On the ambivalent politics of human rights
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088218783787 |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Author | Ayten Gündoğdu |
| Subject Matter | Review Essay |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088218783787
Journal of International Political Theory
2018, Vol. 14(3) 367 –380
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088218783787
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On the ambivalent politics
of human rights
Ayten Gündoğdu
Barnard College, Columbia University, USA
Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Joe Hoover, Reconstructing Human Rights: A Pragmatist and Pluralist Inquiry in Global Ethics, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016.
Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate, Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015.
Human rights have become a crucial frame of reference in addressing various forms of
violence, oppression, and inequality across the world especially since the 1970s. This
development has been welcomed by many scholars who highlight that human rights
offer protections against cruelty and abuse (Ignatieff, 2001), establish a new understand-
ing of legitimate statehood based on the protection of individual rights (Barkin, 1998;
Donnelly, 2003; Henkin, 1990; Reus-Smit, 2001), enhance principles and institutions of
constitutional democracy (Goodhart, 2005; Habermas, 1996; Mayerfeld, 2016), intro-
duce normative concerns into the conduct of foreign policy (Clark, 2001; Sikkink, 1993;
Thomas, 2001), cultivate new forms of transnational solidarity across borders (Keck and
Sikkink, 1998; Risse et al., 1999), and pave the way for post-national or cosmopolitan
forms of political membership (Benhabib, 2004; Soysal, 1994). Such positive accounts
have been challenged by numerous critics who examine how human rights end up aug-
menting the sovereign power of the state (Agamben, 1998), reinforcing a wide range of
hierarchies within the global order (Doty, 1996; Guilhot, 2005; Mutua, 2002), legitimiz-
ing neo-imperial military interventions (Chandler, 2001; Douzinas, 2007; Orford, 2003),
and displacing more ambitious projects of justice and emancipation (Brown, 2004;
Kennedy, 2004; Moyn, 2010, 2018).
The works under review make significant interventions into this ongoing debate by
inviting us to think of human rights in terms of a deeply ambivalent politics: Human
Corresponding author:
Ayten Gündoğdu, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027-6598, USA.
Email: agundogdu@barnard.edu
783787IPT0010.1177/1755088218783787Journal of International Political TheoryGündoğdu
review-article2018
Review Essay
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