Since its adoption in 1948, the ‘universal’ in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been subject to much academic debate. For its defenders, it is precisely the universality of human rights that guarantees their legitimacy as the normative foundation for a global liberal order.Footnote 1 For its detractors, human rights have often been thought of as reflective of a particular Euro-Western historical experience of atomistic individualism, and not necessarily applicable to, nor inherently desirable for, localities outside their historical emergence.Footnote 2 In recent years, however, the theoretical debate on human rights has largely shifted from attempts to theorise the claimed universality of human rights in terms of a philosophical, religious, or even sociobiological foundation, to conceiving of rights discourse as a particular kind of political practice. Footnote 3 Such approaches tend to prioritise local demands over formal legal precepts of the global human rights regime. At the same time, they also steer clear of an uncritical culturalism, where rights discourses are a priori dismissed as a culturally coded ‘foreign’ imposition. In short, they focus on the political, instead of legal or philosophical, importance of rights. This article aims to further advance a political understanding of rights claiming, elaborated in dialogue with debates in contemporary post-foundationalist political theory.Footnote 4
To that effect, the article defends theoretically and illustrates empirically the fundamental importance of claims to universality in contemporary rights discourse, which, as I will argue below, is an issue of central importance in elaborating a political understanding of rights. The first question that I address is what claims to the universal as conveyed through rights discourse do in political struggles. The second question addressed is how the universal ought to be conceived in human rights claiming. Much is at stake here, since it is precisely the claimed universality of human rights that has attracted criticism, not only for being ‘particulars in disguise’, but also for being opposed to political contestation. Such a function of the universal has been criticised for its ostensibly depoliticising and de-democratising effects on social relations. In this article, I challenge this position and instead argue for the significance of the political potential that universal rights claiming hold.
Drawing in particular on philosopher Jacques Rancière’s notion of political subjectification, and political theorist Ernesto Laclau’s understanding of the universal, I will argue that rights discourse may be said to derive its political strength from an invocation of a universal, which in effect is a claim to that which goes beyond any historically rooted tradition, religion, or culture. Further, a second aim of this article is to engage recent scholarship that defends rights claiming (merely) as a practice of resistance. While I argue that Laclau’s conceptualisation of the universal is important for understanding the function of the universal in rights claiming, I will ultimately argue that his understanding of the universal is too weak to sustain a defence of rights claiming beyond resistance. Whereas Laclau’s position helps us to theorise rights as a language of resistance, I argue that a more robust defence of the universal is needed to defend rights in terms of emancipatory political change. Following Sergei Prozorov I will understand the somewhat imprecise notion of emancipatory politics in terms of political practice affirmative of human equality.Footnote 5
The article illustrates and further advances some of the implications of its theoretical argument by examining the contestation over rights claiming in post-revolutionary Tunisia in 2011–14.Footnote 6 During that period, Tunisia experienced fierce political contestation, and provides an intriguing case of contemporary uses of rights discourse beyond a secularised West. I examine one of the most contentious rights issues to emerge in the Tunisian case, namely that of women’s rights. This is a particularly interesting issue because it lends itself to an exploration of both secular and sacred claims to the universal. On the one hand, secular women’s rights groups have been engaged in rights claiming against what they perceive as Islamist attempts to constrain female agency in the public sphere. On the other hand, Islamic women have been engaged in rights claiming in the name of Islam. How may we understand the various and often conflicting claims to the universal that are made in the same historical and geographical context? And what do such claims tell us about rights claiming as a practice of resistance? The case, I argue, while illustrating the importance of the universal for rights claiming, will ultimately call for making a distinction between resistance on the one hand and emancipatory politics on the other.
The article is structured as follows. In the first section, I situate my contribution in relation to the recent debate on rights as a political practice. The second section advances a political understanding of rights claiming by challenging the argument that references to universals implicated in human rights claims impede political contestation. Instead, claims to the universal actually engender political subjectification and democratic politics. To appreciate this requires rethinking both human rights and the function of universality therein, the former from a Rancierian perspective and the latter through Laclau. The third section illustrates the theoretical argument by examining the different universals invoked by secular and Islamic women’s rights groups in post-revolutionary Tunisia. The penultimate section further deepens the argument of the article by arguing that Laclau’s understanding of the universal is insufficiently robust if one wants to defend rights claiming beyond a practice of resistance, an issue to which the Tunisian case points. The conclusion summarises the main argument.
Politicising rights
As Richard Falk has pointed out, human rights discourse in global politics is dual in that it may sometimes underwrite structures of domination on the one hand, but may also be invoked to resist such structures, domestic or global, on the other.Footnote 7 This dual nature of human rights as a language of both ‘power and resistance’ arguably lies at the core of the global human rights regime.Footnote 8 The hegemonic, order-maintaining, dimensions of human rights in global politics have been highlighted in Schmittian and Foucauldian critiques of liberalism.Footnote 9 Drawing out the Schmittian critique of liberal universalism for human rights, William Rasch has argued that human rights discourse should be understood as the most recent chapter in the West’s imperialist quest for global hegemony.Footnote 10 Part of Rasch’s assessment lies in a realist critique of human rights discourse as serving particular US and Western interests. Moreover, he contends that the ‘human’ in Western human rights discourse is a particular rendition of what it might mean to be human, and such a discourse therefore ‘means that the other is stripped of his otherness and made to conform to the universal ideal of what it means to be human’.Footnote 11 Louiza Odysseos has advanced a related critique of human rights.Footnote 12 Like Rasch, Odysseos’s target is liberalism, but for her understood with Foucault as a technology of government rather than an ideology. Odysseos is concerned with how the rights-bearing subject of liberalism, that is, homo juridicus, functions as a ‘partner subjectivity’ to neoliberalism’s homo oeconomicus. Far from producing a subject that challenges neoliberal governmentality by claiming certain rights against the market, human rights discourse, she suggests, is in fact complicit in producing a subject amenable to the self-governing consumerist desiring subject that neoliberalism requires.
Both Rasch and Odysseos are ultimately concerned with the complicity of rights discourse in attempts to eradicate agonism, and thereby difference, as well as the limitations on freedom that such a discourse may engender.Footnote 13 Certainly, their criticisms highlight the potentially depoliticising effects of human rights, in which a discourse ostensibly in the service of the weak becomes complicit in managing global politics in a low-intensity warfare on difference by instituting rigid boundaries for political life. However, in this article I turn my attention to the other side of Falk’s equation, namely the potential function that rights discourse may have to act as a language of resistance against oppressive social structures. As many authors have noticed, human rights discourse has, its hegemonic and imperial potentials notwithstanding, historically acted as a ‘counter-hegemonic’ discourse in many anti-imperial struggles worldwide.Footnote 14 Human rights discourse has, for example, been mobilised in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa; for the rights of the Palestinians; by many anti-colonial movements; and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the abuses of Western governments and their allies.
