Human Rights as Resistance Discourse provides a comprehensive examination of the intersection between human rights and anticolonial resistance. It identifies pivotal and under-explored historical junctures that unearth the evolving function of claiming rights across various stages of anticolonial resistance, including the colonial, nation-building, and postcolonial phases, revealing the relegation of decolonization struggles to the unconscious of the international human rights legal order.
The book advances human rights scholarship through its psychosocial analysis, which captures the encounter with rights from spaces of exclusion. It argues that contemporary human rights practices are yet to confront the conditioning of social mobilizations when rights claims fail to capture collective dissatisfaction, repression, and unfulfilled desire in the postcolonial turn.
Demonstrating the implications of its analysis, the book offers a case study of counterhegemonic Egyptian feminist practices and their responses to sexual assaults during the 2011 uprising. The case study extends the book's central argument on the elusive link between human rights and anticolonial resistance when the development of international and national human rights obligations around gender-based violence discursively limit social mobilizations.
