Taking
a critical attitude of dissatisfaction towards rights, the central
premise of this book is that rights are technologies of governmentality.
They are a regulating discourse that is itself managed through
governing tactics and techniques - hence governing (through) rights.
Part I examines the 'problem of government' (through) rights. The
opening chapter describes governmentality as a methodology that is then
used to interrogate the relationship between rights and governance in
three contexts: the international, regional and local. How rights
regulate certain identities and conceptions of what is good governance
is examined through the case study of non-state actors, specifically the
NGO, in the international setting; through a case study of rights
agencies, and the role of experts, indicators and the rights-based
approach in the European Union or regional setting; and, in terms of the
local, the challenge that the blossoming language of responsibility and
community poses to rights in the name of less government (Big Society)
is problematised. In Part II, on resisting government (through) rights,
the book also asks what counter-conducts are possible using rights
language (questioning rioting as resistance), and whether
counter-conduct can be read as an ethos of the political, rights-bearing
subject and as a new ethical right. Thus, the book bridges a divide
between critical theory (ie Foucauldian understandings of power as
governmentality) and human rights law.
