Dr Mahvish Ahmad

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Human Rights and Politics. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Students who have this course as a core course are guaranteed a place. Other than for students for whom the course is a core course, places are allocated based on a written statement, with priority given to taught postgraduate students in the Sociology Department. As demand is typically high, this may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

During a period of unprecedented changes in social, political, technological, ecological, and cultural spheres key human rights ideas and institutions are being revisited, criticised, or attacked. The story of human rights as the product of a western enlightenment solidified via an international consensus that emerged after the Second World War is being rewritten, bringing attention to competing ideas of rights and justice proposed for instance by anti-colonial figures and movements. Meanwhile, human rights as a powerful exemplar of political liberalism has come under sustained criticism for their institutionalised, procedural, and legalistic nature. Critics say this formalistic approach has obscured relations of power, including racial, classed, gendered, and human-nature inequalities allowing the defence of human rights to be used as a justification for domination and hierarchy, for instance via the deployment of imperial war to protect women and minorities. Finally, liberal human rights face an unprecedented attack by authoritarian, populist, and fascist states and movements. We are today witnessing a roll-back of legal protections for migrants and refugees; indigenous communities; women, trans and non-binary peoples; racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; the environment; the poor and working classes, and others. All this is happening at a time of major social upheaval that bring attention to the limits of the human rights framework including migrant crises, the rapid development of artificial intelligence, a global pandemic, and climate disaster. The multiple and contradictory crises facing human rights raises difficult questions for those committed to social, political, economic, and ecological justice: Do we retain and protect human rights in its current, liberal form–or does it need to be fundamentally revised, perhaps even rejected and replaced with another kind of political project? Those asking such questions find themselves turning to ideas and movements not captured by the languages of human rights and their institutional and legal framing, including the politics of antifascism, abolition, antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, reparations, and more.

This interdisciplinary course examines many of the sharp tensions and contradictions in the contemporary politics of human rights–bringing particular attention to alternative ideas that seek to expand, reconfigure, or replace human rights as a politics for justice. The course provides students with conceptual tools through which to tackle unsettled issues, rather than clear and definitive answers to difficult questions around the future of human rights. It considers the entanglements between human rights, empire, and anti-imperialism; its universalist claims; its relation to capitalist and neoliberal economic orders; and its understanding of what constitutes the human. And, it critically examines the external and internal pressures on the human rights project; mainstream human rights practices like the documentation of “wrongs” and the mobilization of feelings; and the alternative shapes that struggles for social, economic, political, and ecological justice can take at a time of global crisis.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures, online materials and seminars totalling a minimum of 40 hours across AT and WT.

There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of both Autumn Term and Winter Term.

Students should submit two formative essays, 1,000 words each, one in Week 6 of Autumn Term and one in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Gordon, N. and N. Perugini. 2015. The Human Right to Dominate. Oxford University Press.

Singh, J., 2017. Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press.

Madhok, S., 2022. On Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights, and Gendered Struggles for Justice. Cambridge University Press.

Moses, D, Duranti, M  and Burke, R eds. (2020), Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics, Cambridge University Press.

Rodney, W., 2018. How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Verso Books.

Gago, V., 2020. Feminist international: How to change everything. Verso Books.

Getachew, A., 2019. Worldmaking after empire: The rise and fall of self-determination. Princeton University Press.

Brown, W. 2009. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton University Press.

Gilmore, R. W. 2007. Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press.

Mamdani, M. 2009. Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror. HSRC Press.

Fassin, D. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. University of California Press.

Bookchin, M. 1982. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. AK Press.

Douzinas, C. 2007. Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Routledge.

Krabbe, J.S-K. 2015. Race, Rights and Rebels: Alternatives to Human Rights and Development From the Global South. Rowman & Littlefield International.

Gilroy, P. 2009. Race and the Right to be Human. Universiteit Utrecht.

Bhandar, B., 2018. Colonial lives of property: Law, land, and racial regimes of ownership. Duke University Press.

Sankara, T., 1988. ‘Dare to invent the future. Interview with Jean-Philippe Rapp 1985’. pp.189-232 In: Thomas Sankara Speaks. The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987. Pathfinders.

Essay (50%, 3500 words) in the WT.
Essay (50%, 3500 words) in the ST.

Attendance at all classes and submission of all set coursework is required.