Discursive Framings of Human Rights: Negotiating Agency and Victimhood [Paperback]

What does it mean to be a subject of human rights? The status of the subject is closely connected with the form and rhetoric of the framing discourse, and this book investigates the relationship between the status of the subject and the form of human rights discourse, in differing aesthetic and social contexts. Historical as well as contemporary declarations of rights have stressed both the protective and political aspects of human rights. But in concrete situations and conflictual moments, the high moral legitimacy of human rights rhetoric has often clouded the actual character of specific interventions, and so made it difficult to differentiate between the objects of humanitarian intervention and the subjects of politics. Critically re-examining this opposition  between victims and agents of human rights  through a focus on the ways in which discourses of rights are formed and circulated within and between political societies, this book elicits the fluidity of their relationship, and with it the shifting relation between human rights and humanitarianism. Analysing the symbolic framings of testimonies, disaster stories, atrocity tales, political speeches, and philosophical arguments, it thus establishes a relationship between these different genres and the political, economic, and legal dimensions of human rights discourse.

Introduction, Jonas Ross Kj?rg?rd & Karen-Margrethe Simonsen Part One: Troublesome Origins: The Genealogies of Human Rights 1. On the Use and Abuse of History in Philosophy of Human Rights, Lena Halldenius 2. The Political Agency of Victims in Atrocity Tales by Bartolom? de las Casas: The Spanish Origin of Human Rights Karen-Margrethe Simonsen 3. The Inequality of Common Utility: Active/Passive Citizenship in French Revolutionary Human Rights, Jonas Ross Kj?rg?rd 4. The Right toló2