It does not seem too farfetched to suggest that the appropriation of human rights discourse by activists worldwide has propelled more critically-minded academics to formulate a theoretical defence of the value of rights discourse in view of its imperial(istic) potentials. An important step in this direction lies in examining the conditions under which human rights claiming may help to politicise rather than depoliticise the social world. Such a concern should be understood against the long-standing critique of human rights as a strategy to delimit democratic self-determination.Footnote 15 It is in fact not uncommon to regard human rights as a utopian moralistic, legalistic, and profoundly anti-political movement.Footnote 16 Against this view, several authors have pointed out that human rights claiming sometimes work as a practice that opens up new space for democratic contestation.Footnote 17 In particular, Karen Zivi and Joe Hoover have recently presented important post-foundationalist defences of rights.
A politicised conception of human rights, Hoover has argued, highlights the purpose of human rights, not as aiming at a consensus for a set of already articulated demands, but rather as one of creating ‘a space for contesting existing identities and sites of political authority’.Footnote 18 Such an agonistic defence focuses on how rights claiming may pluralise and democratise ‘political life in ways that expand our moral concern and challenge us to increase the substantive control people have over their lives’.Footnote 19 Drawing on a Deweyan ethics and the agonistic understanding of politics developed by William Connolly and Bonnie Honig, Hoover wants to defend the capacity of human rights as a language that may be used ‘to challenge exclusion, deprivation and cruelty by building the power of the oppressed to alter the order of things’.Footnote 20 At the core of his account lies a reconstruction of human rights practice where ‘humanity is mobilized as a political identity to challenge or privilege particular political orders’.Footnote 21 Hoover defends rights claiming as a practice of resistance, and acknowledges that his agonistic account of rights is ‘broadly supportive of individuals and groups seeking to challenge existing power and institutions – though not always in democratic or progressive ways’.Footnote 22 Ultimately then, Hoover’s defence of human rights is couched in terms of resistance to a perceived oppressive order. Several other, broadly speaking poststructuralist authors, also defend rights claiming in terms of resistance to oppressive social orders.Footnote 23
For a similar understanding of rights, which further links a political understanding of human rights to democracy by conceptualising human rights claims as a democratising practice, one may turn to Karen Zivi’s work.Footnote 24 Zivi has proposed to view rights claiming as a way of practicing democratic politics, the aim of which is to contest the boundaries of citizenship and political community. According to Zivi, ‘it is through the making of rights claims that we contest and constitute the meaning of individual identity, the contours of community, and the forms that political subjectivity takes’.Footnote 25 In this way, rights claiming can be seen as a democratising practice, rather than partaking in a desire to remove aspects of social life from the democratic process. However, instead of regarding rights as something that an already constituted social agent, that is, a self-identical subject, invokes, rights claiming can also be said to have a performative role to play in that it constitutes the agent herself. Rights claiming, then, may be understood as a form of ‘political subjectification’ by which a social group signals a demand to be included in a democratic political process.Footnote 26 In other words, rights claiming helps to constitute the agent as a legitimate participant in a democratic process, that is, as a citizen, or a group of citizens. Thus, Zivi’s understanding of rights claiming goes some way to alleviate the concerns of human rights as a depoliticising, anti-democratic practice.
The approach I advance here shares certain features with Hoover and Zivi’s projects. I also seek to present a political understanding of rights claiming, drawing on post-foundationalist political theory. I do so, however, by primarily drawing on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of political subjectification and Ernesto Laclau’s defence of the necessity of the universal for generating political effects. The former is particularly important in defending rights as an emancipatory practice. Even though the notion of subjectification is a significant component of Zivi’s overall defence of rights claiming as a practice that she defends for being inherently democratising – and not for what it necessarily brings in terms of progressive political outcomes – she does not develop Rancière’s conception of politics at any length.Footnote 27 The turn to Laclau, on the other hand, is particularly useful in unravelling a central preoccupation of human rights, namely the status and standing of the universal in rights claiming. Neither Hoover nor Zivi explicitly engage with the status of the universal – though ‘humanity’ plays a similar role in Hoover’s account as ‘the universal’ in mine. Finally, both Zivi and Hoover work with empirical cases where rights are invoked by people who clearly advance progressive political demands, such as HIV-positive women in South Africa, migrant rights movements contesting anti-immigrant legislation, and gay rights activists. The case I examine will rather reveal some ambiguities, and ultimately point to the limitations of approaches that conceptualise rights claiming merely as acts of resistance.
Political subjectification and the role of the universal in rights claiming
What is the precise link between rights claiming and democratic politics? How might rights claiming be construed as conducive to democratic politics? And, finally, what is the role of the universal in rights claiming? I begin by establishing the link between rights claiming and democracy by elaborating on Rancière’s notion of subjectification. Before doing so, however, some of Rancière’s core concepts must be explained since he offers a highly distinctive account of both democracy and politics.
For Rancière, a community exists as a political one due to a fundamental miscount. Politics always starts with a declaration of a wrong. ‘There is politics – and not just domination – because there is a wrong count of the parts of the whole.’Footnote 28 Rancière’s work is structured around a basic opposition between police order and politics; an opposition that cannot be transcended or mediated by a third term.Footnote 29 The police order is fundamentally understood as ‘an order of the visible and sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another not’.Footnote 30 As he puts it elsewhere: ‘[i]t is this exclusion of what “there is not” that is the police-principle at the heart of statist practices.’Footnote 31 Within a police order, all parts of a particular community have assigned places, and the distribution of resources takes place between parts with already assigned functions and identities. So a liberal democracy, oriented around interest group politics, is on Rancière’s understanding a police order. Politics, on the other hand, is an activity that disrupts and calls into question the fundamental division of political subjects within a given police order. As Todd May explains, politics is ‘a process of declassification. It is a process of abandoning the identity one has been given.’Footnote 32 However, the declaration of a wrong is not issued from an already existing subject position within a given community. Instead, it is the very declaration of a wrong that creates subject positions in the first place:
Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics … causes the poor to exist as an entity. … Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.Footnote 33
Rancière refers to the process of emergence of subjects as political subjectification. At the outset, it should be noted that Rancière employs a distinctly post-foundationalist notion of the subject. He rejects both the liberal idea of an autonomous subject that precedes politics and the orthodox Marxist understanding where a subject is determined by its place in a socioeconomic matrix.Footnote 34 Subjectification is instead understood as ‘the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity of enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience’.Footnote 35 The process of subjectification may be contrasted to one of identification; indeed, it concerns the very ‘gap’ between identification in a police order and a claim to subjectivity by the wronged party.Footnote 36 Whereas identification seeks recognition by identifying with an identity already in place within a given police order where all parts already are counted, subjectification disrupts the police order. Subjectification ‘inscribes a subject name as being different from any identified part of the community’.Footnote 37 Politics, as opposed to the police order, is thus understood as ‘distinct from all conflicts of interest between constituted parties of the population, for it is a conflict over the very count of those parties’.Footnote 38 Subjectification is thus productive of the very parties that were previously not counted in a given social order.
