APSA invites proposals for the 2011 Annual Meeting. Proposal submissions will be accepted online until December 15, 2010.
The Politics of Rights
Program Co-chairs:
Frances Hagopian, University of Notre Dame;
Bonnie Honig, Northwestern University.
The 2011 APSA Annual Meeting Program Chairs offer the following theme:
Jeremy Bentham called them “nonsense upon stilts” but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the discourse of rights has never been more pronounced or contested. Around the globe, people mobilize–and in courts, lawyers argue–on behalf of human, civil, political, ethnic minority, aboriginal, women’s, gay, alien, children’s, transgender, corporate, (sub)national, environmental, and animal rights. Some of these are established rights that advocates seek to expand for those previously excluded from their ambit. Others are new rights. At the same time, the abrogation of such rights as habeas corpus and the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” by governments in established as well as new democracies in the decade since September 11 have engendered new alliances of progressives and rule of law liberals to defend the restoration and refurbishment of rights. Movements to expand, create, defend, and entrench rights into national and international law generate counter-claims, put rights under pressure and, some argue, problematically privilege courts, legal and centralized national institutions over other more democratic or popular mechanisms of policy formation and self-governance. We propose that the discipline bring its empirical and normative lenses to reflect on the domestic, comparative, and international dimensions of the complex politics of rights….
View Full Theme Statement (*.pdf)
