Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights [Hardcover]

InStruggles for the Human, Lara Montesinos Coleman blends ethnography, political philosophy, and critical theory to reorient debates on human rights through attention to understandings of legality, ethics, and humanity in anticapitalist and decolonial struggle. Drawing on her extensive involvement with grassroots social movements in Colombia, Coleman observes that mainstream expressions of human rights have become counterparts to capitalist violence, even as this discourse disavows capitalism’s deadly implications. She rejects claims that human rights are inherently tied to capitalism, liberalism, or colonialism, instead showing how human rights can be used to combat these forces. Coleman demonstrates that social justice struggles that are rooted in marginalized communities’ lived experiences can reframe human rights in order to challenge oppressive power structures and offer a blueprint for constructing alternative political economies. By examining the practice of redefining human rights away from abstract universals and contextualizing them within concrete struggles for justice, Coleman reveals the transformative potential of human rights and invites readers to question and reshape dominant legal and ethical narratives.USLara Montesinos Coleman presents an ethnographic exploration of contemporary human rights discourse that reorients debates on legality, ethics, and humanity within anticapitalist and decolonial struggles.Lara Montesinos Coleman is Reader in International Relations, Law, and Development and Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex and coeditor ofSituating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent.“This book needs to be read by every human rights student, by every human rights scholar, by every political theorist… every anthropologist, every sociologist. Whomever cares about the politics of rights, human rights, radical political movements and their vexed relation ló´