Importantly, for democratic politics to occur for Rancière, subjectification has to act on the assumption of equality.Footnote 39 Democratic politics, as Rancière understands it, does certainly not always lead to advances in equality, but it assumes and verifies equality among human beings.Footnote 40 Equality, as Ella Myers explains, is understood in a dual sense in Rancière’s thought as ‘disruptive demonstration’ and ‘universal condition’. ‘The assumption of human equality guides oppositional, usually collective acts of protest that challenge reigning police orders by publicly demonstrating an equality that its actors assume from the start.’Footnote 41 Therefore, equality is understood as axiomatic, that is, it is something given that is revealed through the practice of democratic politics. Equality then, ‘is an affirmation of the always already present condition rather than of an ideal to be attained in the future’.Footnote 42 Rancière’s emphasis on equality infuses his understanding of politics with a principle of normative import. So, democratising, and ultimately emancipatory politics may, as Prozorov argues, be understood as affirmative of an already existing human equality.Footnote 43 Even though one may argue that Rancière’s brand of democratic politics is inherently hostile to institutional politics as Myers does, it is precisely his understanding of it as standing apart from institutions which makes it appropriate for theorising rights claiming, which often takes place outside the formal channels of democratic institutions.
What is, then, the precise link between subjectification and democratic politics on the one hand, and rights claiming on the other? Following Rancière, rights claiming may be understood in two fundamentally different ways: one that is content with a given police order, and one that seeks to disrupt it. If we extrapolate to internationally recognised human rights, the first reading understands the global community as already divided into pre-existing parts. Right claiming would here be understood as individuals simply seeking ‘identification’ with subject positions already inscribed in international human rights treaties. At this point, it is of course important to recall that there are better and worse police orders for Rancière. As Chambers has argued, in Rancière’s understanding, a ‘pure politics’ that does away with the police order is not possible.Footnote 44 A political understanding of rights claiming in Rancière’s sense, however, would imply that such a practice makes ‘visible what had no business being seen, and [makes] heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise’.Footnote 45 In other words, rights discourse would provide opportunities for subjectification, instead of mere identification. Rights discourse would then be constitutive of subjects which are not yet acknowledged within a given police order.
If Rancière’s notion of subjectification helps to account for how rights claiming may be understood as conducive to democratic politics, what is the specific political value in framing a demand in rights language? Rancière suggests that ‘the demonstration proper to politics is always both argument and opening up the world where argument can be received and have an impact – argument about the very existence of such a world’.Footnote 46 He furthermore proposes that it is precisely in this ‘opening up’ that the question of the universal arises. Could rights discourse be understood precisely as conveying this opening by appealing to a universal? To elaborate on the fundamental importance of the universal for rights claiming, I turn to Ernesto Laclau’s work on the relation between the universal and the particular.
Laclau’s empty universal
Laclau has repeatedly returned to the significance of the universal for democratic politics.Footnote 47 He rejects both the pure particularism that is associated with certain versions of postmodernism, and the desire to transcend all particularities in order to reach an untainted universalism, a position which he identifies with Habermas’s procedural account of universalism. Laclau’s main argument is that the mediation between the universal and the particular ‘can only be a hegemonic one (which involves reference to the universal as an empty place), and that the operation it performs modifies the identities of both the particular and the universal’.Footnote 48 In effect, throughout his writings and in a high-profile dialogue with Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, Laclau defends the necessary place of the universal on both ontological and political grounds. This dual strategy differs somewhat from Žižek, who defends the universal on strong ontological grounds by referring to the Lacanian Real, and Butler whose thoroughgoing historicism is prohibitive of strong ontological arguments.Footnote 49
Laclau identifies the origins of the main political problem of universalism as arising out of a secularised understanding of the Christian logic of incarnation (that is, that God became Man in the person of Christ) that emerges in Western modernity. When Man takes God’s place, a need arises for the universal to become incarnated in a concrete historical body, an agent ‘whose particular body [is] an expression of a universality transcending it’.Footnote 50 The distance between the universal and the body in which it is incarnated eventually disappears altogether, and what remains is a complete identification of the universal with a concrete social agent. Such a social agent – whether it is the proletariat or an imperialist European nation state – presents itself as the privileged agent of historical change, carrying the content of the universal for various (regressive) others. As is well known, European imperial expansion relies on this justification when bringing alleged progress to non-European peoples and places. Throughout the twentieth century, various strands of critical thought argued in different registers that ‘the universal’ was no more than an eighteenth-century European particular that had forgotten, sublimated, or simply refused its own particularity.
Against such a background of profound scepticism to universalism in poststructuralist political thought, Laclau argues for the necessity of retaining the universal, albeit in a fractured, empty form. As an ontological condition of possibility for an identity to be, he argues, any identity has to maintain a dimension of the universal as lack. Since all identities are necessarily incomplete, ‘the universal is part of my identity as far as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack, that is as far as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution’. The universal, then, in fact arises out of the particular as ‘an incomplete horizon suturing a dislocated particular identity’.Footnote 51 And the failure to suture an identity is, as Butler points out in her response to Laclau, ‘precisely the futural promise of universality, its status as a limitless and unconditional feature of all political organization’.Footnote 52 Moreover, for waging concrete political struggles, Laclau contends that a strategy of pure particularism is self-defeating. A particular group within a social field has to appeal, and in fact always does, to some principles beyond itself to justify its demands, in order to prevent relations from breaking down into a war of all against all. An ethnic minority living within a nation-state, for example, always makes arguments in terms of general principles that have not yet been fully realised for them; that is, the universal principles of the state have not been universalised enough. The political necessity of appealing to a universal should thus be clear. A particular group, identity, or demand, in making political claims makes a claim to incarnate the empty universal. Even though the particular group, identity, or demand will, as Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart put it ‘always to a certain degree play the role of an impostor’, such a reference to the universal is necessary to generate political effects.Footnote 53
Since every political demand makes a claim to something more general and abstract beyond the assertion of its own particularity: ‘the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation’.Footnote 54 Following Laclau’s logic, the specific value of rights language now becomes clear and may be defended on specifically political rather than philosophical, theological, or even sociobiological grounds. On this understanding, the strength of rights discourse lies precisely in the positing of a universal (the human, the woman), which may be invoked against limitations to contingent configurations of subjectivity in the name of ‘culture’, ‘religion’, and ‘tradition’. As Samuel Chambers explains, ‘a local political demand, when made in the language of rights, points toward a broader universal’. And, it so turns out that rights discourse is a ‘discourse of universalization, in which a political group’s particular demands achieve, through a hegemonic articulation, the status of universal within a given political context.’Footnote 55 A claim to some form of universality then is not a problem, but rather a precondition for effective political action, whether one is currently beneficiary or victim of a given order.
