Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power

How have politico-legal events regarding global terror and financial crisis, for example, impacted on human rights and their politics? What is the relationship between human rights and regimes of power? Can human rights still be considered an emancipatory discourse? Indeed, were they ever a truly emancipatory discourse? Beyond the left’s traditional skepticism towards human rights, recent political developments seem to have further solidified their inadequacy as a vehicle for radical social transformation.

Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation offers a contemporary re-evaluation of left scepticism towards human rights. Whist still foregrounding a critique of liberal conceptions of rights, it draws upon a range of interdisciplinary resources – including critical legal theory, poststructuralist theory, radical democratic thought and feminist/queer theory – to offer a new view of human rights as always unfinished, and so as always able to move beyond their liberal limits.