Introduction to the Aporia of Rights: Explorations in Citizenship in the Era of Human Rights

The assumption that human rights and citizenship are two distinct orders of reality that frequently clash is commonplace today. In this approach citizenship is viewed in terms of a closed world of membership-based privilege, and human rights are viewed as the vehicle of asserting the claims of those who are excluded from this world, the refugee or stateless person being the central trope for this mode of thinking. This collection of essays challenges this mode of thinking. It suggests that citizenship and human rights are profoundly and necessarily co-implicated in the modern historical and conceptual discourse of subjective right. The human rights of the refugee cannot be asserted without simultaneously making a claim on the conception and practice of citizenship. This was of course the point that Hannah Arendt made in her idea of the right to have rights," an idea frequently referred to in this collection. At the same time it becomes clear to anyone who attempts to make sense of this relationship of co-implication that it is complex, always contextually and thus historically specific, and aporetic.