Crucially, then, according to Laclau, the ‘universal’ must necessarily be empty.Footnote 56 Hence, it is not, as Linda Zerelli puts it, something ‘extrapolitical … that can be used to adjudicate political claims’.Footnote 57 Instead, a universal emerges as an outcome of a political struggle. Due to its empty content, there is inevitably a politics involved in claiming the universal: who gets to articulate, interpret, and thereby act as a temporary bearer of its content. On such an understanding of the universal, it also follows that rights may be defended by invoking other universals than secular ones. Human rights are then understood as one way of invoking universals in political struggles. Indeed, such an understanding makes it all the more important to pay close attention to local contexts and the effects of positing certain values as universal, rather than others.
Having elaborated on a theoretical defence of rights discourse as a profoundly political and democratising language through which groups may be afforded opportunities for political subjectification by invoking a universal, I will now put this understanding to work, and examine both its possibilities and limitations. I do so in a setting where rights have been invoked both by groups who already have a precarious, albeit, recognised position: secular women’s rights groups; and by groups which have not: Islamic women.
Rights claiming in post-revolutionary Tunisia
The Tunisian revolution started on 17 December 2010 and ended on 14 January 2011 with the regime resigning following mass demonstrations. In October 2011 elections for a Constituent Assembly were held, and in December the same year, a three-party coalition government led by the moderate Islamist Ennahda party assumed power. During 2012, tensions mounted and Tunisian society became increasingly polarised between, on the one hand Ennahda, and on the other side, the secular political parties and major civil society organisations, which were almost unanimously hostile to Ennahda. Among secular elites, it was not uncommon to characterise the situation as one of a ‘struggle’, ‘contestation’, and even ‘war’ between the Ennahda movement and the rest of the Tunisian society, such as the media, higher education, unions, and human and secular women’s rights groups.Footnote 58 In February 2013, following a political assassination of leftist politician and outspoken Ennahda-critic Chokri Belaïd and widespread protests against a perceived Islamisation of Tunisia, the Ennahda-led government stepped down, and a technocratic government assumed office. In October 2014, parliamentary elections were held and the secular party coalition Nidaa Tounes became the biggest party in parliament, with Ennahda finishing second.
Unlike the other Arab countries that underwent upheavals in 2011, Tunisia did not experience an authoritarian set-back in the years that immediately followed. Instead, an unprecedented space for political activism was opened up, where political institutions could be openly criticised and NGOs freely formed. The language of rights has for a long time been important to Tunisian political discourse. In particular, women’s rights have played an important albeit contested part in this history. A bundle of laws known as the Personal Status Code (PSC) was adopted in 1956, which outlawed polygamy, made mutual consent a requirement for marriage, and dramatically increased the status of the woman under the law.Footnote 59 The women’s rights groups that Ben Ali’s regime supported were fiercely secular, urban, and well-educated. Ben Ali’s ‘state feminism’, on the other hand, largely left out rural and Islamic women, and many analysts agree that his ‘feminism’ was, even more than Bourguiba’s, a discourse deployed to placate Western donors as well as co-opt well educated groups that may otherwise have turned against the regime.Footnote 60
The period between 2011 and 2014 saw an extraordinarily high degree of polarisation and political activism, where the role of women became one of the most hotly contested issues. The two largest women’s rights groups, l’Association tunisienne des femmes démocrates (ATFD) and l’Association des femmes tunisiennes pour la recherche sur le développement (AFTURD) are unambiguously secular. Female members of the oldest human rights organisation in Tunisia, La ligue tunisienne des droits de l’homme (LTDH) and in the leadership of the trade union UGTT, are also secular in outlook. Most of the civil society organisations that mushroomed after the revolution also tended to have a secular outlook. The post-revolutionary period saw a pluralisation of women’s movements in that secularly minded groups now also faced open competition for gender constructions from Ennahda-affiliated women’s groups.Footnote 61 The most visible Islamic women were high-profile members of Ennahda. Moreover, many Islamic women were working at community level and organised as small NGOs. In the following section, I examine how claims to the universal were deployed by secular women’s rights groups.
Secular rights claiming as claims to the universal
In the early months of the Tunisian revolution, women’s rights groups were hopeful that new rights might be claimed in the democratic opening following the fall of Ben Ali’s regime. Not only was there a strong presence of women in the demonstrations against the regime, but sentiments of gender equality reportedly reigned among the protestors. As Saïda Rached, president of ATFD, put it: ‘In the days of the revolution, many women were present, we were asking for freedom, equality, the same things as men do.’ However, as 2011 progressed, the urban and young activists present at the beginning of the revolts were overtaken by Islamist movements with greater popular support bases. A common characterisation of the situation among secular rights groups is that in a few months’ time, women’s rights movements went from a situation in which new rights were being brought up for discussion, such as inheritance laws and even gay rights, to a situation in which the struggle largely became a matter of retaining existing rights in the face of a looming conservative backlash.
For their part, Ennahda sought to reconcile Islam with modernity in a manner that would pay more attention to the particularities of Tunisian culture and Islamic identity, while adhering to modern principles such as democracy.Footnote 62 The more radical elements of Ennahda, as well and Salafi-inspired groups called for an Islamist state based on shari’a. In 2011, thousands of Islamist demonstrators gathered to demand shari’a as the fundamental source of Tunisian legislation. Some Islamist groups also demonstrated against the Tunisian withdrawal of all reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and claimed that it articulated notions of female equality that were Western and particular to Christianity. And even though Islam, just like Christianity, evidently makes universalist claims, the claims invoked by Islamists opposing women’s rights were mostly grounded in the perceived demands of a particular Arab-Islamic culture.
