The special edition of the journal Third World Quarterly on ‘the power of human rights/the human rights of power’, considers the question of duality of human rights in a neo-liberalism context. Here, social and political practices represent realities as to how the interplay of power and subjectivity plays a role in, for example, deducting complex realities into a human rights language or disconnecting rights talks from actual contexts of struggles.
The 14 articles published in the issue are structured into these interesting themes: subject and struggles; rights, state and borders; power, privilege and change; and, politicisation and depoliticisation.
Some of them are:
- The question concerning human rights and human rightlessness: disposability and struggle in the Bhopal gas disaster
- Struggles, over rights: humanism, ethical dispossession and resistance
- Who is the subject of neoliberal rights? Governmentality, subjectification and the letter of the law
- Between learning and schooling: the politics of human rights monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review
- Power, privilege and rights: how the powerful and powerless create a vernacular of rights