Drawing from recent advocacy efforts on the right to education in Kenya, this article argues that linking human rights to local political struggles is a useful way of ensuring their realization. Human rights are legal and moral but their realization is a political project. The form that this project takes will differ from context to context. While paying due regard to the remarkable contribution of international human rights regimes and transnational advocacy of the last fifty years in providing the world (...) with a powerful legal and moral vocabulary of rights, this article suggests that this vocabulary risks losing its edge unless those working in the field of human rights recognize the necessity of local politics. The article examines the activities of the Kenyan human rights movement and its strategic linking of access to basic education with repression of political freedoms. (shrink)

What does the growing tide of displaced persons today teach us about the ongoing paradoxes of human rights regimes, which rely on the particular sovereignty of nation-states for their constitution and application but are framed and normatively justified as universal? Working with Arendt’s defense of ‘the right to have rights’ in response to the problem of statelessness which is the practical lynchpin of these historical and theoretical tensions, I specify that and why any person on earth, regardless of their legal (...) status as a national or resident or non-resident alien, can legitimately expect two things from the political community in which they reside: hospitality and membership. (shrink)