Rights for Daydreaming

Abstract

Contingency and the counterfactual are often apprehended as tools to explore how international human rights law might have evolved differently, or have been ‘done better’ as a hopeful and emancipatory discourse. In this chapter, I remain with the theme of hope which pervades this subset of international law and undertake a counterfactual exploration of it. To do so, I ask the question ‘what if international human rights law, in its mainstream form as a discourse shaped by the United Nations, had been developed as a discourse for daydreaming?’ As rights for daydreaming, human rights would offer a vehicle to help us dream individually, but also collectively, of a future of hope which is better than the present, and to do so in a politically-engaged way. Exploring the history of international human rights law in the twentieth century, I locate one period where the futural and the political did collide, albeit not for long: in the work of states from the Global South during the 1960s–1970s. I consider the difference that might have been made had human rights successfully developed as rights for daydreaming in this period. This includes consequences for this area of law’s connection to grassroots social movements; development of its institutional processes and structures; and its compatibility with neoliberalism. Stemming from these changes, thinking international human rights otherwise in this way may have also had positive consequences for the position and potential of this international discourse today.