Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T03:49:55.244Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The politics of universal rights claiming: Secular and sacred rights claiming in post-revolutionary Tunisia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2017

Stefan Borg
Stefan Borg*
Affiliation:
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stockholm University
*
*Correspondence to: Stefan Borg, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stockholm University, Department of Economic History, 106 91 Stockholm. Author’s email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of political practice. The article develops and defends a post-foundationalist understanding of rights discourse as a way of making a claim to social change through appealing to a universal and illustrates such an understanding with the contestation over women’s rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia. To develop this argument, the article draws on Jacques Rancière’s notion of political subjectification and Ernesto Laclau’s engagement with the relation between the universal and the particular. To examine the relevance of such conceptualisation, the article turns to the struggle over women’s rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia, where secular and sacred understandings of the universal have been invoked frequently through rights discourse. In this context it is shown that claims to the universal give rhetorical force to rights discourse, and instead of depoliticising social relations, which rights discourse is often charged with, such claims are vital for political efficacy. However, whereas Laclau’s position helps us to understand rights as a language of resistance, a more robust defence of the universal is needed to defend rights in terms of emancipatory political change. To pursue this argument, the article turns to Rancière’s defence of axiomatic equality.

Keywords

RightsUniversalismWomen’s Rights ClaimingLaclauRancièrePost-revolutionary Tunisia
Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 453 - 474
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See, for example, Charvet, John and Kaczynska-Nay, Elisa, The Liberal Project and Human Rights: The Theory and Practice of a New World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, for example, Mutua, Makau, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chabal, Patrick, End of Conceit: Western Rationality After Postcolonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Chase, Anthony, ‘Legitimising human rights: Beyond mythical foundations and into everyday resonances’, Journal of Human Rights, 11:4 (2012), pp. 505–525 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chase, Anthony, ‘Human rights and the challenge of foundations’, Human Rights Quarterly, 25:2 (2013), pp. 498–509 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Estévez, Ariadna, ‘A Latin American sociopolitical conceptualization of human rights’, Journal of Human Rights, 7:3 (2008), pp. 245–261 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gündoğdu, Ayten, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoover, Joe, ‘Towards a politics for human rights: Ambiguous humanity and democratizing rights’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 39:9 (2013), pp. 935–961 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoover, Joe, ‘Rereading the universal declaration of human rights: Plurality and contestation, not consensus’, Journal of Human Rights, 12:2 (2014), pp. 217–241 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoover, Joe, Reconstructing Human Rights: A Pragmatist and Pluralist Inquiry into Global Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Odysseos, Louiza and Anna Selmeczi (eds), ‘The power of human rights/the human rights of power’, Third World Quarterly, 36:6 (Special Issue) (2015), pp. 1033–1267 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zivi, Karen, Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For an overview, see Marchart, Oliver, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I understand post-foundationalist thought concerned not so much with a rejection, but rather ‘a constant interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundations – such as totality, universality, essence, and ground’. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, p. 2.

5 Prozorov, Sergei, Ontology and World Politics: Void Universalism I (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 62 Google Scholar.

6 This part draws on interviews with national and international organisations working with human and women’s rights, and other observers, conducted in Tunis in November and December 2014, and in May and June 2015.

7 Falk, Richard, ‘The power of rights and the rights of power: What future for human rights?’, Ethics and Global Politics, 1–2 (2008), pp. 81–96 Google Scholar.

8 Rajagopal, Balakrishnan, ‘The international human rights movement today’, Maryland Journal of International Law, 24:1 (2009), p. 56 Google Scholar; Odysseos and Selmeczi, ‘The power of human rights/the human rights of power’.

9 Chandler, David, ‘Critiquing liberal cosmopolitanism? The limits of the biopolitical approach’, International Political Sociology, 3:1 (2009), pp. 53–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Rasch, William, ‘Human rights as geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the legal form of American supremacy’, Cultural Critique, 54 (2003), pp. 120–147 Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 139.

12 Odysseos, Louiza, ‘Human rights, liberal ontogenesis and freedom: producing a subject for neoliberalism?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 38:3 (2010), pp. 747–772 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Odysseos, , ‘Human rights, liberal ontogenesis and freedom’, pp. 770–771 Google Scholar.

14 Rajagopal, ‘The international human rights movement today’; Estévez, ‘A Latin American sociopolitical conceptualization of human rights’.

