a common humanity. I will return in more detail to this topic in the concluding
chapter.
While there is very significant conceptual overlap inherent in the practice of
humanitarianism and the practice of human rights, a further caveat should be
noted, which in fact relates to the perceived strength of human rights for
humanitarians in search of greater accountability. The concerns summarised by
humanitarianism are necessarily other-regarding. To express humanitarian concern
does not imply pure altruism, as we have seen, and can often productively interact
both with our sense of self and our sense of self-interest. However, the object of
humanitarian concern is necessarily different from the subject. In contrast, human
rights summarise both other-regarding, humanitarian concerns and self-regarding
concerns. I cannot conduct a humanitarian campaign on my own behalf, but I can
advocate for my own human rights. Indeed, there is a strong argument, which we
can find in both John Stuart Mill and Michael Walzer, that the political gains of
human rights protection are strongest when they represent the result of concerted
struggle. Marie-Bénédicte Dembour^ has recently characterised this perspective as
the “protest” school of thought.^64
Here we approach the idea that human rights may be most effective when,
at least collectively, they become a self-help mechanism. If it is the case, as I have
argued, that an important way to understand human rights is as the crystallisation
of humanitarian impulses, and therefore as an important humanitarian project, it
must nevertheless be recognised that this is by no means the only, nor perhaps the
most important source of actually-existing human rights. The other dynamic in play
is the process through which people, and peoples, have struggled to take power
from the grasp of rulers in the form of rights.^65 In doing so, they have frequently
seized upon the vocabulary of universal human rights to do so. So though universal
human rights may represent a language formulated amidst the concern for the
64
She makes the following distinction: “‘natural scholars’ conceive of human rights as
given ; ‘deliberative scholars’ as agreed upon ; ‘protest scholars’ as fought for ; and ‘discourse
scholars’ as talked about .” Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, "What Are Human Rights? Four
Schools of Thought", 65 Human Rights Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2010): 2. Italics in original.
Onuf, "Humanitarian Intervention": 773.