Human Rights and the challenge of Cosmopolis
The paper outlines the diverse willed and unwilled means by which the attenuated nature of the discourse of international human rights has been maintained so that it still cannot be used to hold governments to account for their failures to respect the economic and social rights of their citizens. These means range from geopolitical manoevres, through changed modes of enunciation (that is, the displacement of Political Theory by Law as the source of human rights language), to the absence of appropriate governmentalist techniques for measuring economic and social compliance. It then both questions and counters the doctrine of 'justiciability' (ie. the claim that only civil and political rights are legally enforceable) that is the discursive node of the structure of impotence by showing that many highly effective local rights regimes violate this doctrine. It concludes by proposing a strategy for the development of a more truly cosmopolitan international discourse of human rights. At the heart of this strategy is a socio-legal methodology for translating different rights discourses into one another's terms and monitoring both the accuracy of the translations and their enforcement.