Human rights, belonging and the challenge of difference

Abstract

This article seeks to challenge the regnant liberal orthodoxy that human rights are the highest and most important of our social virtues. It questions the individualist assumptions of such universal claims and draws attention to the need for belonging as something too often ignored if not denigrated in certain academic and liberal circles. Rather than a politics predicated solely on individual rights it argues for a politics of communal difference predicated on shared experience rather than ideological uniformity.