In an era of escalating climate breakdown, fascist resurgence and genocides underwritten by the advanced capitalist countries of the West, do human rights retain any liberatory or disruptive potential?  While some cling uncritically to liberal discourses of rights amid laments for liberal democracy and the ‘rules-based’ order, others highlight the historical complicity between liberalism, colonialism and fascism and insist that any attempt to resist via the defence of liberal rights is doomed to complicity with the structural forces of oppression.  Yet, both those embracing rights and those rejecting them tend to overlook the roots of the present crisis in the corporate capture of democracy – and associated ‘privatisation’ of human rights - in the latter part of the 20th century.  In this context, human rights were incrementally severed from sites of struggle and rendered abstract values within a cosmopolitan ethics that thrived on fantasy and disavowal.  Anti-colonial movements, by contrast, have long histories of disruptive uses of human rights that expose the violence of law and capital – as I will explore through my own engagement with some of the struggles.  Nevertheless, I will suggest that such attempts at disruption also risk falling prey to fantasy at a juncture marked by a sense of the inevitability of catastrophe and the exhaustion of critique if they are not shaped within a radical ethics that I denote ‘insurgent humanism’. 

Lara Montesinos Coleman is Professor of International Law, Ethics and Political Economy at the University of Sussex and author of Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights, published by Duke University Press in 2024 and shortlisted for the Susan Strange Prize. She has published widely on the philosophy and politics of human rights, law and resistance, as well as on questions of critique and on philosophy and method. Her work has a strongly ethnographic component as a result of her long-term involvement with social movement struggles in Colombia, where she is currently working with the Yukpa indigenous people on reparations for genocide linked to open-cast coal-mining at the hands of Anglo-Swiss mining giant, Glencore.  She is currently working on two projects. On is a decolonial re-reading of provisions for reparation that give weight to allegations of genocide linked to energy extractivism, through the lens of the Yukpa’s struggle. The other is a book, Insurgent Human: Radical Ethics for an Inhuman Age, which develops some of the ideas around ethics and political affect at the end of Struggles for the Human.