The white house has become Trump’s house

Last week the Republican Party held its national convention to nominate Donald Trump as their candidate for the 2020 presidential election. Bonnie Honig writes that the convention gave us another look at what power can look like if unchecked and unbalanced

Introduction

IN The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat—Steven Lukes' fictionalized round-up of contemporary political theory—the hapless professor has been kidnapped by the resistance movement and sent off to search for grounds for optimism. In Utilitaria, he is asked to give a lecture on “Breaking Free from the Past;” in Communitaria, on “Why the Enlightenment Project Had to Fail.” Neither topic is much to his taste, but it is only when he reaches Libertaria (not, as one of its gloomy inhabitants tells him, a good place to be unlucky, unemployed, or employed by the state) that he is made to recognize the limited purchase of his academic expertise. At the end of the book, the professor still has not found the mythical land of Egalitaria. But he has derived one important lesson from his adventures: in the pursuit of any one ideal, it is disastrous to lose sight of all the others

Rereading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: plurality and contestation, not consensus

In this paper I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterize the development of the UN human rights regime. The central argument is that within the founding text of the contemporary human rights movement there is an ambiguous account of rights, which exceeds easy categorization of international rights as universal moral principles or merely an ideological imposition by liberal powers. Acknowledging this ambiguous history, I argue, opens the way to an understanding of human rights as an ongoing politics, a contestation over the terms of legitimate political authority and the meaning of “humanity” as a political identity

(En)gendering the political: Citizenship from marginal spaces

This introduction sets out the central concerns of this special issue, the relationship between marginality and the political. In doing so it makes the argument that the process of marginalisation, the sites and experiences of ‘marginality’ provide a different lens through which to understand citizenship. Viewing the political as the struggle over belonging it considers how recent studies of citizenship have understood political agency. It argues that marginality can help us understand multiple scales, struggles and solidarities both within and beyond citizenship. Whilst there is a radical potential in much of the existing literature in citizenship studies it is also important to consider political subjectivities and acts which are not subsumed by right claims. Exploring marginality in this way means understanding how subjects are disenfranchised by regimes of citizenship and at the same how time this also (en)genders new political possibilities which are not always orientated towards 'inclusion'. The introduction then sets out how each article contributes to this project