This article takes up Foucault's politics of human rights and suggests that it may constitute a point of departure for the renewal of HRE, not only because it rejects the moral superiority of humanism—the grounding for the dominant liberal framework of international human rights—but also because it makes visible the complexities of human rights as illimitable and as strategic tools for new political struggles. Enriching human rights critiques has important implications for HRE, precisely because these critiques prevent the dominance of (...) unreflexive and unproductive forms of HRE that lead toward a declarationalist, conservative and uncritical approach. It is argued that Foucault's critical affirmation of human rights—that is, an approach which is neither a full embrace nor a total rejection—provides a critique that can be disruptive to the conventional HRE approach and creates openings that might renew HRE, both politically and pedagogically. (shrink)

In this article, we examine disability and eugenics discourses and the ways they function in spaces where vulnerable persons have been historically excluded by the state and blamed for their own “immiseration.” We ask how queer theories of repudiation, abjection, and vulnerability lend insight into the ways that people with intellectual disabilities are discursively located outside normative discourses of home, care, and quality of life, and whether these discourses shifted to serve this vulnerable population when historically the very places in (...) question repudiated them, infringed on their human rights, and questioned their sexuality. To address these questions, we focus on the recent and impending closures of Virginia’s Training Centers, residential institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities now scheduled for staggered closures before 2020. (shrink)

Recent histories of human rights have shown that the turn to human rights as a form of politics occurred as a placeholder for utopian energies at the end of history, coinciding with a retreat of the organised left, the abandonment of the theme of revolution, and the pluralisation of political struggles. This essay examines the way that radical continental theory has responded to the political hegemony of human rights by focusing on ‘post-Marxist’ thought. Examining the work of four influential critics (...) of human rights—Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière—I argue that post-Marxist thought provides two very different approaches to the political possibilities offered by human rights. The first retains a fidelity to the revolutionary critique of rights by rejecting the language and conceptuality of human rights as too deeply implicated in the liberal political order that needs to be resisted. The second acknowledges the limitations of human rights while arguing that they also offer important tools for democratic political struggle. The essay draws upon these analyses to consider the contemporary political meaning of human rights. It argues that the latter of these strategies is problematic because we now face a radically different political conjuncture to the one in which the politics of human rights first emerged: human rights have played an important role in the project of post-historical reaction; the political space in which the politics of rights once made sense has collapsed; and we have seen substantial political upheavals in the wake of the crisis of capitalism. (shrink)