Since their advent in the Age of Reason, rights have proven a powerful instrument for social movements and other actors interested in remediating wrongs and mitigating injustice. But what exactly are rights? And what accounts for the often dramatic and consequential difference between our normative ideals about rights and their institutional realities? Unintended consequences plague the history of rights and their implementation, the worst of which involve justification for imperial expansion, growth of the carceral state, and the global spread of extractive capitalism. Indeed, organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, G7 states and the World Economic Forum have leveraged rights to legitimate political, economic, and military interventions above all across the Global South. Yet, all the while, rights—human rights in particular—retain a privileged place, within both social movements and the liberal imagination. Why, despite these complicities and complexities, does the idea of rights maintain such a tenacious grip on our political discourse as well as our utopian aspirations?
In this course, we will confront these questions through a close reading of scholar-activist Radha D’Souza’s 2018 book What’s Wrong With Rights? Viewing contemporary rights in theory and practice through several lenses—of Third World and Indigenous struggles, experiences of national liberation and socialism, and aspirations for emancipation and freedom—D’Souza attempts to provide answers to the conundrum of rights: Why are activists and activist scholars unable to “let go” of human rights? Why do Indigenous movements find themselves compelled to invoke the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People to make their claims sound “reasonable”? How have transformations in transnational finance capitalism shifted the definition and the role of rights, from the World Wars of the 20th century to the compounding crises that mark the 21st? Are rights still worth fighting for? And, if so, how should we approach them, in activist practice and institutional life?
