Redistributive Human Rights?

UNSW Sydney will host a workshop that considers the different ways in which the language and frameworks of human rights have been mobilised - both to make redistribute justice claims or to contest economic inequalities, but also to close down political discussions around distributional questions and crush Third World demands for global wealth redistribution.

We hope to interrogate, why and how, at specific moments and in specific places, human rights movements and NGOs operated as either “powerless companions” or as “fellow travellers” to elitist economic agendas as well as to excavate moments when rights movements committed to companionships of solidarity based on building the power of the marginalised.

This workshop aims to build on and extend current debates about the relationship between human rights and economic inequality.

We hope to enrich these discussions by paying attention to the complex and varied nature of human rights movements, the historical contingency of human rights frameworks and the differing visions and forms of rights.

In doing so, we aim to deepen understandings of the “distributional imagination and political economy” of human rights.

This event is supported by the Australian Human Rights Institute, UNSW Sydney, La Trobe University and the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School.

Image: Hyejin Kang/Shutterstock