POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Course Objectives: The objective of this course is: 

• to provide students with a political perspective on universal human rights.
• to equip students with instruments that help them to conduct discussions on the relationship between politics and law.
• to broaden and enrich the students’ perception on issues like social identities, gender, and sexuality by introducing the related universal standards. 
• to provide students with the contemporary debates on human rights concerning gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity and the role of human rights in eliminating discrimination. 
• to improve students’ ability of critical thinking.

Course Content: Instead of adopting a philosophical perspective on the concept or a legalistic perspective on its practice, this course considers human rights as politics. Within a political perspective on human rights, the course relocates rights at the junction of politics and law, as the outcomes of social movements and power relations. In this context, fundamental premises of the contemporary human rights regime are introduced and discussed primarily. Then, by referring to the dynamic relationship between social movements and law, the course examines the historical process of identitybased rights movements. In this regard, the course questions the potentials and limits of human rights in struggles against discrimination and inequality. For this discussion, the course mainly focuses on political identities based on gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. It introduces fundamental political-legal concepts and the minimum universal standards in this context. Ultimately, the course discusses the role of politics in the expansion of the scope of international human rights standards.