To understand the specific political force of rights discourse as one deployed against the perceived claims of culture, it is important to elaborate on the specifically Tunisian Islamist discourse, as articulated by the Ennahda leadership in general, and its leader Rachid Ghannouchi in particular.Footnote 63 First, Ghannouchi has tended to reject the opposition between a secular political sphere and a private religious one, as one stemming from the French former colonial masters. Instead of the perceived colonialist opposition between politics and religion, Ghannouchi has emphasised an opposition between colonial master and colonised subordinate country, where secularism is seen as a colonial imposition on Tunisia. Second, since Bourguiba’s project of modernising Tunisia entailed that the state controlled religious institutions, one of Ghannouchi’s priorities has been not so much to impose religion on state institutions, as to free religious institutions from state control. Third, and related to the previous two themes, is an overarching desire to return Tunisia to an authentic Arab-Islamic identity, believed to have been distorted by modernist, Westernised elites. Ennahda aims at completing the decolonisation that Bourguiba began from the French by launching a project for Tunisia’s Arab Muslim identity.Footnote 64 In Ghannouchi’s brand of Islamism, politics has ultimately a limited place, since there is an already articulated and divinely inspired higher order to which human arrangements are, and will progressively be, aligned with.
It is against such background that the rights claiming of secular women’s rights group needs to be understood. When asked to elaborate on their demands, the president of the ATFD put it thus,
Patriarchy is worldwide. Women’s rights are part of human rights, one cannot divide them. Our reference point is universal human rights, we don’t recognize cultural or religious specificity. Woman rights are part of universal human rights; indivisible, universal.
And as the secretary general of AFTURD put it,
[W]e work for the universal: we work so as to make sure that we can coexist in our differences, without bickering, we believe there is a place for everyone. The principle of a constitution and the principle of law function as a common base for everyone, based on human rights, the universality of humans.Footnote 65
Thus, whereas Islamists typically opposed demands of women’s rights by appealing to the perceived demands of a particularistic Arab-Islamic culture, secular women’s rights organisations articulated their demands by making recourse to universal human rights. Rights discourse, thus, was deployed to combat what they deemed as conservative, traditional, and cultural constraints upon their lives.
The contestation between claims to universal human rights and the perceived demands of a conservative interpretation of culture and Islam came to the fore in the writing of a new constitution. In October 2011, a Constituent Assembly was elected and charged with the task of writing a draft for a new Constitution. The same tension between claims to rights, invocation of universality and ‘the human’ on the one hand, and claims to religion, culture, and tradition on the other, resurfaced in the contestation over the new constitution. During the drafting process, some secular members of the constituent assembly wanted the constitution to refer to universal human rights, whereas Islamists preferred Islamic human rights. Some Islamists particularly feared that a reference to universal human rights might open up for a recognition of homosexuality. As a compromise, the constitution’s preamble refers to ‘the highest principles of universal human rights’, but notes that those are ‘inspired by the heritage of our civilization, accumulated over the travails of our history, from our enlightened reformist movements that are based on the foundations of our Islamic-Arab identity and on the gains of human civilization’.Footnote 66
Moreover, for over a year, a particularly controversial article (article 28) of great symbolic importance of the post-revolutionary constitutional draft was fiercely debated.Footnote 67 The debate centred on whether the term ‘equal’ or ‘complementary’ should be used to describe a woman’s relation to a man. Whereas secular women’s rights groups emphasised the importance of women as referred to as equal, some Islamists preferred the designation of women as complementary to men. As Monica Marks observes, there is little doubt that the notion of complementarity ‘did depart from the standard liberal, individualistic template of Western human rights norms’.Footnote 68 What to some of the Islamists signalled an acknowledgement of religiously or culturally prescribed ‘natural’ gender roles, was for secular women’s organisations perceived as potentially constraining on women’s role in society. The notion of complementarity was for the secular side taken to imply that men and women are not equal in all respects, but are both deficient and lacking in some ways so that a member of the other gender makes the other complete. During the heated discussion of article 28 in the Constitutional Draft, one of the most well-known Tunisian activist bloggers, Amira Yahyaoui head of the secular NGO Al Bawsala, expressed it thus,
For Tunisian women we need to fight for the universality of legal equality. Our goal and our example should be universality … . There is no specificity in rights, no specificity [based] on identity, no religious specificity.Footnote 69
Again, thus, rights discourse was invoked by secular rights groups against the claims of culture and religion for proposals that were perceived to limit the agency of women. Following an intense mobilisation of secular civil society activist groups, Ennahda backtracked, and the notion of complementarity was scrapped and replaced with one of equality. Thus, Tunisian secular rights claiming illustrates the Laclauian defence of the universal in practice.
Sacred rights claiming as claims to the universal
Post-revolutionary Tunisia reveals a more complex picture than solely one in which universal rights understood in a secular way are pitted against perceived claims of culture and religion. There is a parallel discourse of female resistance, which has received less attention, in Islamic women’s rights claiming. Here, Islam assumes the function of the horizon of the universal, and points to that which may be invoked and mobilised against patriarchal cultural constraints. While, as seen in the previous section, certain Islamists resorted to an appeal to culture and religion in order to circumscribe agency and depoliticise women’s demands, Islamic women’s rights groups on their hand, tended to invoke religion in order to advance women’s position in society. Islamic women’s groups were smaller and much less organised.
