The most we can hope for...: Human rights and the politics of fatalism

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 103, Issue 2-3, 2004, Pages 451-463

  Brown, Wendy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33645130346     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-451     Document Type: Review

References (11)

1. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Subsequent citations are given in the text
2. Talal Asad makes this point for an altogether different kind of inquiry into human rights: "Human rights depend . . . on national rights. States are essential to the protection they offer. This means that states can and do use human rights discourse against their citizens - as colonial empires used it against their subjects - to realize their civilizing project" ("What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry," Theory and Event, online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory-and-event/v004/4.4asad.html. Quotation from paragraph 113)
3. Michael Ignatieff, "Human Rights," in Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia, ed. Carla Hesse and Robert Post (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 323
4. See, for example, Ignatieff's many appearances in the New York Times in the past two years, including "Threats and Responses: Liberals for War; Some of the Intellectual Left's Longtime Doves Taking on Role of Hawks," by Kate Zernike, March 14, 2003, A16
5. "The Way We Live Now, 3-23-03; I Am Iraq", March 23, 3002, sect. 6: 13
6. "The American Empire: The Burden," January 5, 2003, sect. 6: 22
7. and most recently, "Why Are We in Iraq (And Liberia and Afghanistan?)," September 21, 2003, sect. 6: 38
8. Michael Ignatieff, "Nationalism and Toleration," in The Politics of Toleration in Moderm Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 85
9. This point has been developed at length by many. Most of the essays in left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), make a contribution to this argument
10. My own other efforts to think through the problem can be found in my essay in that volume ("Suffering Rights as Paradoxes") as well as chapter 5 of States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
11. and "Revaluing Critique: A Response to Kenneth Baynes," Political Theory 28.4 (August 2000): 469-79