Rights Mobilizations and Their Critics

The objective of this course is to grapple with the ambiguity at the core of rights-demands by those excluded from prevailing national and international political orders. Rights-claims are always made in existing legal vernaculars while seeking to challenge the regimes whose infrastructure, language, and norms of fairness they are adopting. In this class, students will consider rights as an enduring legal form and as a specific, contextual political demand.

The class will begin with the French Revolution’s invocation of the Rights of Man and Citizen via Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on those left out of this formulation, namely women. We will then discuss the adoption and contestation of the Declaration by enslaved people on Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) before diving into the critics of the Revolution’s mobilization of rights such as Edmund Burke. Afterwards, we will debate constitutional abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and those who deemed legal frameworks wholly insufficient for the task at hand, such as William Lloyd Garrison.

Towards the end of the 19th century, European and U.S. American worker’s ambivalent rights-mobilizations and court-driven backlash add another dimension to the rights puzzle: what kind of material equality is required for legal equality? To proceed to emergent human rights law, we will discuss the League of Nation’s proposals for minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe after World War I and Hannah Arendt’s concerns about this approach’s limits. Anti-colonial thinkers, meanwhile, challenged the stark divide between universalist rights-claims in the metropole and racialized disfranchisement and rightlessness in the colony. Some, such as M. K. Gandhi, pioneered new methods for claims-making which exceeded traditional legal appeals. After the global horrors of the Second World War, we investigate the political opportunity structure and the normative motivations of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We conclude with accounts of those trying to actualize the UDHR’s ideals and their partial successes, failures, and disappointments in the political arena and in court. We will also debate accounts by those who consider international law wholly inadequate to the task it has set for itself.