Abstract
Against the well-established critical rejection of rights a growing literature in the tradition of agonistic democracy asserts their emancipatory role in the struggles for social change. However, agonistic theorists, invested as they are in the idea of democratic innovation as a process of gradual ‘augmentation’ of existing rules, institutions and practices, fail to account for the ruptural capacity, and hence for the full radical potential, of rights. Using the performative approach, I develop a conception of rights claiming as a defiant practice to express the ruptural dimension of certain forms of rights politics. I demonstrate how defiant rights claiming articulates immanent critique by declaring the incapacity of putative duty-bearer institutions and governments to uphold the claimed right due to structural constraints, thereby generating inevitable contradictions within the extant order and creating the necessity for an alternative one. Moreover, in order to fully capture the emancipatory potential and creative capacity of rights, this article argues for understanding certain forms of rights politics both as augmentation and rupture, taking the two to be different dimensions of the same radical democratic practice. I present the creative use of rights discourse by the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the transnational network of agrarian movements, La Via Campesina, as precisely such a combination of the practice of augmentation and defiant claims, which has led to the transformation of the right to food and land into the right to food sovereignty, demonstration of the structural embeddedness of rights violations in the existing global regime of food production and distribution, and authorisation of an alternative vision of the future.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1990. On revolution. London: Penguin Books.
Austin, John L. 1975. How to do things with words, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil. London and New York: Verso.
Balibar, Étienne. 2013. Equaliberty: political essays, trans. james ingram. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Baxi, Upendra. 2008. The future of human rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beitz, Charles. 2009. The idea of human rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benhabib Seyla 2006. In Another cosmopolitanism, ed. Robert Post. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Brown, Wendy. 2004. ‘The most we can hope for’: Human rights and the politics of fatalism. The South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2/3): 451–463.
Brown, Wendy. 2000. Revaluing critique: A response to Kenneth Baynes. Political Theory 28(4): 451–468.
Chambers, Samuel A. 2004. Giving up (on) rights? The future of rights and the project of radical democracy. American Journal of Political Science 48(2): 185–200.
Cheah, Pheng. 2007. Inhuman conditions: On cosmopolitanism and human rights. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Christodoulidis, Emilios. 2009. Strategies of rupture. Law and Critique 20(1): 3–26.
Claeys, Priscilla. 2014. Human rights and the food sovereignty movement: Reclaiming control. New York: Routledge.
Cohen, Joshua. 2004. Minimalism about human rights: The most we can hope for? The Journal of Political Philosophy 12(2): 190–213.
Connolly, W.E. 1995. The ethos of pluralization In Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Cruft, Rowan S., Matthew Liao, and Massimo Renzo (eds.). 2015. Philosophical foundations of human rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Desmarais, Annette A. 2007. La Via Campesina: Globalization and the power of peasants. London: Pluto Press.
Douzinas, Costas. 2000. The end of human rights: Critical thought at the turn of the century. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
Dunford, Robin F., and Sumi Madhok. 2015. Vernacular rights cultures and the ‘Right to Have Rights’. Citizenship Studies 19(6–7): 605–619.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1984. Rights as trumps. In Theories of rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Edelman, Marc, and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. 2016. Political dynamics of transnational agrarian movements. Rugby: Practical Action Publishing.
Forst, Rainer. 2010. The basic right to justification: Toward a constructivist conception of human rights. Ethics 120(4): 711–740.
Friedmann, Harriet. 1993. The political economy of food: A global crisis. New Left Review 197(1): 29–57.
Griffin, James. 2008. On human rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gündoğdu, Ayten. 2015. Rightlessness in an age of rights: Hannah Arendt and the contemporary struggles of migrants. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. Remarks on legitimation through human rights. Philosophy & Social Criticism 24(2): 157–171.
Hoddy, Eric T., and Jonathan E. Ensor. 2018. Brazil’s landless movement and rights ‘from below’. Journal of Rural Studies 63 (October): 74–82.
Holt-Giménez, Eric H., and Annie Shattuck. 2011. Food crises, food regimes and food movements: Rumblings of reform or tides of transformation? Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1): 109–144.
Honig, B. 1993. Political theory and the displacement of politics Ithaca. London: Cornell University Press.
Honig, Bonnie. 2009. Emergency politics: Paradox, law, democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hoover, Joe, Marta Iñiguez, and de Heredia. 2011. Philosophers, activists, and radicals: A story of human rights and other scandals. Human Rights Review 12(2): 191–220.
Hoover, Joe. 2016. Reconstructing human rights: A pragmatist and pluralist inquiry in global ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Houtzager, Peter P. 2005. The Movement of the Landless (MST), juridical field, and legal change in Brazil. In Law and globalization from below: Towards a cosmopolitan legality, ed. Boaventura De Sousa and Santos and Cesar A. Rodríguez-Garavito, 218–240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ingram, James. 2008. What is a ‘right to have rights’? Three images of the politics of human rights. American Political Science Review 102(4): 401–416.
Kennedy, D. 2004. Dark sides of virtue Reassessing international humanitarianism. Princeton,: Oxford Princeton University Press.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On populist reason. London: Verso.
Lefort, Claude. 1986. The political forms of modern society. Cambridge: Polity.
