The preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes a peculiar hierarchy between rebellion and human rights. The preamble affirms that “whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”Footnote ¹ According to the declaration, rebellion against oppression and tyranny is an act that individuals can only be compelled to pursue, and only once other choices are exhausted. Rebellion descends upon the oppressed “man” from without and he cannot refuse it. It is a force that takes over desperate men. Human rights, in turn, police against rebellion by prevailing in the law. They are the preferred weapon against two extremes: oppression and rebellion. And if rebellion is the space of compelled political action, human rights is the space of uncompelled, free, and authentic action against oppression and tyranny.

This preamble passage conveys two distinct characteristics of human rights. First, it conveys the political practices, including rebellion, that the project of human rights undoes in its unfolding in the world.Footnote ² That is to say, human rights do not only protect; they also overturn other political horizons of action. Second, the passage conveys the kind of action that the declaration deems properly human. In the following reflections, I examine these two characteristics by turning to the international stage on which declarations are conceived and from which campaigns are waged, and to the human who stands as the subject of human rights. If the project of human rights claims to produce a particular human by advancing from the land of the international, what human actions does it destroy as it proceeds?

In her “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt famously identifies a number of characteristics that contributed to the ineffectiveness of human rights. She argues that “man” of the 20th century seeks his understanding of his essence no longer in history or nature, but in “humanity,” which had ceased to function as a “regulative idea” in the Kantian sense and become “an inescapable fact.” As she puts it, “‘humanity’ has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history,” whereby “the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself.” This protection of the human by humanity, however, is not possible, according to Arendt, even if this unit, humanity, encompasses mankind itself. For it is conceivable, she writes, “that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.”Footnote ³ In other words, the category of humanity, as inclusive and universal as it may be, could unleash destruction on its own members; it could generate its own internal others. Significantly, she adds, in a world that finds “nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” human rights can be enforced only as national rights. That is to say, only the sovereign state can effectively guarantee human rights. International declarations of human rights fail precisely because they do not account for the way international law operates, “in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states.”Footnote ⁴ Arendt, in short, declares ineffective both the measure of humanity and the presumed existence of an international that transcends the sovereign state.

In a world where states bombard entire populations in the name of a humanity that opposes terror, while simultaneously denying those fleeing bombardment a place of refuge, Arendt's insights are still relevant, in particular to the contemporary Middle East. But what Arendt does not consider are the productive powers of this humanity as it has been claimed by the stage of the international governing the non-Western world. This stage, I suggest, complements sovereign states, and is not merely subsumed by them. Indeed, sovereign states remain the effective authors of international law. As the 19th-century American jurist Henry Wheaton put it, “the peculiar subjects of international law are Nations and those political societies of men called States.”Footnote ⁵ This wisdom has changed very little despite the passing of time and the entry of nonstate actors, such as national liberation movements, onto the field of international law. As a matter of law, nonstate actors do not wield the same power as states; their will is not equally regarded.

Yet the rise of the international stage cannot be understood only in terms of the wills of sovereign states. The carving out of an international sphere and the proliferation of international governing institutions introduced a new force in the world. Between 1815 and 1914, nearly every kind of social activity and every sphere of human thought in Europe responded to the force of internationalism, introducing an array of international associations and conferences.Footnote ⁶ The 20th century saw further intensification of the international in the juridico-political field. The creation of the League of Nations during the interwar period, accompanied by the Mandate system, introduced a new international actor. As Anthony Anghie argues, this new international actor provided “international law with a range of ambitions and techniques for the management of international relations.” Significantly, according to Anghie and contra Arendt, international institutions were not the effect of sovereignty but were given the task of creating sovereignty out of what these institutions regarded as the backward people and territories brought under the Mandate regime.Footnote ⁷ Anghie, in other words, reveals the power operations of the international stage and its institutions in the colonial and postcolonial governance of the non-Western world (which explains why most field offices of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights are outside Western Europe and North America).Footnote ⁸ These international institutions might not have transcended the wills of sovereign states, or more accurately the states deemed sovereign and therefore able to have wills, but they constituted a complimentary force.

