Beyond Human Rights Critique

Rising authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, grinding wars, mass involuntary migration, rampant misinformation and the unsettling possibilities of AI have made the world promised by the human rights project seem a distant or even fanciful prospect. Whatever faith we have in human rights to either secure or remake the world has had good reason to be shaken—or was unfounded from the start. Indeed, since universal rights were proposed there have been skeptics, questioning their abstraction, insufficiency, Eurocentrism, and overreach, among other shortcomings. When it comes to critiquing human rights, is there anything left to be said?

This seminar course considers where the human rights idea and project goes from here. Starting rather than ending with these critiques, we will pursue theoretical and practical attempts to reimagine human rights in their light. How have commentators drawn on liberal, pragmatic, radical democratic, and anticolonial thought to forge a vision of human rights made to the measure of a world in crisis? What are the value and limits of critique in the human rights project? And how do theory and praxis relate in attempts to reconstruct human rights beyond these critiques? In pursuit of answers, we will read political theory, history, philosophy, and ethnography, as well as together assemble an archive of already existing projects to reformulate, resignify, and mobilize human rights in novel directions.