The Reign of Rights in Global Politics

1. New final year option… The Reign of Rights in Global Politics

2. What is the course about? …human rights are becoming the world’s secular religion (Eli Wiesel). This course systematically interrogates the rise of human rights to such prominence.

3. What does the course look like? The course combines theory with an interest in empirical cases of rights in global politics. It aims to familiarize students with both, and what’s more, to let students have a choice in what cases we examine.

4. Part I of the course examines the history and evolution of rights within the history of liberalism and introduces the prominent ways of defining and understanding human rights. It, then, explores new theorisations of rights as practices of governing and forms of subjectification in global politics. Moreover, the course discusses well-known critiques of the universality of human rights and their Western-centric conception of the human. Part I

5. Part II of the course analyses the challenges that rights present to state sovereignty. It also examines the violent global politics associated with human rights, such as the emergence of human rights wars (Ulrich Beck). Moreover, it interrogates the more recent, often racist, trade-off between rights and security within the ensemble of practices we call the ‘war on terror’. Part II

6. Part III of the course investigates the use of rights in our practices of resistance, analyzing how rights incite rights-holders as appropriate political subjectivities (Foucault). It discusses the expansion of human rights into emergent areas such as women’s rights, indigenous rights, etc It also explores the ways in which human rights talk becomes the hegemonic register in which to articulate and legitimate social/political action. Part III

7. Part IV concludes the course by discussing the practical ethico-political problems of the reign of rights and of our own acceptance of this language in global politics. Do global interventionist practices render human rights the rights of those victims who have no (positive-constitutional) rights (Ranciere)? Moreover, who can speak on behalf of subaltern others (Alcoff)? And finally, is the language of rights appropriate for righting historical and current wrongs (Spivak)? Part IV

8. Student’s interests The course aims to encourage students to choose cases and examples that suit their interests – in part III students will help choose the cases we focus on in the workshop.

9. Want to know what we will be studying week on week?

10. Week 1 Human Rights: the History of an Idea and the Contemporary Consensus on Human Rights

11. Week 2 • Defining and TheorisingHuman Rights

12. Week 3 • Human Rights Contentions: • Universality and Relativism, Euro-Centrism and Imperialism

13. Week 4 • Human Rights, International Law and the Evolution of Sovereignty

14. Week 5 • Human Rights Wars: • Discipline and Punish

15. Week 6 • Human Rights since 9/11: • Demise or resurgence?

16. Week 7 • Governing and Resisting through Rights: • Case Studyof Indigenous Rights • (Student’s choice)

17. Week 8 • Governing and Resisting through Rights: • Case Studyof Women’s Rights • (Student’s choice)

18. Week 9 • Governing and Resisting through Rights: • Case Studyof Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Rights (Student’s choice)

19. Week 10 • Human Rights as the Rights of those who • have no rights: States, rights-holders, • victims and interveners

20. Week 11 • Human Rights Warriors, Advocacy and the Problem of Speaking for Others

21. Week 12 • Righting Wrongs? If the subaltern could • speak, should it speak the language oßfrights?