Voices of Suffering, Fragmented Universality, and the Future of Human Rights*

Baxi, Upendra

doi:10.4324/9781315199955-4

Cited by 11 publications

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“…It is a long recognised norm of international law that states have the sovereign right to determine how nationality, and hence citizenship, is acquired (Batchelor, 2006;Baines, 2017). However, in the case of stateless people, the state's prerogative of determining formal membership is often at odds with the protection of human rights (Baxi, 2017). Indeed, the very notion of statelessness exposes the essential weakness of a political system that relies on the state to act as the principal guarantor of human rights (Chan, 1991).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This relates to a further point: it may be tempting to consider identity as given when debating identity-vulnerability interactions. However, identities are intrinsically socially formed, products of group-based interactions, and the nature of vulnerability can itself shape the nature and functioning of a social identity (Baxi, 2017). This has been extensively documented for the evolution of social norms amongst societies that have to manage common pool resources (Smith, 1988).…”

Section: Issues the Nexus Between Vulnerability To Violence And Globamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When a State holds women's citizenship as encompassing less rights than that of men, it shows that all citizens are really not equal, despite what any Constitution might claim (Batchelor, 2006). It shows that rights can be granted and denied based on gender (Baxi, 2017). Gender discrimination in nationality laws implicitly endorses the idea that women should naturally hold less power than men, that they are beneath men, that the father is the head of the household and the legitimate source of identity (Chan, 1991).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifiable Challenges as Global Complexities

Policek

2020

Globalization and Its Impact on Violence Against Vulnerable Groups

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Discourses on globalization and violence often fall short on understanding the gender aspects of different forms of violence. This is particularly the case for stateless women and girls, faced with the existing institutionalized systems of social and legal protection which do not account for them, making them almost invisible. Subsequently, this contribution claims that the assessment of vulnerability, and likely responses, are linked to power and identity at the global levels. Furthermore, such responses are shaped by the structure of agency and associated power structures in society. Unequal power structures are likely to lead to unequal patterns of neglect, or perverse responses that protect entrenched interests aligned with existing structures of identity or influence. In this way, the “vulnerability of stateless identity” can itself be a source of heightened anxiety and fear.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Issues the Nexus Between Vulnerability To Violence And Globamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifiable Challenges as Global Complexities

Policek

2020

Globalization and Its Impact on Violence Against Vulnerable Groups

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“…Social science-inflected critiques of human rights are hardly new. 1 A critical and empirical literature on human rights law, discourses, and movements was already present in the late 1990s (Baxi 1998, Hafner Burton & Ron 2007, Kennedy 2001, Rajagopal 2007. What is striking, though, is the volume of contemporary critique and the apocalyptic predictions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critiques of Human Rights

Langford

2018

Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci.

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Empirical critiques of human rights have reached a crescendo. Despite their centrality in late modernity, human rights face claims of irrelevance and predictions of demise. These social science–inflected assessments follow a familiar repertoire of critique. Concerns surrounding sociological legitimacy, material effectiveness, and distributive equality are foregrounded and undergirded by a growing body of empirical evidence, especially in sociology, political science, and anthropology but also in economics and social psychology. However, the critique has also catalyzed a counter-critique. A contending body of evidence accompanied by mid-level theorizing suggests that the turn to human rights has been more successful than imagined. This paper argues that it is difficult to reach any definitive conclusion given the role of normative biases in the research and a failure to agree on common benchmarks for evaluation. Nonetheless, with an emerging postliberal order, and a deepened concern over respect for human rights in both democracies and autocracies, critiques and counter-critiques deserve consideration in ensuring that the political project of human rights is both effective and equitable.

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“…The outcomes of the human rights interventions discussed in these early chapters provide little scope for understanding freedom outside of liberal conceptions generally, or the current phase of economic global expansion more specifically, where human life is subordinated to the neoliberal market and includes the commodification of suffering. 19 More significantly for the purposes of my book, the notion that divergent understandings of freedom have always existed outside of the liberal and neoliberal imaginaries and related market terms is either barely considered by those who shape, support and implement the rights regime, or considered inherently alien and therefore irrelevant to the recursive ideological currents within the fishbowl.…”

Section: Evaluating Lgbt and Feminist Human Rights Advocacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Gender, Alterity and Human Rights

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IntroductionThis book explores the imaginary possibilities of freedom in the aftermath of the critique of human rights. Addressing this issue in relation to gender and alterity, I specifically focus on how, in light of such critique, freedom is to be envisaged once the emancipatory claims of human rights have proven disingenuous, false or simply unrealizable. In the global context, freedom remains defined as a liberal, external pursuit, involving the accumulation of further rights by a rational, finite and individual subject. The critical legal project, including postcolonial and feminist interventions, has successfully dismantled the façade of this claim, exposing the regulatory and governance structures of human rights. The central endeavour of this book is to consciously explore the imaginary possibilities that have emerged in the aftermath of critique by centring and examining articulations of freedom available in non-liberal, alternative epistemologies. I address alternative registers that present radical insights on freedom as based on discrete understandings of the subject which are distinct from/remain beyond the reach of liberal individualism, and posit notions of self-scrutiny, reflection, discernment and the turn inwards as central features.The focus on non-liberal (as opposed to illiberal) articulations of freedom pushes against the liberal positioning of human rights as indispensable central instruments in struggles for freedom, and further questions their capacity to realize this goal. The discussion not only exposes the parochial, provincialized identity of human rights as liberal, overwhelmingly Western and Eurocentric, but also displays the destructive capacities nestled in the liberal claim to ideological supremacy -one that ultimately seeks to retain its dominance over all others through its coercive formulations of how to be, and be free, in the world. The notion that divergent understandings of freedom have always existed outside of the liberal and neoliberal imaginaries and related market terms is either barely considered by those who shape, support and implement the rights regime, or considered inherently alien and therefore irrelevant to the recursive ideological currents within the fishbowl. This book sets the stage for the argument that freedom should be actively delinked from the human rights project as formulated and imposed by the liberal 1 Ratna Kapur -9781788112536

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Voices of Suffering, Fragmented Universality, and the Future of Human Rights*

Cited by 11 publications

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Identifiable Challenges as Global Complexities

Identifiable Challenges as Global Complexities

Critiques of Human Rights

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