Hannah Arendt's “Right to Have Rights”: A Philosophical Context for Human Security

Abstract

Contemporary international legal theorists and policymakers have endorsed the concept of “human security” in an effort to mitigate the same categories of suffering that Hannah Arendt sought to address with her concept of a “right to have rights.” Like Arendt, human security theorists and practitioners today focus on the plight of individuals in distress as a consequence of the unrealizability in practice of their human rights. But despite the popularity of the goal of human security, the content of this concept remains unsettled. This article argues that Arendt's notion of a right to have rights offers important insights to those who wish to develop the idea of human security in a way that primarily serves humanitarian, rather than strategic, goals, and who seek an interculturally legitimizable basis for human rights, rather than a conventionally universalist foundation.