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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: stefan.borg@ekohist.su.se
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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 

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References

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24 Zivi, Making Rights Claims.

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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.

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