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Aside from the case of refugees under international law, are non-citizen outsiders morally justified in unlawfully entering another state? Recent answers to this question, based on a purported right of necessity or civil disobedience, exclude many cases of justified border-crossing and fail to account for its distinctive political character. I argue that in certain non-humanitarian cases, unlawful border-crossing involves the exercise of a remedial moral right to resist the illegitimate exercise of coercive power. The case accepts, for the sake of argument, two conventional assumptions among defenders of immigration restrictions: that states have a 'right to exclude' and that migrants have a prima facie duty to respect borders. Nonetheless, where immigration law is racist or otherwise discriminatory, it violates the egalitarian standards at the core of any authority it can plausibly claim over outsiders. In such cases, it may be resisted even where the law is facially non-discriminatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review essay, I examine two recent books in critical theory as part of a reflection on the utility, as well as the possible risks and limitations, of liberal rights and citizenship in resisting contemporary forms of power. While Ben Golder's book 'Foucault and the Politics of Rights' offers a compelling reconstruction of Foucault's thought that calls attention to the ambivalent character of rights discourse, Wendy Brown's book 'Undoing the Demos' applies a Foucaudlian mode of analysis to paint a dark vision of how neoliberalism is reconfiguring liberal-democratic institutions and norms according to economic imperatives. In this essay, I unpack the arguments of these two books, situating them within a broader context of critical thought and evaluating some of their central ideas and assumptions. I suggest that Golder is insufficiently critical of the central notion he presents of an anti-foundational 'tactical' conception of rights and propose that we instead see rights as political in the sense of being open, provisional and subject to on-going contestation. I examine the evolution of Brown's thinking on rights in her work and call attention to some of the shortcomings in her analysis of power. Ultimately, I propose, both Foucault (in Golder's reading) and Brown demonstrate that it is possible to maintain a productive scepticism towards rights and other humanistic social categories, while acknowledging their indispensable value in certain contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds a new perspective to recent debates about the political nature of rights through attention to their distinctive role within social movement practices of moral critique and social struggle. The paper proceeds through a critical examination of the Political Constitutionalist theories of rights politics proposed by Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy. While political constitutionalists are correct to argue that rights are ‘contestable’ and require democratic justification, they construe political activity almost exclusively with reference to voting, parties and parliamentary law-making, neglecting the vital role rights play in political struggle outside and against the official institutions of democratic citizenship. In contrast to the political constitutionalist stress on the patient and reciprocal negotiation of rights within formal electoral processes, this paper locates the political nature of rights in their conflictual logic as ‘claims’ in multiple spheres that function to mobilise oppositional support against powerful adversaries and challenge dominant understandings. An activist citizenship of rights is frequently necessary, it argues, given the structural barriers of power and inequality that distort legislative decision-making and lead to the denial of fundamental moral entitlements to less powerful groups. The paper provides an illustration of activist citizenship taken from a contemporary squatting movement centred around the right to housing, Take Back the Land. In exercising the moral right to housing, for which they demand political recognition, through the occupation of vacant buildings, the practices of Take Back the Land reflect the conflictual dimension of rights as claims in keeping with their historical role in empowering subordinate groups to challenge unjust relations of power and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The republican tradition in political theory offers a distinct approach to thinking about rights that addresses long-standing objections to the depoliticising logic of the discourse through its attention to power relations and the socially embedded nature of moral claims. However, the most systematic republican theories of rights-based citizenship translate these theoretical commitments into a tame set of institutional proposals that largely affirm existing states. In this article, I critique the limits of Philip Pettit's juridical republicanism and Richard Bellamy's parliamentary republicanism and set out an alternative populist account of republican citizenship based on the notion of rights as claims' - a form of speech act that empowers agents with self-respect to mobilise popular support and challenge arbitrary power when political institutions are unresponsive or unavailable. Populist citizenship takes place whenever social groups and classes mobilise directly outside constitutional structures in order to contest the legitimacy of the political regime and lay claim to new rights through direct appeal to the sovereign authority of the people themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the impact of campaigns by the student movement in Great Britain. Problems associated with the anti-tuition fees campaign are identified. An argument is raised over the effect that the Anti Poll-Tax campaign had on Tory government policy. The achievements of the movement are mentioned including the near defeat of the Coalition government, and success in obtaining a pledge to cut tuition fees.