Pragmatism, Human Rights, Agonistic Pluralism, John Dewey, Democracy, and 4 more

More Info: This is the draft introduction to the monograph - DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Publication Date: 2016

It is often assumed that democracy is both desirable and possible in global politics. Interrogating Democracy in World Politics provides an important counter-argument to this assumption by questioning the history, mea... more abstractIt is often assumed that democracy is both desirable and possible in global politics. Interrogating Democracy in World Politics provides an important counter-argument to this assumption by questioning the history, meaning and concepts of democracy in contemporary international and global politics. Combining viewpoints from the fields of international relations, political theory and history, the book includes: Critical examinations of the concept of democracy as a political order and ethical ideal Assessment of the role and function of democracy in how contemporary political events are understood and evaluated Analysis of the relationship of democracy to international stability, liberalism and the emergence of capitalist economies The book focuses on the move from the concept of ‘international politics’ to ‘world politics’, recognising the equal importance of understanding democratic interaction both within and between states. It reviews current scholarly thinking in the field before providing a complex theoretical re-engagement with the meaning of democracy in contemporary world politics. Interrogating Democracy in World Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, democratization studies and globalization.

More Info: Edited with Meera Sabaratnam and Laust Schouenborg

Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Science, Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and 3 more

Publication Date: 2014

Publication Name: Contemporary Political Theory

Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Science, Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and 3 more

Publication Date: 2014

Publication Name: Contemporary Political Theory

Critics of human rights are hesitant to reject them outright for fear of undermining the work they may do in resisting oppression. This pragmatic justification is central to celebrations of human rights as well, but i... more abstractCritics of human rights are hesitant to reject them outright for fear of undermining the work they may do in resisting oppression. This pragmatic justification is central to celebrations of human rights as well, but is it more than a failure to move beyond liberal hegemony? I argue human rights have radical potential because the act of claiming such rights uses the ambiguous but universal identity of “humanity” to make claims on the established terms of legitimate authority. The potential of human rights to fight for social change is examined by looking to the movement for a human right to housing in the United States. I explore how homeless individuals, public housing tenants and low-income urban residents realise their human right to housing through eviction defences, the occupation of “people-less” homes, and attempts to remake the structure of home ownership through community land trusts.

Human Rights, Governance, Resistance (Social), Affordable Housing, Homelessness And Housing Exclusion, and 3 more

More Info: version accepted for publication, pre-copy edit

Publication Date: 2015

Publication Name: Third World Quarterly

Who has the authority to assign responsibility for international crimes? There is a simple answer: international tribunals, in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet this obvious response obscures furt... more abstractWho has the authority to assign responsibility for international crimes? There is a simple answer: international tribunals, in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet this obvious response obscures further questions regarding where the political authority to create international tribunals comes from, as well as the vital moral question regarding how courts are constituted as actors with the capacity to assign blame. In modern international politics authority has traditionally rested with states, meaning that rightful legal institutions were created and justified by the consent of states. The ICC is granted authority in this way, as it was created through a treaty negotiated and signed by states. Such a procedural response, however, obscures as much as it reveals about the politics and morality of assigning responsibility for international crimes. Asking how a new international authority is constituted and justified as an actor with the political power to try state officials and other international criminals, and to embody and defend supposedly emergent norms of global justice, is a more contentious and difficult question that takes us beyond questions of positive law.

International Relations, Ethics, Pragmatism, Practice theory, International Criminal Law, and 3 more

More Info: Volume 76, Number 3 & 4 (2013), 263-286

Publication Name: Law and Contemporary Problems

Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most imp... more abstractHuman rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. These criticisms are pursued with varying intensities, as some defenders of human rights are willing to accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, while staunch opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in language of human rights because of the deep pathologies of rights-thinking as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this paper, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of “humanity” as a political identity, and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics.

Human Rights, Giorgio Agamben, Agonistic Pluralism, Democracy, Bonnie Honig, and 4 more

More Info: pre-review copy of forthcoming article in Philosophy and Social Criticism (2013)

Publication Date: 2013

Publication Name: Philosophy and Social Criticism

In this paper I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterise the development of the UN human rights regi... more abstractIn this paper I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterise the development of the UN human rights regime. The central argument is intended to demonstrate that within the founding text of the contemporary human rights movement there is an ambiguous account of rights, which exceeds easy categorisation of international rights as universal moral principles or merely an ideological imposition by liberal powers. Acknowledging this ambiguous history, I argue, opens the way to an understanding of human rights as an ongoing politics, a contestation over the terms of legitimate political authority and the meaning of “humanity” as a political identity.

