| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Human rights originated as a political claim made by movements contesting state power. Recently, they have become the property of states: a juridical right that is for the state to give. I track this transformation through changes in responses to humanitarian crises. Humanitarian crises are seen to issue from two sorts of states-rogue states and failed states-both of whom violate, by commission or omission, the rights of their subjects. Given the failure of these states to protect the rights of their citizens, policymakers and rights advocates call for external intervention, or state-building. In understandings of state-building, human rights are for the state; or more correctly the state-being-built; to give, reversing the development of human rights from a set of political movements that protested unjust state power.
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