Statelessness framing licensed humanitarian military intervention for human rights

Evidence

Along with the rights to liberty, equality, property and security that contemporary human rights campaigns share with the older rights-of-man tradition, today’s human rights are often justified as necessary to protect two key principles: ‘humanity’ and ‘dignity’. For the young Marx, the split between the man and the citizen in the eighteenth-century declarations reflected the fact that the individual in bourgeois society leads a double life – a celestial life in the state (as an equal citizen) and a terrestrial life in civil society (as an unequal, egoistic individual). The problem of the relation between man and citizen has similarly preoccupied much twentieth-century criticism of human rights. Faced with mass population expulsions in the wake of World War I, Hannah Arendt argued that those who lacked citizenship and had no other status than mere humanity were deprived even of the rights of man. … The recognition that those who lacked the protection of a nation-state were also deprived of human rights ultimately licensed new forms of ‘humanitarian’ intervention that rationalized the projection of military might beyond the borders of sovereign territories as a means to secure humanity. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 53

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Whyte argue the human rights movement’s own logic, not just state abuse of it, produced interventionism?
• XREF: Connects to reader’s focus on human-rights discourse — parallels Islamophobia and the Novel’s account of how universalist rhetoric is selectively weaponized. — connects to: Human rights advocates legitimized progressive-sounding counterinsurgency warfare — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 493; Liberal human rights discourse actually licensed powerful states’ interventions for their corporations — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 287; Anti-colonial rights advocates unwittingly armed later coercive interventions in global capitalism’s interests — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 273 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Liberal human rights discourse actually licensed powerful states’ interventions for their corporations #expands (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 287
• Anti-colonial rights advocates unwittingly armed later coercive interventions in global capitalism’s interests #expands (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 273
• Human rights advocates legitimized progressive-sounding counterinsurgency warfare #expands (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 493
• Neoliberal human rights legitimize state violence to protect global markets. #expands (0.85)
• Neoliberals reframed human rights as instruments of market submission #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 120