Human Rights, History of Human Rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Agonism

More Info: Draft of an article to be published in 'Journal of Human Rights', 2013

Assigning responsibility is increasingly common in world politics, from the United Nation’s assertion that sovereignty entails a “responsibility to protect” to the International Criminal Court’s attempts to hold indiv... more abstractAssigning responsibility is increasingly common in world politics, from the United Nation’s assertion that sovereignty entails a “responsibility to protect” to the International Criminal Court’s attempts to hold individuals responsible for international crimes. This development is welcome but problematic as the model of moral agency that our contemporary practices of responsibility are based on leads to a number of problematic consequences that impede efforts to make world politics more just. In particular, our contemporary practices of responsibility are excessively focused on the obligations of individual and collective actors, at the expense of enabling conditions, and on holding specific perpetrators accountable, neglecting the need for wider social transformations in response to mass violence and suffering. Alternative understandings of moral agency, which better serve international/global practices of responsibility, are possible and here I defend an understanding of moral agency based on the philosophy of John Dewey. The critical insights and practical possibilities of this alternative understanding of moral agency are explored with reference to international interventions in Sierra Leone and Uganda.

Free Will, Moral Responsibility, International Criminal Law, International Criminal Court, Uganda, Humanitarian Intervention, and 5 more

More Info: Published in 'International Theory', Volume 4, Issue 2 (2012), 233-268.

Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse poli... more abstractParadoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an attempt to understand and theorize human rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Attempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice—taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism, there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy.

Human Rights, Agonistic Pluralism, and Activism

More Info: Co-authored with Marta Iniguez de Heredia, appearing in Human Rights Review, Volume 12, Number 2 (2011), 191-220.

International Relations, International Law, Human Rights, International Human Rights Law, Social movements and revolution, and 7 more

More Info: Draft of review article forthcoming in The Journal of Internvention and Statebuilding

International Ethics, Realism (Political Science), and Egypt

More Info: Published in The Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, Issue 4 (2011), 127-137.

This work sets out to critically reconstruct human rights as both an ethical ideal and a political practice. I critique conventional moral justifications of human rights and the related role they play in legitimating ... more abstractThis work sets out to critically reconstruct human rights as both an ethical ideal and a political practice. I critique conventional moral justifications of human rights and the related role they play in legitimating political authority, arguing that the pluralism and political content of human rights cannot be eliminated. I reconstruct the relationship between ethics and politics through an engagement with pragmatist and pluralist moral theory, which I then develop into a democratising account of human rights by incorporating work on agonistic democracy. The resulting view of human rights is situated and agonistic, seeing the act of claiming human rights as a political act that makes demands on the social order in the name of a particular ethical ideal. Rather than seeing the political act of claiming rights as undermining human rights as universal moral principles, it becomes essential to global ethics as such. The international political aspect of rights is then examined by looking to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in historical context, and contrasting human rights practice as expressed in popular social movements with conventional state-centric and legalist accounts. In the end the defence of human rights that is offered aims to preserve the transformative power of human rights claims, their democratising content, while undermining their totalising tendency, in which a singular conception of humanity provides certain moral principles to legitimate political authority.

Ethics, Pragmatism, Political Theory, Human Rights, Agonistic Pluralism, and 2 more

When we claim rights we do more than demand that established privileges and protections are respected, we also perform the political subjectivity and institutional arrangements that inspire our claims. It is this feat... more abstractWhen we claim rights we do more than demand that established privileges and protections are respected, we also perform the political subjectivity and institutional arrangements that inspire our claims. It is this feature of rights claiming that critical scholars are rightly suspicious of, as claiming rights as a tool for overcoming injustice and oppression risks reducing the horizon of political struggle to the established order. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged this pessimistic view by attending to the ways in which rights claiming can alter political subjectivities and institutional arrangements, and thus help to open the horizon of justice rather than close it down. In this paper, I argue that understanding rights claiming as a type of political performance requires us to rethink the ethical justification of rights. Rather than seeing rights as protecting essential qualities of rights holders or derived from reason itself, we can see rather that rights are protections and privileges serving various ends, which can and must be constantly reconstructed to meet our actual needs. This leads to an understanding of rights as potentially radically democratic, in contrast to traditional views counterpoising rights as protections against the excesses of democracy.

Political Philosophy, Ethics, Political Theory, Human Rights, Performativity, and 9 more