For Islamic women, rights discourse was used to reassert the right to have a religious identity respected in the public sphere; most notably to wear the hijab without being subject to harassment. At societal macro level, Islamic women worked for increased female representation in elected assemblies, on campaigns to prevent violence against women (although marital rape was a controversial notion for some), and against sexual harassment of women in the streets. Others were working on transitional justice initiatives, such as gathering testimonies from women suffering from persecution under the Ben Ali era.Footnote 70 This was an issue of particular importance to Islamic women’s rights groups, as Islamic women had been particularly harassed by the regime, with hijabs sometimes torn off and veiled women even spat at by the police. In addition, Islamic women deemed members of ‘unrecognized organizations’ faced arbitrary imprisonment, and sometimes even rape and torture.Footnote 71
Another issue that drew much support from Islamic women’s rights groups was economic empowerment schemes for women, with a particular focus on rural women. Islamic women’s rights activists were often working in more traditional communities, and habitually in Southern Tunisia, where women’s rights issues had a harder time gaining traction than in the relatively wealthy northern and more urban Tunisia. However, Islamic women’s rights groups did have an advantage that their secular counterparts did not. A marginalised position vis-à-vis the (northern) secular elites could sometimes be turned into a strength. In their local communities, the almost always veiled Islamic women activists’ strategy of defending women’s rights by an appeal to Islam was rhetorically more effective. Such a defence countered the objection that human and women’s rights were a Western or even Christian, that is, particular, imposition on another particular, Islamic-Arabic culture.Footnote 72
Whereas Islamic women were more inclined to speak of their activities in terms of economic development and social justice, they would also make recourse to the notion of women’s rights. Indeed, rights discourse became central also to Islamist movements across the region following the Arab uprisings.Footnote 73 Aitemad Muhanna characterises Tunisian Islamic women’s activism as ‘opposed to the universality of women’s rights; [placing the] emphasis on the family unit for achieving women’s rights; and an understanding of women’s rights within an Islamic framework’.Footnote 74 And Loes Debuysere notes, Islamic women ‘develop a different and original paradigm for women’s rights derived from Islamic principles, based on the centrality of the family and the concept of complementarity (instead of full equality) between the sexes’.Footnote 75 Undoubtedly, many Islamic women did take issue with the secular understanding of universality. Yet, if universalism is understood in an empty Laclauian sense, Islamic rights discourse may be understood as ultimately undertaken with an appeal to a sacred universal, Islam, deployed as a means of critiquing particular, cultural, norms.
As one of the highest ranking female Ennahda members, Meherzia Labidi, put it,
Our reading is this: Islam as a monotheistic religion was sent down to humans who have free will. So we want to reinforce liberties – freedom of consciousness, political participation, etc.Footnote 76
As another Islamic woman’s rights activist put it, ‘Islam calls for social justice by which human dignity of men and women is equally respected and none lives in material and spiritual deprivation.’ However, many Islamic women believed that the true message of Islam had been distorted due to ‘social conditions and rigid cultural traditions’.Footnote 77 Islamic women often tried to find scriptural justification for rights in the Qur’an or the Hadith and convince their followers that there was no contradiction between Islam and women’s rights. Consequently, when Islamic women defended rights, they often did so in terms of religion, arguing that women’s rights are deeply ingrained and rooted in Islamic principle of freedom, justice, and equality.Footnote 78 Thus, Islam provided the critical horizon that could be invoked to challenge patriarchal cultural norms, and performed the function as a universal for the purposes of critique.
Rights claiming as political subjectification
Having examined the significance and variations of universals invoked through rights claiming, to what extent may one understand the women’s rights claiming examined in Tunisia in terms of Rancière’s understanding of political subjectification? As previously noted, Ben Ali allowed for a certain amount of space for the main secular women’s rights organisations in order to cultivate his regime’s image as ‘progressive’. In fact, secular women were a recognised subject under the regime, and their demands therefore uttered from an already existing subject position. Secular women’s rights claiming during the Ben Ali era may therefore not be understood as political in Rancière’s sense, since they were issued from within a given police order.Footnote 79 After the revolution, however, the space for political activism increased. Rights language was used precisely to contest female visibility. As Maya Jribi, a secular women’s rights activist put it,
[W]omen’s rights are neither an Arab nor Muslim cause per se – it is a universal cause. All over the world we strive so that women are more valued, have more rights and become more visible.Footnote 80
The category of universality was invoked to constitute a subject of woman who by appealing to the equality of human beings realised rights that were already enjoyed by others, that is, males. The secular universality invoked, however, was sometimes less inclusive, and sought to exclude certain subject positions. Returning to the quote by the secretary general of AFTURD, when talking about the possibilities of cooperating with Islamic women’s organisations, having first said that AFTURD works ‘for the universal’, she goes on to say that [Islamic women] ‘want to change this, by taking a point of view that is very, very, very particular which they then try to universalize to the whole world. We cannot work together.’Footnote 81 As Debuysere notes, ‘insisting that only their agenda is a “universal” one, in contrast to the “particular” Islamist-oriented point of view, paradoxically reveals the particularity of the universal project of some secular women’s associations’.Footnote 82 The secular universal invoked then enabled certain subject positions while disallowing others.
Islamic women, on the other hand, were not a recognised political subject under Ben Ali’s regime. On the contrary, wearing the hijab was outlawed in public schools, public offices, and in universities, and women who chose to wear it were sometimes subject to harassment from the regime’s security forces. Moreover, as Islamic women were quick to point out, in particular ATFD often failed to support Islamic women. The reluctance on part of the secular women’s rights groups to help Islamic women is well known in women’s right’s circles and evident from US diplomatic reporting.Footnote 83 Thus, Islamic women’s rights groups often emphasised that they had been the most oppressed women during Ben Ali’s regime, whose ideal of a ‘modern’ Westernised woman was at odds with a pious and often veiled woman.Footnote 84 Especially during Ben Ali’s era, but also in the aftermath of the revolution, Islamic women may be understood as political actors in Rancière’s sense, since they demanded to be recognized as a political subject and counted for. For Ben Ali’s regime, struggling for women’s rights at the same time as affirming Islam was utterly contradictory, and the category of ‘Islamic women’ was unrecognised. After the revolution, Islamic women still had to struggle for being recognised as women’s rights activists. For some of the secular groups, the notion of being veiled and driven by a strong Islamic faith was incompatible with women’s rights. Islamic women thus demanded to be recognised as political subjects provoked by the many wrongs committed to them during Ben Ali’s regime.
As one of the highest ranking female (and veiled) Ennahda members, Meherzia Labidi, put it:
I think in Tunisia I represent trouble for some people because I deconstruct the image of Islamist women that the dictator built. We are described as women who are not audacious, with no capacity to build or lead. I’m proving the contrary. I am one face in Tunisia, one of many others. … I’m proving that Tunisian women are plural. … I do ask for my due place, and for respect as being one part of this mosaic.Footnote 85
In ‘asking for her place’, rights discourse was employed, although, as we have seen, oftentimes by appealing to a sacred instead of a secular universal. However, if the secular conception of universalism tended to exclude certain political actors, some critical questions regarding the expansiveness of the Islamic conception of universality invoked by Islamic women remain. First, there was a fear that rights discourse would become too expansive and also include gay rights, which was deemed unacceptable. Second, there were some limitations regarding full gender equality. Most notably, most Islamic women did not accept full non-discrimination in inheritance matters, viewing the current framework rooted in shari’a as based in divinely instituted law. Many of them had a difficult time accepting the notion of equality within a family, preferring instead ideas of divinely instituted complementarity. As female member of Ennahda’s executive committee Monia Brahim put it, Islam is ‘a total project’, and rather than focusing on individual rights ‘our vision is that society is made up of families and so laws have to be based on safeguarding the unit of the family rather than of individuals’. In some cases thus, the sacred universal proved more restrictive than a secular one.
