Abstract
This chapter draws on the works of Hannah Arendt to explore detainees’ repeated cries of ‘We are human!’ It proposes modern legal-positivist approaches to rights encourage the development of juridical systems, but leave philosophical dimensions of human rights under-theorised. It is to a moral understanding of a shared humanity that the cry ‘we are human’ speaks. The chapter challenges dominant institutionalised discourses of human rights and proposes an alternate approach less dependent on the nation-state and more focused on the human subject of human rights. Detainees recount protest as re-humanising, communicative acts.
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Notes
- 1.
Australasian Correctional Management, known as ACM, was the private security firm contracted to run Australian immigration detention centres from 1998 to 2003.
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Fiske, L. (2016). ‘We Are Human.’ Re-humanising Human Rights. In: Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58096-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58096-2_2
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