This international force exerts power in additional ways. A modern term par excellence, “the international” first entered the English language toward the late 18th century via the legal field, and later migrated to other fields of knowledge and action, notably Marxist theory and socialist practice in the 19th century.Footnote ⁹ Coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1780, it expressed the branch of law that until then went under the sign of the law of nations.Footnote ¹⁰ Bentham signified as international the sphere of interstate relations whose rules he proposed to regulate and codify through the procedures of positivist jurisprudence, displacing in the process natural law's grounds of authority in universal reason. Much can be said about the shift from the law of nations to international law, from natural law to positive law, but I want to focus on two concrete consequences. First, in its juridical itinerary the international became a new signifier of the world, limiting its meaning to the relationship between states (consider, for example, how the terms “world exhibit” and “international exhibit” were used interchangeably in the second half of the 19th century to signify similar exhibits in which only states were represented). Second, when Bentham first coined it, the term “international” had no temporal dimension. History, tradition, and the movement of time were not central to the meaning of the international. Bentham meant it only as a signifier of interstate relations that enabled jurists to adequately distinguish it from domestic law. In his account, the international was temporally flat and carried no normative associations. Over time, and as the scope of the international, in its juridical itinerary, expanded to include other states as part of the international “family of nations,” the international began to signify a progressive overcoming of the past: a Eurocentric world, a less expansive international society, and a narrow recognition of the will of only sovereign states.Footnote ¹¹ Once the international successfully broke away from the past into its own present, the future became the further perfection of the present. In other words, the international and its expansion was being charted along the lines of modernist and progressive linear temporality.

That the international, ever expanding and promising to further perfect itself, proceeds in a progressive temporality from the grounds of the present helps to explain the inferiority of rebellious action in the declaration. Human action, to be in line with this progressive temporality, must be—like the international—both self-assured and assured about its future as extending from the present. It is action that thinks big—about the world as a whole. It is therefore distinct from rebellious action, which interrupts time and looks for singular possibilities in its ruins in the midst of darkness and destitution. International human action is assured in itself, its progressive promise, and the world it can further perfect from the grounds of the present. Rebellious action, by contrast, is unclear about its future, and yet attached to time and its risks. Of course, progressive temporality characterizes modern revolutions as well. But revolutionary temporality is nevertheless distinct from the linear temporality of the international, as it entails a radical break from the present, introducing perils, liabilities, and unforeseen possibilities. To use David Scott's formulation, revolutionary action is “tragic,” by which he means, drawing on both Arendt and Raymond Williams, fragile, contingent, entailing collision in a field of power, unpredictable, and exposed to the risk of political affairs. That is why tragedy, according to Scott, “might be the price of freedom.”Footnote ¹²

In addition to the progressive temporality of the international, the fixity of the human at the core of international human rights declarations also contributes to the prioritization of a particular kind of human action: redemptive, confident, and grandiose. This fixity is first evident in the preamble of the declaration, which states that “a common understanding of [human] rights and freedom is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge.”Footnote ¹³ The main body of the declaration lists these rights and freedoms, effectively constituting them as common. To be a human subject of human rights, therefore, is to become acquainted with these rights and freedoms, to gain a “common understanding” of them, and to be disciplined into international humanity. At issue, then, is the fixing of a particular meaning of the human subject of human rights by numerating that subject's rights and freedoms. The necessity of defining the human stems in part from the redemptive, progressive temporality of human rights, which is also common to the international. Human rights promise to animate more humans in the world by delivering them from their dehumanizing pasts.Footnote ¹⁴ But this international production of humans, a power operation of human rights, is only possible when one knows who or what is the human, when one lists its qualities and desires in the form of freedoms and rights. And while this is arguably understandable given the imperative to act against oppression and tyranny, it is by no means obvious why one has to decide on a common understanding of the human in order to act against injustice. After all, there were and are humans who inhabit this world, work through its catastrophes, unfairness, and destructiveness, without the project of human rights or a definition of what it means to be human. I am referring not to a world in which human rights are declared but not realized, but rather to a world without a singular definition of the human articulated in the land of the international, accompanied by the governing mechanisms of the law, and deployed to the world as a whole with the promise of animating more such humans—a world in which what it means to be human does not need to be resolved in order to act ethically and politically.

Since the 17th century, with jurist Hugo Grotius, the surface of the sea has become an object of the law of nations/international law and the means of its expansion.Footnote ¹⁵ The law expanded from the land to the surfaces of seas, gradually reaching their depths. Refugees that flee from one land to another travel on the surfaces of international seas, and many meet their deaths in the depths of those seas. But they persist in their movement. They are like the hills people of Southeast Asia who lived in nonstate spaces and about whom James Scott writes “they have a radical bias for hope,” insisting on reading the world in their favor. He also adds that “these misreadings of the world were occasionally so widespread and massive that they touched off rebellions that in fact changed the odds.”Footnote ¹⁶ In fleeing and seeking refuge, refugees do not attempt to resolve the question of their human status; European governments are more preoccupied with this matter. Rather, they chart new routes for inhabiting a new part of the world, as they follow ancient routes of migration and movement. These are the actions—not only rebellious actions—that human rights declarations cannot capture. But if we were to tentatively articulate the refugees’ actions as rights, we would need to include the right to defy borders, to risk one's life, to leave one's homeland, to fight, to flee, to settle in another land, to smuggle, to begin anew, to disrupt the international fabric, and the list goes on.