Sundhya Pahuja

Rights as Regulation: The Integration of Development and Human Rights

Recent attempts to integrate human rights and development have come from several quarters. However, in contrast to this ascendant orthodoxy and the increasingly ‘commonsensical’ understanding that human rights and development should be integrated as deeply and as quickly as possible, this chapter will argue that their integration should be understood as the creeping transformation of a promised sphere of ‘rights’ into a domain which may aptly be called ‘regulatory’. This transformation results in a problematic contraction of the sphere of politics in the ‘global’ arena. The argument is made through a brief genealogy of the return of law and development, and through an engagement with the work of Amartya Sen and Hernando De Soto.

Conserving the World's Resources?

Central to the question of how we live is how we share the earth. From conflict over territory, to passage over the high seas, to the quest for raw materials, to disputes over water and oil, to dams and development, to methods of agriculture, food security and to negotiations over climate change, the question of resources lies at the heart of many international events. But if the struggle for control over resources lurks under the surface of international law, international law lies in the background of how we understand and define them in the first place.

Before the beginning: a disclosure of law's foundation [Paper in: Divining the Source: Law's Foundation and the Question of Authority. Beard, Jennifer and Pahuja, Sundhya (eds).]

In the origin, there is (ostensibly) a beginning. By this we mean that a story of origin would seem to describe a beginning: a beginning, which marks a break from that which preceded it and which provides a foundation for that which follows. When a system of social organization narrates its origin, it draws a limit by saying ‘this is our beginning’, and it is from here that we exist and have meaning. The effect is thus authoritative and authorising. In each of these collected essays, the authors engage with the question of law’s foundation. And whether more or less abstractly, each author is concerned with the possibilities for ways of being which are produced and precluded both by the narration of a particular origin, and with the need to find foundations at all. For by founding authority, the narrative of origin erases the possibility of being – of arriving – otherwise. Moreover, it prevents the subject of narration from being more than the origin allows. The subject is always already that which is born of its origin. This is not to say that the origins used to narrate a particular subject cannot be re-authored. The Western (legal) subject is a prime example of a subject that has retained its bodily integrity despite, or perhaps because of, the possibility of re-telling the story of law’s origin. Hence, the legal subject has existed (variously) under the authority of God or Natural Law, divine right and, according to social contract theory, by itself consenting to undertake the authorisation of its origin. In this way, also, secular authority takes the place of sacred authority such that secularism must therefore be seen as part of the religious tradition.1 So, already, in setting out to describe the link between law and origin, our text has shifted to a discussion of authority. The link between authority and law hardly needs explaining. Rather, it is the shift from origin to authority that interests us because in our view, it is this shift that presents the legal theorist with an opportunity to challenge law ‘at its foundations’. Writing as lawyers concerned with the imperial effects of international economic law and development,2 the authorship of law is an obvious point of departure when discussing theories of