Ethics and Human Rights: Roles, Responsibilities, and Rehumanizing Journalism

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