Migration and Human Rights – Exposing the Universality of Human Rights as a False Premise

In the twenty-first century, the ability to migrate to some country other than one’s own, and to enjoy in that country legal status akin to that of a citizen, is a global marker of privilege. Such freedom is accorded only to a small class of people. For Bauman (1998, 9), international mobility is now the world’s ‘most powerful and most coveted stratifying factor’ (as cited in Castles 2005, 217)

Rituals of World Politics: On (Visual) Practices Disordering Things

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable and boring routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected, disruptive and disordered elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. The collective discussion recovers the disruptive work of a range of rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war. We do so through engaging a series of ‘world pictures' (Mitchell 2007). We show the worlding enacted in rituals such as colonial treaty-making, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts,algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. It emphasises the role of rituals in generating dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than in imposing a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals

The forgotten children report

The report of the Australian Human Rights Commission's (AHRC) most recent national inquiry into the impact of immigration detention on children, The Forgotten Children, was publicly released in February this year and immediately dismissed by the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, as 'a political stitch-up'. The PM claimed that the timing of the inquiry was evidence of its politically partisan nature. The inquiry was launched six months after his government took power, when the number of children in detention had fallen from the record high reached under Labor in July 2013. AHRC President, Professor Gillian Triggs, claimed that because a federal election was imminent, she decided to wait on its outcome and possible changes to Australia's asylum seeker policies before launching an inquiry. The Coalition government took power in October 2013. The number of children in detention then decreased significantly, but Triggs claimed that over the next six months 'children were being held for significant periods and were not being released. While the [asylum seeker] boats were stopping, the children were being detained for lengthening periods of time. When the inquiry was announced ... children had been held on average for seven months and 1,006 remained in closed indefinite detention

Irregular Immigrants in Australia and the United States - Rights, Realities, and Political Mobilization

This article considers the gap between the universal promise of human rights and the reality of the rights enjoyed by irregular immigrants in liberal democracies such as Australia and the United States. Against the idea that stronger international rights enforcement mechanisms will automatically improve the position of irregular immigrants, it argues that international law currently provides a warrant for the way in which countries like Australia and the United States treat irregular immigrants. After developing this argument, the article explores how irregular immigrants might employ the language of rights more effectively in their political mobilization

Human rights, the right to have rights, and life beyond the pale of the law

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt is famously scathing of the societies established between World Wars I and II to advocate on behalf of refugees and advance the protection of human rights. In Arendt�s view, �all societies formed for the protection of the Rights of Man � showed an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals�. The human rights they invoked were nothing more than �the standard slogan of the protectors of the underprivileged, a kind of additional law, a right of exception necessary for those who had nothing better to fall back upon� (1968b, 293). In this article, I compare the position of exiles now living in or seeking to gain entry to Western states to that of Arendt�s interwar refugees. I argue that for the modern-day exile, human rights continue to function inadequately as �a kind of additional law � for those who [have] nothing better to fall back upon�. I conclude that contemporary exiles have much in common with Arendt�s interwar refugees, and pose similar dilemmas insofar as the invocation of universal human rights is concerned

Mobilising for food sovereignty: the pitfalls of international human rights strategies and an exploration of alternatives

This article considers the role played by the language of human rights in a global campaign for food sovereignty. Led initially by the international peasants’ movement, Vía Campesina, the campaign opposes the globalisation of agricultural markets and neoliberal interventions in food production. Alongside other strategies, the campaign makes creative use of human rights and also seeks their institutionalisation in a UN Declaration on the rights of peasants. An examination of how the campaign employs human rights reveals a more complicated process than that suggested by the theoretical polarisation of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ accounts of rights development in the sociology of human rights. It demonstrates both wariness of state power and attempts to harness the power of the state against international forces. It also shows that a desire for legal reform co-exists with the struggle for more radical social and political transformations.The research for this article was supported by the Australian Research Council funded Laureate Fellowship project ‘Strengthening the International Human Rights System: Rights, Regulation and Ritualism’ (project number FL 100100176)

Human rights rituals: Masking neoliberalism and inequality, and marginalizing alternative world views

The role played by ritual in the field of human rights has not been widely remarked or analysed. Here I argue that the triumph of human rights as the predominant language for making social justice claims in the international sphere is partly attributable to the power of certain linguistic and embodied rituals. I suggest that these rituals veil the material factors at stake when human rights are invoked internationally, obscuring the relationship between neoliberalism, material inequality, and human rights. I compare the vision of justice propounded through the rituals of human rights with that proposed by the peasants’ movement, Vía Campesina. Vía Campesina’s vision is grounded in material realities and confronts neoliberal policies head on. I consider how it unsettles the rituals of human rights, and whether it can be preserved in the form of a UN Declaration on the rights of peasants