A STUDY OF HUMAN RIGHTS WITH REFERENCE TO THE THEORY OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SUBJECT OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS AND MODERN DEMOCRACY

2022-12
Musabaşoğlu, Elif Hannan
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The political signification of human rights has always been an ongoing debate for the political theory. It is understandable given human rights’s aspiration to include everyone seems like a delusive solution for the fundamental questions of politics, such as recognition and representation, and its antagonistic nature. This thesis explores the potential responses to this conundrum by post-foundational leftist perspectives. My aim is to demonstrate the political value of human rights for left politics. Examining the theory of radical democracy suggested by Laclau and Mouffe, the interpretation of power and democracy by Lefort, and Douzinas’s critical legal views on human rights; I conclude that the concept of human rights can be re-formulated as the rights of the other. Therefore, it can sustain the center of the law empty and establish an institutional basis for the unsutured realm of the political and empty space of power suggested by these post-foundational views. By framing the issue of rights in connection with the experience of the subject of democracy and the articulation of political resentments, I try to define the human rights as the possibility of claiming a place on an institutional ground, when the existing legal system fails to recognize the claimant as a legitimate interlocutor. In this sense, I claim rights reflect the subject’s political experience in relation to state authority by priorly defining the frame of action and articulation for her.
Costas Douzinas, Claude Lefort, Human Rights, Post-foundationalism, Radical Democracy
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/101252
Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats
E. H. Musabaşoğlu, “A STUDY OF HUMAN RIGHTS WITH REFERENCE TO THE THEORY OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SUBJECT OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS AND MODERN DEMOCRACY,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.
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