Human Rights, Human Wrongs: The Life of Race in the Human Rights Framework

Catalog description

This course will look at how race gets constituted and contested in the human rights field by studying debates, cases and campaigns regarding topics such as the prohibition on torture, the prohibition on racial discrimination, labor rights, property rights, migrant rights, minority rights, the right to religious freedom, apartheid, genocide and settler colonialism. How do racial logics inhabit and frame notions of 'the human' as they get deployed in the legal cases, advocacy efforts and international institutions where these issues play out? What are the political stakes of different imaginings of the rights bearing human, and of different histories of human rights, for struggles addressing structural racism and white supremacy? This course invites us to take a step back to examine the racial politics of the human rights framework and consider debates internal to invocations of right claims to develop an immanant critique of what the human rights framework renders visible and what it casts in shadows. Readings will include a range of contemporary scholars working at the intersection of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), including Anthony Anghie, Daryl Li, Adelle Blackett, Asli Bali, Ntina Tzouvala, Robert Knox, Wadie Said, Tendayi Achiume and Samera Esmeir.