Rights, social theory and political philosophy : a framework for case study research

The purpose of this chapter is to outline a research framework that can begin to bring together the insights of both social theory and political philosophy to address rights issues. Their separation is a significant weakness that runs through much of the literature on rights. On the one hand, approaches to rights from the perspective of political philosophy are too often uprooted from any concern with the social, cultural, historical, political and economic specificity of particular cases. Approaches from the perspective of social theory and sociology, on the other hand, have a tendency to adopt the rhetoric of the moral high ground without any effort to engage in the king of sustained moral argument associated with political philosophy. One of the reasons for the invidious division of labour is the volume and complexity of the relevant literatures in each field and the difficulty of know where to start. It is these problems that I address, and I do so by developing some preliminary guidelines for case study research. Such research can explore the field by dividing it into more manageable, bitesized, portions that are less daunting and less forbidding. The idea would be to develop research strategies into rights issues that are explicitly informed by social theory and by political philosophy, but that radically limit their object of study. The aspect of rights under scrutiny would be limited in having a precise focus - guided by very clear questions or specific problems about the legitimacy of rights claims and/or the feasibility of their implementation. The studies would also be limited in drawing, self-consciously, only on carefully delimited aspects of social theory and political philosophy, thus making realistic demands on the researcher, who will still have to master a testing range of literatures and skills. The intention would be for a series of such piecemeal studies, each produced by a more integrated social theory/political philosophy approach, not only to offer valuable insights of their own but also to provide the foundations for subsequent cross-study work on rights.