Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa (Queen Mary University of London, School of Law) has posted The Paradox of Non-Human Rights, Rights, Resistance, Critique: Essays in Honour of Costas Douzinas (Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa & Illan Rua Wall eds., Routledge, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter takes inspiration from Costas Douzinas’s work on the paradoxes of human rights to illuminate the contradictory logic that underpins the emerging discourse of non-human rights. It interrogates the ontological and anthropological foundations upon which rights are granted, revealing how efforts to extend rights beyond the human often reproduce rather than displace anthropocentrism. What appears to be a progressive project of ‘decentring’ the human frequently results in a subtle form of ‘recentring,’ as non-human beings—animals, rivers, or machines—are recognized as rights-bearing subjects only insofar as they resemble humans. In this way, the human continues to serve as the moral and legal benchmark for determining worth, assimilating and flattening non-humans into familiar conceptual frameworks. Situating non-human rights within broader philosophical, economic, scientific, and technological contexts, the chapter exposes a pervasive metaphysical drive to overcome otherness and reaffirm a disembodied, abstract conception of the human as the ultimate standard of value, agency, and existence.
Recommended!
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