Legitimizing Human Rights: Beyond Mythical Foundations and Into Everyday Resonances

Abstract

What is the source of human rights’ resonance and does that legitimize working on human rights transnationally? This article responds both to human rights critics (among them relativists, poststructuralists, and some Queer theorists) and supporters (legal, philosophical, and historical universalists) who assume human rights’ source is in some sort of singular foundation. This is a shared misconception. Human rights’ global resonance does not come from one foundation but rather flows out of human rights’ mutually dependent groundings in law, politics, institutions, and norms. A key element to the intersections among these groundings is the impact of transnational conversations in which local actors have had a substantial stake and which have contributed to human rights’ continuing rearticulations. The vitality of the intersections between human rights and bottom-up social movements is what gives the lie both to overly top-down conceptualizations of human rights as well as to overly structuralist dismissals of human rights. Each de-emphasizes the essential role of human agency, the saliency of transnational normative networks, and the ways in which individual and collective action anchor human rights in contemporary politics. This will be illustrated by reference to movements for rights regarding sexual orientation and gender identity, even (or especially) in the controversial context of the Arab world. If this argument has merit, then we can move beyond the question of whether or not human rights in the abstract are inherently legitimate or illegitimate. Instead, the question becomes the degree to which specific human rights and specific human rights claims have flowed out of everyday local struggles. It is the answers to that question that will indicate the legitimacy and resonance (or lack thereof) of specific human rights.