15 Zivi, Making Rights Claims, p. 5. Marxist authors have long argued that positing certain political demands, most notably individual property rights, as human rights entails removing them from democratic contestation, a historical practice tightly linked to the emergence of ‘possessive individualist’ ideology advancing the interests of the bourgeoisie. See Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar. For a critique drawing on historical materialism particularly targeting Marxian critiques of human rights, see Blakeley, Ruth, ‘Human rights, state wrongs, and social change: the theory and practice of emancipation’, Review of International Studies, 39:3 (2013), pp. 599–619 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Kennedy, David, ‘The international human rights movement: Part of the problem?’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 15:2 (2002), pp. 101–126 Google Scholar; Brown, Wendy, ‘“The most we can hope for …”: Human rights and the politics of fatalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:2/3 (2004), pp. 451–463 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

17 Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights; Hoover, ‘Rereading the universal declaration of human rights’; Hoover, Reconstructing Human Rights; Zivi, Making Rights Claims.

18 Hoover, ‘Towards a politics for human rights’, p. 953 Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., p. 955.

20 Hoover, Reconstructing Human Rights, p. 22.

21 Ibid., p. 29.

22 Hoover, Reconstructing Human Rights, p. 29, emphasis added.

23 See many of the contributions in Odysseos and Selmeczi, ‘The power of human rights/the human rights of power’.

24 Zivi, Making Rights Claims.

25 Ibid., p. 7.

26 Ibid., p. 121.

27 Ibid., p. 121.

28 Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 10 Google Scholar.

29 Chambers, Samuel, The Lessons of Rancière (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 65–87 Google Scholar.

30 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 29.

31 Rancière, Jacques, ‘Ten theses on politics’, Theory and Event, 5:3 (2001)Google Scholar, thesis 7.

32 May, Todd, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 11.

34 Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, p. 100.

35 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 35.

36 Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, p. 101.

37 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 37.

38 Ibid., p. 100.

39 Ibid., p. 31.

40 Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, pp. 28, 80; May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière, p. 64.

41 Myers, Ella, ‘Presupposing equality: the trouble with Rancière’s axiomatic approach’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 42:1 (2016), p. 46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Prozorov, Ontology and World Politics, p. 62.

43 Ibid., pp. 60–7.

44 Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière.

45 Rancière, Disagreement , p. 30.

46 Ibid., p. 56.

47 See, for example, Laclau, Ernesto, ‘Universalism, particularism and the question of identity’, in Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996a), pp. 20–35 Google Scholar; Laclau, Ernesto, ‘Subject of politics, politics of the subject’, in Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996b), pp. 47–65 Google Scholar; Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto, and Žižek, Slavoj, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000)Google Scholar.

48 Ernesto Laclau, ‘Preface’, in Emancipation(s), p. viii.

49 Butler, Laclau and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

50 Laclau, ‘Universalism, particularism and the question of identity’, p. 23 Google Scholar.

51 Ibid., p. 28.

52 Butler, Judith, ‘Restaging the universal: Hegemony and the limits of formalism’, in Butler, Laclau and Žižek (eds), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 32 Google Scholar.

53 Critchley, Simon and Marchart, Oliver, ‘Introduction’, in Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart (eds), Laclau. A Critical Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 7 Google Scholar.

54 Laclau, ‘Universalism, particularism and the question of identity’, p. 35 Google Scholar.

55 Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, p. 151.

56 For an elaboration, see Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, pp. 134–53.

57 Zerilli, Linda, ‘This universalism which is not one’, in Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart (eds) Laclau. A Critical Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 105 Google Scholar.

58 See, for example, Kraiem, Mustapha, La Revolution Kidnappée (Tunis: Fondation Farhat Hached, 2014), pp. 339–520 Google Scholar.

59 Perkins, Kenneth, ‘Playing the Islamic card: the use and abuse of religion in Tunisian politics’, in Nouri Gana (ed.), The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 58–80 Google Scholar.

60 Khalil, Andrea, ‘Tunisia’s women: Partners in revolution’, The Journal of North African Studies, 19:2 (2014), p. 193 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marks, Monica, ‘Women’s rights before and after the revolution’, in Nouri Gana (ed.), The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013a), pp. 224–251 Google Scholar.

61 Grami, Amel, ‘The debate on religion, law and gender in post-revolution Tunisia’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 40:4–5 (2014), pp. 391–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khalil, ‘Tunisia’s women’; Marks, ‘Women’s rights before and after the revolution’.

62 Wolf, Anne, ‘An Islamist “renaissance?” Religion and politics in post-revolutionary Tunisia’, The Journal of North African Studies, 18:4 (2013), p. 566 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Marzouki, Nadia, ‘From resistance to governance: the category of civility in the political theory of Tunisian Islamists’, in Nouri Gana (ed.), The Making of the Tunisian Revolution. Contexts, Architects, Prospects (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 207–223 Google Scholar.

64 Ravanello, Olivier, Au sujet de I’Islam. entretiens d’Olivier Ravanello avec Rached Ghannouchi (Paris: Plon, 2015), p. 136 Google Scholar.

