A genealogy of rights: emancipatory rights-claiming as a conscious act of freedom

Abstract

This project seeks to excavate and explore the emancipatory potential of rights and rights language. Public international law, and its most powerful normative concept, sovereignty, helped manufacture a distinct brand of freedom and equality in the rollout of international human rights law (IHRL), which, until today, is evidenced by the emergence primarily of breaches of rather than adherence to IHRL. This is a project that descends into rights and rights language. This is not un-trod territory. There are several scholars engaged in similar pursuits, with similar aims. While there will be an assessment of the many rigorous critiques of human rights language and human rights law, this project will not be offering a new intervention into the failures and flaws of human rights. Rather, this investigation is looking to capture genealogical insights and transform rights critique into potential ways forward. This will involve several strategies, but most especially the transformative way rights can be deployed as political claims – it is in the radical re-imagining of rights and their content on which this project is based. Rather than submitting to a regime of legal order that roughly categorises communities and individuals and uses bright lines to demarcate where and when they might assert a certain claim, this project is interested in the gaps between such bright lines, where new subjects and subjectivities are being discursively created, and where there lurks an opportunity to shift cultural, social, and political norms in the protection of the least protected.