Emma Larking

Human Rights and the Principle of Sovereignty: A Dangerous Conflict at the Heart of the Nation State?

The coercive power of the state in liberal democracies is justified largely by the claim that the state is the best mechanism for the protection of individual rights. Individual rights are, in turn, founded on assumptions about universal freedom and equality. But if this is the case, how can liberal states disavow the freedom and equality of people outside their borders? Most try not to, for example, by ratifying international instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet their pursuit of policies guided solely by concern for the so called ‘national interest’ can lead in effect to behaviour that undermines basic freedoms. Where this happens, a poisonous hypocrisy enters the bloodstream of the nation state, and infects the institutions established to protect the freedom and equality of its own citizens. In this paper I argue Australias detention of asylum seekers, and a range of recent amendments to the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), are invidious steps along the path to a government which openly and aggressively denies the freedom and moral equality of individuals both here and elsewhere.

Human Rights, the Right to Have Rights, and Life Beyond the Pale of the Law

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt is famously scathing of the societies established between World Wars I and II to advocate on behalf of refugees and advance the protection of human rights. In Arendt’s view, ‘all societies formed for the protection of the Rights of Man … showed an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.’ The human rights they invoked were nothing more than ‘the standard slogan of the protectors of the underpriviledged, a kind of additional law, a right of exception necessary for those who had nothing better to fall back upon.’ (1968, 293) In this article I compare the position of exiles now living in or seeking to gain entry to Western states to that of Arendt’s interwar refugees. I argue that for the modern day exile, human rights continue to function inadequately as ‘a kind of additional law … for those who [have] nothing better to fall back upon’. I conclude that contemporary exiles have much in common with Arendt’s interwar refugees, and pose similar dilemmas insofar as the invocation of universal human rights is concerned.

Mobilising for Food Sovereignty: The Pitfalls of International Human Rights Strategies and an Exploration of Alternatives

ABSTRACT This article considers the role played by the language of human rights in a global campaign for food sovereignty. Led initially by the international peasants’ movement, Vía Campesina, the campaign opposes the globalisation of agricultural markets and neoliberal interventions in food production. Alongside other strategies, the campaign makes creative use of human rights and also seeks their institutionalisation in a UN Declaration on the rights of peasants. An examination of how the campaign employs human rights reveals a more complicated process than that suggested by the theoretical polarisation of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ accounts of rights development in the sociology of human rights. It demonstrates both wariness of state power and attempts to harness the power of the state against international forces. It also shows that a desire for legal reform co-exists with the struggle for more radical social and political transformations.

Irregular immigrants in Australia and the United States — Rights, realities, and political mobilization

ABSTRACT This article considers the gap between the universal promise of human rights and the reality of the rights enjoyed by irregular immigrants in liberal democracies such as Australia and the United States. Against the idea that stronger international rights enforcement mechanisms will automatically improve the position of irregular immigrants, it argues that international law currently provides a warrant for the way in which countries like Australia and the United States treat irregular immigrants. After developing this argument, the article explores how irregular immigrants might employ the language of rights more effectively in their political mobilizations.

Retheorising Statelessness: A Background Theory of Membership in World Politics by Kelly Staples. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 191pp., £65.00, ISBN 978 0 7486 4277 9

into the canon of political realism. Sleat takes the core realist belief to be that disagreement, not only about morality, but also about politics and legitimacy, is both endemic and permanent. Once liberalism has discarded its vision of consensus politics and the resultant theory of legitimacy, its ‘central normative commitment to being a non-oppressive form of political association has to be abandoned also’ (p. 81). What Sleat offers is a realist account of liberal legitimacy that is free from the illusions of consensus, but which does not succumb to the fallacy that ‘might is synonymous with right’ (p. 152). Liberal realism avoids these two extremes through a legitimation story of ‘moderate hegemony’ in which liberal rulers act as ‘restrained masters’ whose power is self-constrained by their endorsement of political (rather than legal) constitutionalism. By being open about its partisan foundations and restrained in the means it uses to secure its liberal ends, liberal realism respects the moral equality of its non-liberal internal enemies. Radically, this entails a conception of rights as political rather than moral, and accepts the use of political power to promote liberal convergence through the formation of citizens’ beliefs. In this way, politics can try to ‘create harmony if no natural harmony exists’ (p. 62). For those hoping for a more iconoclastic brand of realism the moderation of Liberal Realism may disappoint, but this is an avowedly liberal project that aims to radically ameliorate rather than undermine liberal politics. Although his account of liberal realism might have been more fully elaborated, Sleat nevertheless provides a coherent and original contribution to a school of political thought that has often been stimulating, but has seldom been systematic in its approach.