Legal intensification and substitution

This book has shown that one of the most significant global transformations that we can now see occurring is the development of new forms of legal sociability, expressed above all through identities that coalesce around legal claims and processes. Courts, legislatures and treaties are becoming more significant than ever before as mediators of human belonging, at levels both within and beyond the nation-state. This change goes largely unnoticed because the identity-awakening that accompanies legal process has to do with the discovery of an inner essence, something that is believed to have always been there but has only been waiting for the right conditions to be discovered. And the emergence of something that has always existed might well make for an epiphany and a new confidence in living, but it does not constitute a revolution noticeable by those on the lookout for such things. Or perhaps the revolution is quiet because of the scale of the entities in which it is occurring: marginalized peoples and interest groups, sometimes brought together in common cause, bringing about change through slow accretions, not the possessors of power from which a sudden shift of behavior produces cataclysms or reverberations that find their way into history.

Rights and rights-oriented institutions are more than ever before being used to underwrite assertions of identity and belonging. The United Nations, with its global recognition and high prestige, has the capacity to bring to life social categories it has itself invented or fundamentally transformed. Social entities can be brought into being through the long-term magical properties of words, expressed through the incantations of public advocacy and lobbying.