Post-foundationalist rights claiming beyond resistance
Post-revolutionary Tunisia illustrates the main theoretical argument of this article: what gives rights discourse its specific political value is the invocation of a universal that points beyond the ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, and particularistic interpretation of religion of a political community, towards a broader horizon of humanity. The Tunisian case illustrates that claims to the universal are vital for contemporary projects that seek to open up more and more life for political contestation and change. But what kind of universal may be invoked in rights claiming? Is critique of the traditions of one’s particular community enabled only by a secular understanding of the universal? For Islamic women’s rights groups, Islam functioned as the universal that was invoked to criticise perceived oppressive cultural particularities. In certain contexts and for certain audiences, appeals to Islam instead of a secular universal were more effective for rights activists. Thus far then, I have offered a theoretically grounded argument for why one should take religious rights claiming just as seriously as secular ones, since on a political understanding of rights claiming, they perform a similar function, which is to open up to contestation claims made in the name of a particular culture and tradition and afford possibilities for political subjectification.
Yet, an important aspect of the understanding of rights claiming elaborated upon will in the final part of the article be raised, an issue which takes us to the core of what is at stake in the retheorisation of human rights in post-foundationalist theoretical terms: the character of the invoked universal. Laclau’s argument concerning the vital political value of universalism coupled with Rancière’s notion of political subjectification help us to understand why rights discourse is a profoundly political language, and why it remains such an important language for articulating various political demands in. The strength of human rights as a political language is precisely that it invokes a universal when an argument is made for social change, thereby enabling previously marginalised groups of people to enter the political realm. Moreover, if we follow Laclau, we need to think seriously about competing universalisms as invoked foundations when making rights claims. If the universal is empty in terms of substance, there are other universalisms that rights claiming may rely on and that may potentially also work for progressive political change. However, to recognise that there are competing universalisms that serve a similar political function does not mean that all universals are equally politically or ethically defensible. Laclau’s understanding of the universal does not tell us anything about the extent to which, if at all, the invoked universal is emancipatory or politically progressive in a specific setting.
In the case of post-revolutionary Tunisia, the Islamic universal that served a similar political function as a secular universal when claiming rights, was ultimately shown to be more restrictive than the secular one. The conception of universalism that secular women’s rights groups invoked enabled the claiming of a more extensive set of rights for women and was also compatible with for gay rights, for instance. The sacred universalism that Islamic women invoked, on the other hand, often excluded certain forms of equality, such as full equality in inheritance matters. To be sure, a post-foundationalist understanding of universalism would point out that there may emerge more expansive understandings of rights in the future, also from within an Islamic framework. The crucial point, however, is that Laclau helps us to understand how rights claiming function as a language of resistance to hegemonic social configurations rather than one of emancipatory politics. With Laclau, one may ultimately defend rights claiming as a political practice of local resistance against hegemonic social orders, rather than as an inherently emancipatory practice. Laclau’s defence of the universal tends to collapse into relativism, where every claim that opposes a hegemonic order may be seen as engaging in resistance, regardless of the content of its claim. In the final analysis, to admit as Laclau does, that all claims to the universal are after all fraudulent means that to defend the universal as universal can on a Laclauian understanding only be done in bad faith.
To many contemporary poststructuralist defenders of human rights, such a defence is arguably the most one may ask for. However, within contemporary post-foundationalist thought, there are resources for theorising what claims to the universal would be admissible to convey in rights discourse for such claims to be considered emancipatory, here understood as affirmative of equality. In what remains, I show what in post-foundationalist theoretical terms is needed for rights claiming to move beyond mere resistance to hegemonic orders. To that end, Rancière’s thought offers crucial resources, and I will return to his defence of axiomatic equality as a litmus test for emancipatory rights claiming. However, I will pursue the argument for axiomatic equality via Sergei Prozorov’s recent defence of universalism. Doing so enables me to put the question of the universal conveyed through rights discourse into the context of broader debates within contemporary post-foundationalist thought.
Prozorov situates his intervention precisely as a response to what I identified as the key problem not only in traditional defences of universalism, but also ultimately in Laclau’s defence of the universal: how to conceive of ‘a genuine universalism that does not relapse into a hegemonic universalization of some particular content’.Footnote 86 Inspired mainly by Badiou and Heidegger, but also by a number of other post-foundationalist thinkers such as Agamben and Nancy, Prozorov starts from arguing that the social field has to be understood in terms of a ‘fundamental lack’ or nothingness; a void that he calls the World.Footnote 87 Whereas other post-foundationalist philosophies would agree with the understanding of the World as void, Prozorov argues that such an understanding has consequences for the worlds it discloses. It should be emphasised that the World, for Prozorov, is nothing that lies beyond the worlds in which we find ourselves à la classic transcendentalism. On the contrary, the World ‘is that which, ontologically belonging to but not necessarily appearing in every positive world, conditions the possibility of every world’s becoming-otherwise’.Footnote 88
Like many post-foundationalist philosophers including Laclau, Prozorov argues that ‘the social order is sustained by a structural void that cannot be subsumed under its positivity, which entails both that every positive order is contingent and could be otherwise and that its claims to completion, closure and self-immanence are inconsistent’.Footnote 89 However, against authors such as Laclau who would point to the impossibility of self-identity and closure, and then only advocate for an affirmation of openness, in a move similar to Rancière, Prozorov defines politics as ‘a practice of affirmation of principles or “axioms”, derived from the void of the World, universally for a given world’.Footnote 90 Like Rancière as well as Badiou, whose set-theoretical defence of universality Prozorov is mostly indebted to, he seeks to derive universal principles (or axioms), whose affirmation becomes the litmus test for emancipatory politics in every conceivable world.Footnote 91 For the axioms to be authentically universal, they cannot be derived from any particular positive world. Neither is it a matter of deriving positive principles from the nothingness of the void – that would be logically impossible. Rather, it is the void’s ‘disclosure within worlds’ that provides us with ‘political principles that are valid for any world whatsoever’.Footnote 92
