Introduction: Snapshots of Rights Discourse

We often hear that rights talk pervades politics, law and morality, that rights have never played a more decisive role in the formation of local and global relations, that rights are used more frequently than ever before to debate and resolve social, legal and political disputes, that rights emerge out of attempts to deal with or prevent injustice, and that they can support strategies of emancipation. At the same time, we are warned that many of the rights we have been taking for granted are being undermined and their existence threatened by forces intent on recasting the domestic and international political order. These attempts to reorganise the political order by reconstructing rights are not, we are told, done in search of justice, but to enhance social control and political domination. The volume at hand consists partly of attempts to examine such assumptions by exploring the role of rights in public political discourse, policy debates and legal decision making.