Book Review: General Politics: Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1478-9302.12016_90 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
tered in that city, as well as the number of business
hotels located in each, and business events occurring
there.
Casting this wider net is notable, though when the
top results are reported, the top global cities are indeed
essentially the same as in all other global cities research.
The core of the book is driven by a different index
which accounts for all branch locations of Forbes 2000
companies, divided into different sectors (financial,
legal, advertising and so on).The comprehensive nature
of this measure (being calculated for 525 cities) does
give credence to this study being a deeper look at a
certain kind of global connectivity than past research.
However, I find the measure troubling as it appears to
me to focus ultimately on connectivity within global
firms rather than between them – and this still falls
somewhat short as a comprehensive measure of global
city interconnectedness.
Perhaps more troubling, this approach assumes that
cities (particularly those well outside the developed
core) are connected primarily through the presence of
(potentially quite marginal) Forbes 2000 branches,
when it might be more likely that the Forbes 2000
companies would be working with and through local
companies, which go unmeasured. This invisibility is
particularly true of legal services in India and Pakistan,
both of which are almost completely detached from
global legal firms. Clearly a better measure of capital
flows between global firms, and between global and
local firms, is called for, though how realistic it is that
these data can be gleaned is a different issue. On the
whole this volume presents a new and thorough way of
examining the connectivity of global firms in a com-
prehensive way, but the analysis comes across as over-
stating the actual importance of this measure relative to
other measures, even their own city place power
measure.
Eric Petersen
(Senior Transport Planner, TransLink)
Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Demo-
cratic Citizenship by Karen Zivi. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012. 158pp., £15.99, ISBN 978 0 19
982640 7
Karen Zivi eloquently and persuasively argues that it is
the democratic character of the process of making
rights claims that underlines the continued and increas-
ing popularity of human rights talk as a language of
political reform. She argues that ‘it is through the
making of rights claims that we contest and constitute
the meaning of individual identity, the contours of
community, and the forms that political subjectivity
takes’ (p. 7).Her particular way of making the case is to
apply the notions of performative utterance and per-
formative practice to human rights, and to apply these
to both how we think about and theorise human rights
and the political activity of making rights claims. Zivi
locates the process of making rights claims in a broad
rights culture which she sees as ‘an ever changing
conglomeration of stories, rituals, beliefs and practices’
(p. 11). She argues that it is important to focus on ‘the
kind of activity that rights claiming entails’ (p. 14).
Performative theory – drawing on J.L. Austin,Der rida,
Cavell and Butler – proves in Zivi’s hands to be a
powerful and insightful way of understanding the often
confusing multiplicity of ways in which people use
rights language.
In the first part of the book Zivi makes her case that
a performative understanding of rights claiming illus-
trates the democratic character of this process. Over
two chapters, she takes us from H. L.A. Hart’s classic
definition of what it means to have a right, through the
common conception of ‘rights as trumps’, to an under-
standing of rights claiming as persuasion (with innova-
tive and accomplished readings ofArendt and J. S.Mill).
The paradox of rights is that – as with the ‘rights as
trumps’ approach – rights are often employed instru-
mentally to end debate and identify secure winners; yet
at the same time, rights spill out beyond these narrow
instrumental uses and take on a life of their own.Their
performance is not instrumentally controllable, and
leads to ongoing political engagement, often in unex-
pected forms.
This dynamic is illustrated well in the second part of
the book, which examines closely two cases in which
rights claims are made: the same-sex marriage debate
(as it plays out in the US, and particularly California);
and AIDS policies in the US and South Africa regard-
ing mother-to-child HIV transmission. In both of these
cases, Zivi effectively argues that a performative under-
standing of rights claiming can change our expectations
about what rights claiming can mean for us as demo-
cratic citizens.
Anthony J. Langlois
(Flinders University, Adelaide)
BOOK REVIEWS 283
© 2013 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2013, 11(2)
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