It is precisely such a move that is necessary in order to move beyond a conception of politics as merely critique or resistance, that is, to move from Laclau’s defence of what is after all a partial and hence fake universalism to a real one.Footnote 93 For Laclau, there is nothing inherently universal about equality. For Rancière, on the contrary, an already existing equality reveals itself through human communicationFootnote 94 whereas for Prozorov equality is ultimately negatively derived from the nothingness of the void.Footnote 95 Emancipatory politics, that is, politics affirmative of equality, ‘begins with the decision that declares the universal validity of a certain principle for the world in question and proceeds through the intra-worldly treatment of the consequences of this decision’.Footnote 96 Crucially, it is not only a matter of affirming universal axioms, they also have to be affirmed for all beings in the world. Here, Prozorov’s affinities to Rancière become apparent again. Rancière’s police order is precisely the social order that suppresses interruption from the axioms of the void: through political practice ‘the well-policed world is shown to contain a supernumerary world, in which the part of those without a part comes to appearance’.Footnote 97 Affirmative politics then, ‘must affirm the principles that is heterogeneous to any police order whatsoever’, namely the principle of equality.Footnote 98
We may then better understand what is at stake in elaborating a post-foundationalist defence of the universal to be invoked in rights claiming, in order for rights claiming to be understood as an emancipatory practice. The properly political claim for Rancière, is issued from and simultaneously constitutive of those, who are not yet included and recognisable within a given police order. Thus, since there are no predetermined subjects of rights, Rancière’s understanding puts the focus on the particular subjects that come into being through political struggle by employing rights discourse verifying the assumption of equality.Footnote 99 It is important to recall that there are discursive resources that provide opportunities for verifying the assumption of equality other than a secular interpretation of human rights. Progressive interpretations of religious universals may provide precisely such resources. In the case of post-revolutionary Tunisia, some Islamic women’s rights groups deployed Islam in ways that challenged unequal relations between men and women. Rights claiming that does not assume equality however, may be seen as engaging in resistance to a hegemonic order, but not in emancipatory politics. For instance, certain examples of Islamic rights claiming, where the inequality of men and women is assumed, may be seen as engaging in resistance to a secular order, but not as an emancipatory political practice. The emancipatory value of rights claiming, in contrast to its importance merely as a language of resistance, then ultimately hinges on the extent to which rights discourse provides a language where equality is assumed, and thus affords the opportunity to demonstrate this inscribed, but far too often unrealised, equality.
Conclusion
This article has developed a post-foundationalist defence of rights claiming as a political practice and illustrated such an understanding in the struggle for rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia. In particular, it examined the political function of claims to the universal in rights discourses. With the opening of democratic space after the revolution in Tunisia, gender politics became a site of struggle as to who would count as political subjects, and what agency such subjects were to be endowed with. Here, rights were invoked to resist practices that limit politics, and such rights claiming therefore demonstrate the possibilities of rights discourse to politicise social relations and cultural patterns infused with gendered hierarchies. Claims to represent and carry the universal were used to open up ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, and conservative interpretations of religion to political contestation, and it is precisely such a claim that gave the specific political force to rights discourse. Rights claiming may therefore be understood as a democratising practice, in that it may help to politicise and pluralise interpretations of culture, tradition, and religion. If the rights claiming observed in post-revolutionary Tunisia is at all representative of contemporary rights claiming, it is rather clear that far from being ‘utopian’, rights discourse is a profoundly political language.
While both Rancière and Laclau help us to understand the political importance of rights claiming, the post-foundationalist understanding of rights discourse that I have defended does not absolve us from the ethico-political responsibility to assess the legitimacy of the invoked universal as well as the desirability of the new subject positions that are sometimes constituted through rights claiming. Laclau helps us to appreciate that rights claiming that invokes a sacred universal operate in a similar way as one that relies on a secular conception of universality, which points to the potentially progressive function of sacred rights claiming. Ultimately though, Laclau has little to offer when it comes to evaluating the progressive content of the invoked universal. In other words, Laclau helps us to understand rights claiming as a language of resistance rather than as one of emancipation. One way of going beyond a defence of rights claiming as merely a practice of resistance, I argued, is to supplement Laclau with Rancière’s defence of axiomatic equality.
Finally, important strands of poststructuralist IR have over the past decades been concerned with ‘historicising’, ‘denaturalising’, and ‘provincialising’ universalist claims. As Charlotte Epstein recently put it, ‘the poststructuralist project … is an effort to continue to seek ways to theorize a constructed world without seeking the old comfort of universals’, and the problem that poststructuralist critique identifies is precisely ‘the persistent gearing of social theorizing towards the universal, at the expense of the particular and the political’.Footnote 100 In light of Laclau’s writings, such a characterisation of the poststructuralist project, while not uncommon, is problematic in scholarly terms. More importantly, it also leaves something to be desired for activist movements worldwide, many of which constitute themselves as rights-based movements. While substantial strands of poststructuralist-oriented academic writing in IR and beyond has been concerned with undermining any claim to the universal, activists worldwide, the alleged bearers of what might promise an alternative global order, hold on to its alleged incarnation in concrete social agents when arguing for social change. This article has argued that they do so for good reasons. Insofar as activists also affirm equality when claiming rights, they moreover do so for the right reasons.
Interviews
The author interviewed representatives of the following organisations in November and December 2014, and in May and June 2015: ATFD, AFTURD, Nissa Tounissiet, LTDH, Al Bawsala, Search for Common Ground Tunisia, Solidar Tunisie, Ennahda MP, former Ettakatol MP, Human Rights Watch, UN Women’s programme office, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, European Union Delegation, and the following academics: Professors Amel Grami, Mohamed Kerrou, and Mouna Dridi. For research assistance and translations, thanks are due to Dr Halim Boubaker and Ms Néfissa Houcine. The interpretations remain my own.
Acknowledgements
For very helpful comments on several iterations of this article, I thank Tom Lundborg. For substantial comments, thanks are also due to Dan Öberg, Louiza Odysseos, Linus Hagström, Johan Eriksson, Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, Björn Jerdén, Mikael Eriksson, Hans Ingvar Roth, and Jane Freedman. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers. The usual disclaimer applies. A grant from Särskilda forskningsprogrammet at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs funded the research undertaken for the article.
Stefan Borg is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Relations at the Department of Economic History, Stockholm University and an Associated Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of European Integration and the Problem of the State: A Critique of the Bordering of Europe (Palgrave 2015). His work has also appeared in journals such as JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of International Relations and Development, Geopolitics, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Middle East Critique. An earlier version of this article was awarded the International Studies Association (ISA) Human Rights’s section Best Paper Award in 2016.
