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McNeilly (2015) Critique - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Wendy Brown: rights operate to produce and regulate subjects and in their very promist to protect individuals and to facilitate sovereign choices for them, rights discourse produces a certain kind of subject in need of a certain kind of protection
      - There is no universal subject of human rights, rather the universality of human rights is a site to debate the meaning of this subject and reveal, in a way that liberal conceptions of human rights currently cannot, the role of power in the creation of notions of the human
        
        The finally fixed human subject must also remain a ‘not yet’ and a site of contest
      - This assertion does not take away the protection contained in the assertion that all humans have rights
        
        instead, it seeks to enhance the position of those subjects who are often on the margins by highlighting the universality of human rights as a place able to contest the current power regimes shaping and restricting such subjects
  - - - The politics of human rights is in essence about making and remaking temporarily dominant ideas about what the content of international norms and treaty provisions mean in the varied contexts in which people are seeking to draw upon them
      - Commentators, including those from a liberal background, have acknowledged the culturally contingent nature of the content of human rights
        
        However, the new approach to universality that McNeilly is asserting differs in that it points not to some element of relativity within rights, but to the ongoing nature of the universalisation process
      - The cultural nature of any universal does not point towards a hybrid form of relative universality but to the ‘not yet’ which defines the universal and urges us towards an understanding of universality as a process of universalisation within the context of a critical relation to power
  - - - Rather than a utopian vision similar to that underpinning liberal human rights, however, this view promoted by foregrounding the process of universalisation as an ongoing struggle highlighting that human rights are in many ways a self-critical or self-refuting ideal
      - We must always strive towards the achievement of a world where human rights are fully realized but yet always fall short of such achievement
      - Universal human rights have not failed because human rights violations still exist, nor because human suffering still proliferates in various locations across the globe
        
        If the point of human rights is to encourage engagement in an ongoing process of universalisation, continual making and re-making of human rights in a way that can never achieve a perfect realisation, we see that it is engagement in this process in itself which holds possibilities for those on the margins, rather than the (impossible) output of a final realisation or fully complete concept of universal human rights
        
        Human rights can never be fully ‘achieved’ in the sense of an answer to the diverse political, social, and economic problems facing world populations
        
        they are not possessions which can straightforwardly emancipate of juridically guarantee liberty, security and equality in the liberal sense