The Human Rights State : : Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations / / Benjamin Gregg.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2016
• VerfasserIn: Gregg, Benjamin,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)

The nation state operates on a logic of exclusion: no state can offer citizenship and legal rights to all comers. From the logic of exclusion a state derives its sovereign power. Yet this exclusivity undermines the project of advancing human rights globally. That project operates on a logic of inclusion: all people, regardless of citizenship status or territorial location, would everywhere be recognized as bearers of human rights. In practice, human rights are afforded, if at all, then only to citizens of those few states that sometimes regard human rights as moral necessities of domestic commitments-or for states that find that stance politically expedient for the moment.This discouraging reality in the first decades of the twenty-first century prompts the question: What political arrangement might better conduce the local embrace and enduring practice of human rights? In The Human Rights State, Benjamin Gregg challenges the conviction that the nation state can only have a zero-sum relationship with human rights: national sovereignty is possible or human rights are possible, but not both, not in the same place, at the same time. He argues that the human rights project would be more effective if established and enforced at local levels as locally valid norms, and from there encouraged to expand outward toward overlaps with other locally established and enforced conceptions of human rights grown in their own local soils.Proposing a metaphorical human rights state that operates within or alongside a nation state, Gregg describes networks of activists that encourage local political and legal systems to generate domestic obligations to enforce human rights. Geographic boundaries and national sovereignties would remain intact but diminished to the extent necessary to extend human rights to all persons, without reservation, across national borders, by rendering human rights an integral aspect of the nation state's constitution.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. A Project for the Free Embrace of Human Rights -- Part I. The Human Rights State: Politics by Metaphor -- Chapter 1. Human Rights as Metaphor -- Chapter 2. Human Rights in a Backpack -- Chapter 3. The Body as Human Rights Boundary -- Part II. The Human Rights State Through Persuasion, Not Coercion -- Chapter 4. Teaching Human Rights as a Cognitive Style -- Chapter 5. Developing Human Rights Commitment in Post-Authoritarian Societies -- Chapter 6. Digital Technology as Resource for the Human Rights Project -- Part III. Defense of the Human Rights State in the Face of Challenges -- Chapter 7. Human Rights Patriotism -- Chapter 8. A Human Right Not to Democracy but to the Rule of Law -- Chapter 9. Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention -- Coda: A Community of Nation States Practicing Domestic Cosmopolitanism -- Notes -- References -- Index -- Acknowledgments