On a Radical Politics for Human Rights

A set of politics that uses rhetoric, imagery, music, and performance to promote interests that are distinctively and explicitly identified with the working class, Burgmann productively suggests, might revitalize the labor movement. Yet the effort to apply lessons from “identity politics” to “class politics” reproduces two problems in contemporary radicalism. First, by reducing the movements of ethno-racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians to “identity politics” Burgmann underestimates those movements' claims to civil rights, human rights, socioeconomic improvement, and their general democratic nature. Second, the use of “class” to explain the antiglobalization movement is anachronistic and inadequate to the task of understanding radical politics today.

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Reclaiming the Radical in Universal Human Rights

International Human Rights Law Review ◽

10.1163/22131035-00402007 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 256-276 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Kathryn McNeilly

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Judith Butler ◽

Political Activity ◽

Radical Politics ◽

Ongoing Process ◽

Universal Human Rights ◽

Competing Ideas ◽

To Come ◽

A Site

The universality of human rights has been a fiercely contested issue throughout their history. This article contributes to scholarly engagements with the universality of human rights by proposing a re-engagement with this concept in a way that is compatible with the aims of radical politics. Instead of a static attribute or characteristic of rights this article proposes that universality can be thought of as, drawing from Judith Butler, an ongoing process of universalisation. Universality accordingly emerges as a site of powerful contest between competing ideas of what human rights should mean, do or say, and universal concepts are continually reworked through political activity. This leads to a differing conception of rights politics than traditional liberal approaches but, moreover, challenges such approaches. This understanding of universality allows human rights to come into view as potentially of use in interrupting liberal regimes and, crucially, opens possibilities to reclaim the radical in rights.

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On a radical politics for human rights

The Meanings of Rights ◽

10.1017/cbo9781139227124.009 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 106-120 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Illan Rua Wall ◽

Costas Douzinas ◽

Conor Gearty

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Radical Politics

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Queer at 25: A Critical Perspective on Queerness, Politics and Futures

Journal of Asian and African Studies ◽

10.1177/0021909620946855 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 56 (1) ◽

pp. 120-134

Author(s):

Melanie Judge

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Human Rights ◽

Focal Point ◽

Radical Politics ◽

Constitutional Democracy ◽

Critical Perspective ◽

Queer Identity ◽

Formal Equality

With a focus on contemporary South Africa, and through the lens of queer identity and politics, the article critiques the limitations and possibilities for queerness and its futures in post-apartheid South Africa. From the advent of constitutional democracy and its ushering in of human rights, the article analyses developments in the politics of sexuality in the context of enduring systems of violence, rooted in colonial and apartheid histories. Discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people – at the intersection with other forms of discrimination – has emerged as a focal point for political resistances in the post-apartheid period. These resistances are interrogated, including the paradoxes of rights struggles that they expose, and the contradictions between formal equality gains and present queer realities that they call attention to. With an emphasis on enduring inequalities within post-apartheid society, and on the racialisation of violence against queerness, the article explores various political formations of and for queer freedom. In navigating these dynamics of inequality and difference, the article urges a radical politics – both for relating as equals, and against the violent ends of othering.

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From Silence to Radical Politics: Ethics, Affect and Becoming-disobedient

Mistral | Journal of Latin American Women's Intellectual & Cultural History ◽

10.21827/mistral.1.37519 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Philippa Page

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Crimes Against Humanity ◽

Radical Politics ◽

Complex Interactions ◽

New Public ◽

Do So

This article seeks to map out the notion of disobedience as it is conceptualised and practiced by the recently formed Argentine collective “Historias Desobedientes. Hijas, hijos y familiares de genocidas por la memoria, la verdad y la justicia” and its eponymous Chilean counterpart. To do so, it explores the published writings and artistic expressions of some of the collective’s members, as well as citing recent ethnographic work with some of the women who have publicly broken this “family mandate” by openly condemning their own fathers’ crimes against humanity. The analysis aims to better understand the complex interactions between ethics, affect and politics in these disobedient becomings. The article takes a comparative, transnational approach. By exploring dialogues that have been opened up between the Argentine collective and disobedient women located in Chile and Germany respectively, it asks what has enabled the emergence of these new public actors within the local sphere of human rights activism decades after the dictatorships ended? It considers not only how the Historias Desobedientes have been shaped by local human rights struggles, but also the ways in which they offer their own contours to the increasingly intersectional and transnational agenda. Particular attention is paid to the seminal influence of contemporary, intersectional feminism in articulating this specific praxis of disobedience as a non-violent challenge, not only to the resurgent discourses of reconciliation, impunity and/or denial, but furthermore to the long-embedded patriarchal and capitalist structures underpinning them.

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For a Right to Health Beyond Biopolitics: The Politics of Pandemic and the ‘Politics of Life’

Law Culture and the Humanities ◽

10.1177/1743872120978201 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 174387212097820

Author(s):

Antonio Pele ◽

Stephen Riley

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Well Being ◽

Right To Health ◽

Radical Politics ◽

Rights Discourse ◽

The Right ◽

Human Rights Discourse ◽

Proper Response ◽

Politics Of Life

We argue, drawing on the work of Didier Fassin, that the right to health can be understood as an essential part of a radical politics of life. Since the right to health implies fostering the well-being of individuals in a way that is structural, progressive and non-discriminatory, the right not only problematises the ‘governmentality’ approach to power but allows push-back against statist and market discourses through a specific phenomenology of right. The discourse of rights – like the pandemic itself – oscillates between general and particular in a way that makes normative responses unstable. Nonetheless it is this dialectic that is characteristic of human rights discourse and allows a right to health to be the proper response to pandemic without it being subsumed within neoliberal logic. A politics of life is a multi-focussed analysis of life, health and society potentially resisting the appropriation of biological life by neoliberalism.

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