Human rights as a space of politicization

Human rights are presented as a space of politicization: neither timeless guarantees standing outside political struggle nor empty fictions reducible to the historical practices that produce citizenship. Their force appears when people excluded from a community assert a universal claim from that exclusion. The paradox is decisive: rights become political not by resolving the gap between universal humanity and particular membership, but by making that gap a site of contest and action.

The antinomy of humanity and citizenship

The argument begins with a problem in the relation between the rights of human beings as such and the specific rights of citizens. Balibar, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s account of refugees, emphasizes the failure of human rights when people lose the particular ties and standing through which rights can be claimed. A person stripped of citizenship and other social relations may seem to embody humanity in its most general form, yet that abstraction can coincide with the loss of effective recognition and protection. The universal bearer of rights can thus become the person least able to exercise them.

This difficulty cannot be resolved by choosing one side of the opposition. Treating Human Rights as natural guarantees outside history makes them an essentialist beyond political struggle; treating them only as the product of historical processes risks reducing them to a fetish of existing citizenship arrangements. Either move obscures how rights can expose exclusions within a political order. The task is to understand the gap between universal claims and particular membership without abolishing either term.

Rights as a political opening

Jacques Rancière’s account locates the political force of Human Rights in that gap. Their universality does not stand apart from the community as a higher, prepolitical standard; nor does it simply mirror the rights already secured by citizens. Rather, the gap separates the community from itself. It opens a position from which those who do not fit the established social order can challenge the order’s account of who belongs and who may speak for the whole.

A political agent can use this position to assert a claim to universality precisely from a particular identity that the existing arrangement treats as insufficient or out of place. Rancière describes this as the position of the part with no part: someone without a recognized place in the social structure speaks as an agent of the community as a whole. Human rights, on this reading, name not only protections to be administered but a right to politicize the terms of membership and universality. Their value lies in enabling a challenge to the community’s presumed completeness.

This also explains why rights cannot be detached from political action. If citizenship is treated as the sole ground of rights, politics contracts into the negotiation of already recognized interests. The universal claim interrupts that settlement: it allows an excluded group to show that the community’s existing account of itself does not include everyone it claims to represent. The resulting contest is not an appeal to a separate realm beyond politics but an intervention into how the political community is constituted.

The rightless and humanitarian substitution

The argument changes register when rights are considered from the position of people excluded from political membership and reduced to bare life. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Homo sacer names a condition in which a person remains biologically alive but is deprived of an effective political and legal standing. In that condition, rights may appear useless because those to whom they nominally belong cannot enact them.

Rancière’s reversal is that apparent uselessness does not make the rights void. When the excluded cannot exercise rights themselves, someone else may take up their claim in their place. Human rights then become the rights of people denied rights, and the right to humanitarian intervention can be presented as an attempt to act on their behalf. But this substitution is politically ambivalent: the rights are returned to those who claim authority to enforce them, potentially replacing the agency of the people whose rights are invoked.

The example of the United States’ overthrow of Saddam Hussein makes the risk concrete. The intervention was justified partly by reference to the suffering of the Iraqi people, but it also advanced a political and economic vision centered on liberal democracy, private property, and incorporation into the global market. A politics framed as the impartial prevention of suffering can therefore limit the possibility of a collective project of social transformation. The question is not only whether intervention names a real harm, but what political arrangement it makes possible and whose agency it displaces.

Law, power, and the stakes of intervention

The book’s wider account of political power sharpens this caution. Political authority is not separated cleanly from violence: even relationships presented as nonpolitical can embody prior political decisions and structures of subordination. Humanitarian claims therefore cannot be assessed as though intervention occurred in a neutral space, outside power. The language of universal protection may conceal the political choices through which an intervention identifies its beneficiaries, defines a crisis, and determines what form of change is permitted.

The discussion of prisoners held at Guantánamo offers a related illustration of exclusion from legal standing. Their description as people who had been missed by bombing treats survival as if it did not restore a recognized right to live under law. They occupy a condition likened to being legally dead while biologically alive, while the authorities exercising power over them act in a space that remains within the law but is not effectively constrained by it. This example shows why universal rights require attention to the institutions and exceptions that determine whether a person can claim them.

The resulting account preserves the political promise of Human Rights without treating them as a complete remedy. They matter when people excluded from the recognized community use them to contest that exclusion and claim a place in shaping the common world. They are weakened when reduced to abstract guarantees, confined to the rights of already recognized citizens, or invoked to authorize a substitute politics that prevents those affected from formulating their own collective future.