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The question concerning human rights and human rightlessness: disposability and struggle in the Bhopal gas disaster

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 21:30 authored by Louiza OdysseosLouiza Odysseos
In the midst of concerns about diminishing political support for human rights, individuals and groups across the globe continue to invoke them in their diverse struggles against oppression and injustice. Yet both those concerned with the future of human rights and those who champion rights activism as essential to resistance, assume that human rights – as law, discourse and practices of rights claiming – can ameliorate rightlessness. In questioning this assumption, this article seeks also to reconceptualise rightlessness by engaging with contemporary discussions of disposability and social abandonment in an attempt to be attentive to forms of rightlessness co-emergent with the operations of global capital. Developing a heuristic analytics of rightlessness, it evaluates the relatively recent attempts to mobilise human rights as a frame for analysis and action in the campaigns for justice following the 3 December 1984 gas leak from Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Informed by the complex effects of human rights in the amelioration of rightlessness, the article calls for reconstituting human rights as an optics of rightlessness.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Third World Quarterly

ISSN

0143-6597

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

6

Volume

36

Page range

1041-1059

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2015-07-07

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2016-12-02

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-02-24

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