VIRTUAL - Rights from Below: A Critical Look at Theory & Praxis of Human Rights

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Rights From Below: A Critical Look at the Theory and Praxis of Human Rights and the Need for a New Emancipatory Framework

Description

This graduate study group critically examines human rights by looking at the framework’s history, theory and praxis. The course will examine how rights can be ineffectual without consequent capacity to enforce them and even oppressive, as they can be used by powerful actors to entrench and extend their power (for instance, should free speech protect reach or does the latter impede the former?). We will examine inherent competition of rights which require mediation by a court system that is not equally available to all actors, and whether claims of cultural and religious rights should be confined within the universality of human rights (for instance, can we accept someone’s religious right to discriminate? Is this really a cognizable right if it in fact impedes other persons’ rights?). The course will also examine the historical and political contingency of identities and how we interpellate social constructions to be natural and immutable and consequent limits on our political possibilities. We will expose the false dichotomy between civil and political rights and economic rights and understand their interplay. We will examine whether the rights framework should extend to non-human actors (corporations, nature, animals etc.) and how and whether rights should have consequent responsibilities.

Each session will be comprised of 45 minutes of presentation and 45 minutes of student-led discussion.

Session 1: Rights, the State and Structural Violence

• emergence of rights in Western thought
• the liberal bourgeois state and capitalism as central to the rights framework
• rights as the raison d’etre of the state and the inherent right of derogation (the “public emergency exception”)
• the inherent paradox of state violence and protection
• how rights work to mask and mechanize subjugation on the one hand, and work to oppose it on the other
• how crises expose and exacerbate injustices (pandemic and climate change as case studies)

Readings:

• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Dec. 16, 1966, 999 U.N.T.S. 171. 
• International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Dec. 16, 1966, 993 U.N.T.S. 3, 6 I.L.M. 360.
• Alexander, M. (2012), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (originally published 2011) pages 185-220
• Mill, J. S. (1978) On Liberty. Elizabeth Rapaport E., Ed. (originally published 1859) pages 1-14; 24-29; 54-59
• Farmer, P. (2005), “On Suffering and Structural Violence: Social and Economic Rights in the Global Era” in his Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (pp 2-51)
• Žižek, S. (2008), Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (selections) -pp 1-20

Biography

Alexandra Arneri is a Partner at the bicoastal boutique firm Cittone Demers & Arneri LLP, where she practices complex commercial litigation and serves as outside general counsel to several media and tech companies. She has a robust and diverse pro bono practice, including having helped children who have been injured during illegal child labor, protected people on disability from losing affordable housing, stopped deceptive trade practices, helped people obtain healthcare and back wages and prevailed in asylum cases in the 9th Circuit. Alex has an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, an LLM concentrating in international law from NYU School of Law and a B.A./LLB from Sydney University