Humanizing the Citizen

Abstract

Contemporary citizenship and cosmopolitan scholars frequently understand human rights as an extension, or a supersession, of nationally based citizenship rights. Lopez argues that while this makes sense in a normative register, the equation of human rights and post-national citizenship rights is more difficult to sustain when human rights are understood as a historically embedded and social-relational political imaginary. The chapter engages in a sympathetic critique of key scholars in the field, namely Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir, Yasemin Soysal, Linda Bosniak, Saskia Sassen, Seyla Benhabib, David Held, and Ulrich Beck. Lopez concludes that what makes the claims of the aforementioned scholars difficult to sustain is the politically problematic figure of the victimized distant and/or excluded other that plays a key role in the human rights political imaginary.