| The international community has long distinguished civil and political rights from economic and social rights. For the past half-century, the global North has delegitimized the latter based on the presumption that such rights were inherently vague, positive, non-justiciable, and therefore invalid. Over the past decade, however, Northern NGOs have increasingly begun to work for the realization of subsistence rights, a subset of economic and social rights dealing with extreme poverty. This dissertation attempts to understand what emerging NGO work on subsistence rights implies for human rights politics.; Employing an interpretive, multiple-method, qualitative research design, I investigate the emergence of subsistence rights among three types of NGOs: human rights, social justice, and humanitarian organizations. While human rights organizations have adopted a legal approach to subsistence rights, social justice and humanitarian organizations approach them predominantly through moral lenses. This diversity of NGO practice shows that the delegitimization of subsistence rights was misguided in two respects. First, human rights organizations are winning important advances for subsistence rights in the legal realm, thus demonstrating that these rights are legally valid when constructed as such. Second, by adopting a moral approach to rights, social justice and humanitarian organizations are demonstrating that subsistence rights can be effective tools to develop norms, transform cultural assumptions, and guide organizational practice even when they are not conceived in legal terms.; I argue that this reconstruction of human rights politics is best understood through a social theory of human rights. Combining constructivism and post-positivist legal understandings, a social theory subsumes human rights, and the historical legalization of rights, within a broader social and political context. It argues that both legal and moral approaches to rights are valuable tools with their own sets of costs and benefits. It suggests that rhetorical, political and cultural contestation is central in the implementation of subsistence rights, whether or not legalization is the ultimate end of NGOs' efforts. An appreciation for a social theory of human rights enables practitioners and scholars to understand how recent NGO engagement with economic and social rights is rewriting the landscape of human rights politics. |
