Routledge The Power of Human Rights/The Human Rights of Power (ThirdWorlds)

The contributions to this volume eschew the long-held approach of either dismissing human rights as politically compromised or glorifying them as a priori progressive in enabling resistance. Drawing on plural social theoretic and philosophical literatures – and a multiplicity of empirical domains – they illuminate the multi-layered and intricate relationship of human rights and power. They highlight human rights’ incitement of new subjects and modes of political action, marked by an often unnoticed duality and indeterminacy. Epistemologically distancing themselves from purely deductive, theory-driven approaches, the contributors explore these linkages through historically specific rights struggles. This, in turn, substantiates the commitment to avoid reifying the ‘Third World’ as merely the terrain of ‘fieldwork’, proposing it, instead, as a legitimate and necessary site of theorising. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly. About the Author Louiza Odysseos is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex and Deputy Director of the Sussex Rights and Justice Research Centre. She is the author of The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (2007) and numerous articles on ethics, rights and resistance. She has also co-edited Gendering the International (2002), The International Political Theory of Carl Schmitt (2007) and Heidegger and the Global Age (2017). She is currently researching a monograph entitled The Reign of Rights in Global Politics. Anna Selmeczi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her current research focuses on knowledge dynamics in urban social movements, particularly the pedagogical aspects of grassroots political practices.