Lefort, Claude. 1988. Democracy and political theory, trans. David Macey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Little, Adrian, and Moya Loyd. 2008. Introduction. In The politics of radical democracy, ed. Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd, 1–11. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Madison, Soyini D. 2010. Acts of activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marks, Susan. 2011. Human rights and root causes. The Modern Law Review 74(1): 57–78.
Martínez-Torres, María E., and Peter M. Rosset. 2010. La Via Campesina: the birth and evolution of a transnational social movement. Journal of Peasant Studies 37(1): 149–176.
Marx, Karl. 1975. On the Jewish question. In Collected Works, vol. 3, ed. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers.
McMichael, Philip. 2009. A food regime genealogy. Journal of Peasant Studies 36(1): 139–169.
McNeilly, Kathryn. 2016. After the critique of Rights: For a radical democratic theory and practice of human rights. Law and Critique 27(3): 269–288.
Meszaros, George. 2011. The MST and the rule of law in Brazil. In Social movements, law and the politics of land reform, ed. George Meszaros. Abingdon: Routledge Cavendish.
Meszaros, George (ed.). 2013. Social movements, law and the politics of land reform: Lessons from Brazil. Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The democratic paradox. London: Verso.
Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The last utopia: Human rights in history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mutua, Makau. 2002. Human rights: A political and cultural critique. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Norval, Alleta J. 2009. Rereading Austin and Cavell. In Law and agonistic politics, ed. Andrew Schaap, 163–177. Farnham: Ashgate.
Norval, Aletta J. 2001. Radical democracy. In Encyclopedia of democratic thought, ed. Paul Barry Clarke and Joe Foweraker. London: Routledge.
Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty. 2007. https://nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290. Accessed 5 May 2020.
O'Connell, Paul. 2018. On the human rights question. Human Rights Quarterly 40(4): 962–988.
Pashukanis, Evgeny. (1978). Law and Marxism: A general theory, trans. Barbara Einhorn, ed. Chris Arthur. London: InkLinks.
Patel, Raj. 2007. Transgressing rights: La Via Campesina’s call for food sovereignty. Feminist Economics 13(1): 87–116.
Patel, Raj. 2009. Food sovereignty. The Journal of Peasant Studies 36(3): 663–706.
Patel, Raj, 2011. What does food sovereignty look like. In Food sovereignty: reconnecting food, nature and community, eds. Hannah Wittman et al. Oxford: Pambazuka Press.
Perugini, Nicola, and Neve Gordon. 2015. The human right to dominate. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004a. Introducing disagreement. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 9(3): 3–9.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004b. Who is the subject of the rights of man? South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2/3): 297–310.
Rawls, John. 2000. The law of peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Raz, Joseph. 2010. Human rights without foundations. In The philosophy of international law, ed. S. Samantha, 321–338. Besson and John Tasioulas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rosset, Peter. 2013. Re-thinking agrarian reform, land and territory in La Via Campesina. The Journal of Peasant Studies 40(4): 721–775.
Schaap, Andrew. 2011. Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Rancière’s critique of Hannah Arendt. European Journal of Political Theory 10(1): 22–45.
Searle, John. 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5(1): 1–23.
Searle, John, and Daniel Vanderveken. 1985. Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stammers, Neil. 2009. Human rights and social movements. London: Pluto Press.
Tasioulas, John. 2009. Are human rights essentially triggers for intervention? Philosophy Compass 4(6): 938–950.
Tilzey, Mark. 2018. Political ecology, food regimes, and food sovereignty. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lars, Tønder, and Lasse Thomassen. 2005. Introduction. In radical democracy: Politics between abundance and lack, ed. Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, 1–13. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tully, James. 1999. The agonic freedom of citizens. Economy and Society 28(2): 161–182.
Wall, Illan R. 2012. Human rights and constituent power: Without model or warranty. London: Routledge.
Wenman, Mark. 2013. Agonistic democracy: Constituent power in the era of globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Windfuhr, Michael, and Jennie Jonsén. 2005. Food sovereignty: Towards democracy in localized food systems. Rugby: FIAN International, ITDG Publishing.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1987. English speech act verbs: A semantic dictionary. Sydney: Academic Press.
Wingenbach, (ed.). 2011. Institutionalizing agonistic democracy. Farnham: Ashgate.
Wittman, Hannah. 2011. Food sovereignty: A new rights framework for food and nature? Environment and Society: Advances in research 2(1): 87–105.
Wittman, Hannah, Annette A. Desmarais, and Nettie Wiebe (eds.). 2010. Food sovereignty: Reconnecting food, nature, and community. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.
Wolford, Wendy. 2010. This land is ours now: Social mobilization and the meanings of land in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.
Zerilli, Linda. 2005. Feminism and the abyss of freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Zivi, Karen. 2012. Making rights claims: A practice of democratic citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, S. 2005. Against human rights. New Left Review 34: 115–131.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks go to Alex Latham-Gambi, Karen Zivi, Priscilla Claeys and Ntina Tzouvala for their insightful comments on an earlier version of the article, and to Claudio Michelon and Euan MacDonald for their support as my PhD supervisors when these arguments were first elaborated. Of course, all errors and omissions are solely my own. This study was funded by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia under Grant: #YS-18-089.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Eristavi, K. Performing Defiance with Rights. Law Critique 32, 153–169 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09277-5
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09277-5