Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power

Rights are used as weapons by political forces to batter despised communities, demolish existing institutions, and smash opposing ideas. Clifford Bob looks at how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to cover ulterior motives, crowbars to break rival coalitions, blockades to suppress subordinate groups, spears to puncture discrete policies, and dynamite to explode whole societies. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements, the American civil rights movement, nationalist, populist, and religious movements in today's Europe, and internationalized conflicts related to Palestinian self-determination, animal rights, gay rights, and transgender rights.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 280 pages
\n Publication date: 16 April 2019
\n Publisher: Princeton University Press
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Rights are often perceived as protective principles, embodying humanity's highest aspirations to safeguard the vulnerable and uplift the oppressed. However, since the Enlightenment, political actors have also wielded rights as aggressive weapons, targeting marginalized communities, dismantling existing institutions, and crushing opposing ideas. Rights as Weapons delves into the overlooked ways in which the powerful employ rights as weapons against the weak, examining a diverse range of historical and contemporary conflicts across the globe.

Clifford Bob explores how political forces utilize rights as rallying cries, naturalizing novel claims as inherent in humanity, absolutizing them as trumps over rival interests or community concerns, universalizing them as transcultural and transhistorical, and depoliticizing them as concepts beyond debate. He demonstrates how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to conceal ulterior motives, as crowbars to break rival coalitions, as blockades to suppress subordinate groups, as spears to puncture discrete policies, and as dynamite to explode entire societies. Moreover, he illustrates how the targets of rights campaigns repel such assaults, employing their own rights-like weapons: denying the abuses they are accused of, constructing rival rights to protect themselves, portraying themselves as victims rather than violators, and repudiating authoritative decisions against them.

This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements, the American civil rights movement, nationalist, populist, and religious movements in contemporary Europe, and internationalized conflicts. By examining these cases, Rights as Weapons sheds light on the complex dynamics between rights, power, and political conflict, offering valuable insights into the ways in which rights can be both a tool of empowerment and a weapon of repression.

\n Weight: 590g\n
Dimension: 166 x 243 x 30 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780691166049\n \n