Re-envisioning Human Rights in the Light of Arendt and Rancière: Towards an Agonistic Account of Human Rights Education

Abstract

This article takes up Arendt's ‘aporetic’ framing of human rights as well as Rancière's critique and suggests that reading them together may offer a way to re-envision human rights and human rights education (HRE)—not only because they make visible the perplexities of human rights, but also in that they call for an agonistic understanding of rights; namely, the possibility to make new and plural political and ethical claims about human rights as practices that can be evaluated critically rather than taken on faith. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the need for a renewal of HRE by suggesting that the paradoxes of human rights—such as the disparity between the reality of the human condition and the abstract ideal of human rights—can be politically and pedagogically invigorating by rethinking human rights in agonistic terms and formulating more robust practices of HRE.