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Ben Golder

    Ben Golder

    Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s — his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and... more
    Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s — his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and so forth — as proposing a critique of rights discourse which definitively rules out any political appeal to rights. On the other hand, somewhat curiously it has to be said, there is a tendency to read his works of the late 1970s and early 1980s — his perhaps less celebrated concern with ethics and with technologies of the self — as tacitly re-introducing a liberal humanist notion of subjectivity and, with that, an embrace of orthodox rights discourse. Beginning from this curious disjunction between the rejectionist Foucault and the liberal Foucault, this article attempts to articulate a Foucauldian politics of human rights along the lines of a critical affirmation. Neither a full embrace nor a total rejection of human rights, the Foucauldian politics of human rights developed here elaborates (and attempts to connect) several disparate figures in his thought: rights as ungrounded and illimitable, rights as the strategic instrument-effect of political struggle, and rights as a performative mechanism of community.
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    This paper is a brief review essay of Anne Orford's book 'International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect' which, along with three others and a response by the author published in the inaugural issue of the 'London Review of... more
    This paper is a brief review essay of Anne Orford's book 'International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect' which, along with three others and a response by the author published in the inaugural issue of the 'London Review of International Law', was first given at an author-meets-reader session at the University of Sydney. This review addresses the Foucaultian dimensions of Orford's book.
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    This article engages with the work of three international legal theorists (Kennedy, Orford and Mutua) on the question of human rights and argues that whilst each provides a critique, each also makes a redemptive return to human rights.... more
    This article engages with the work of three international legal theorists
    (Kennedy, Orford and Mutua) on the question of human rights and argues that whilst each provides a critique, each also makes a redemptive return to human rights. The article maps and critiques this tendency in contemporary international legal thought.
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