65 Debuysere, Loes, ‘Tunisian women at the crossroads: Antagonism and agonism between secular and Islamist women’s rights movements in Tunisia’, Mediterranean Politics, 21:2 (2016), pp. 237–238 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Tunisian Constitution, preamble.

67 Charrad, Mounira M. and Zarrugh, Amina, ‘Equal or complementary? Women in the new Tunisian Constitution after the Arab Spring’, The Journal of North African Studies, 19:2 (2014), pp. 230–243 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monica Marks, ‘Convince, Coerce, or Compromise? Ennahda’s Approach to Tunisia’s Constitution’, Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper 10 (2014).

68 Marks, ‘Women’s rights before and after the revolution’, p. 236 Google Scholar.

69 Thomson Reuters Foundation, ‘Al Bawsala President Amira Yahyaoui Talks about Women’s Rights in Tunisia’ (4 June 2013), available at: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBgO4-7nmU0} accessed 6 June 2016.

70 Interview with Nissa Tounissiet, Islamic NGO.

71 Gray, Doris, ‘Tunisia after the pprisings: Islamist and secular quests of women’s rights’, Mediterranean Politics, 17:3 (2012), pp. 294–295 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Interview with Search for Common Ground Tunisia.

73 Al-Anani, Khalil, ‘Islamist parties post-Arab Spring’, Mediterranean Politics, 17:3 (2012), pp. 466–472 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Muhanna, Aitemad, ‘Islamist and secular women’s activism and discourses in post uprising Tunisia’, in Maha El Said, Lena Meari, and Nicola Pratt (eds), Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World (London: Zed Books, 2015), p. 218 Google Scholar.

75 Debuysere, ‘Tunisian women at the crossroads’, p. 229.

76 Marks, Monica, ‘Women in Tunisian politics: Two contrasting perspectives’, interviews by Monica Marks with Mehrezia Labidi and Maya Jeribi (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2013b), p. 5 Google Scholar.

77 Muhanna, ‘Islamist and secular women’s activism and discourses in post uprising Tunisia’, p. 220 Google Scholar.

78 Interview with Human Rights Watch, Tunis.

79 At this point, Rancière’s dichotomy between police order and politics needs to be problematised. For many of the secular women’s rights activists, neither pre- nor post-revolutionary Tunisia was perceived of as social orders conducive to women’s rights. Recognition of a subject is arguably less clear cut than Rancière’s categories of identification in a police order versus subjectification as politics suggests.

80 Marks, ‘Women in Tunisian politics’, p. 8, emphasis added.

81 Debuysere, ‘Tunisian women at the crossroads’, p. 238.

82 Ibid., p. 239.

83 See, for example, Al-Akhbar, ‘Tunisian Association Of Democratic Women on GOT [Government Of Tunisia] Interference, Danger of Islamists’, US Embassy in Tunis (22 February 2006), available at: {http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/484} accessed 15 May 2016.

84 Khalil, ‘Tunisia’s women’, p. 190 Google Scholar.

85 Marks, ‘Women in Tunisian politics’, p. 3, emphasis in original.

86 Prozorov, Ontology and World Politics, p. xvii.

87 Paipais, Vassilios, ‘The promise of ontology: Nihilism for a pluralist world’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45:1 (2016), pp. 64-71Google Scholar (p. 66).

88 Prozorov, , Ontology and World Politics, p. 32 Google Scholar.

89 Ibid., p. 45.

90 Prozorov, , Ontology and World Politics, p. 47 Google Scholar.

91 For Badiou’s defence of universalism, see, for example, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

92 Prozorov, Ontology and World Politics, p. 43.

93 Ibid., pp. 50, 147.

94 As Myers notes, Rancière relies primarily on the observation that ‘every act of human communication, even between those who stand in a relation of profound inequality with one another, is evidence of a fundamental (though denied) equality’. Myers, ‘Presupposing equality’, p. 50. As Rancière puts it, ‘[t]here is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must be the equal of the person who is ordering you.’ Rancière, Disagreement, p. 16.

95 Prozorov’s axiomatic defence of equality consists in arguing that ‘[s]ince the World as void by definition lacks any sort of hierarchical structure that could justify inequality or even make it conceivable, the elements of the pure multiplicity that appears in the mode of being-in-the-World are all a priori equal.’ Prozorov, Ontology and World Politics, p. 81 Google Scholar.

96 Ibid., p. 51.

97 Ibid., p. 61.

98 Ibid., p. 60. Prozorov, however, also derives the axioms of freedom and community in addition to equality.

99 Schaap, Andrew, ‘Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Rancière’s critique of Hannah Arendt’, European Journal of Political Theory, 10:1 (2011), pp. 22–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 34).

100 Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations: Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 516 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 511.