Human Rights, Local Plights: The Implications of Rights Discourses in the Struggle over Arab-Palestinian Bedouin Land in Israel

A widely diffused, engaged approach understands human rights as an opportunity to enhance moral progress. Less visible has a critical realm of research that reveals the often ambiguous social life of human rights discourses. This article draws on a specific case study from the intricate issue of how activism for Arab-Palestinian Bedouin citizens in Southern Israel engages with the global human rights discourse. It follows the implications of mobilization, focusing on events related to a campaign against house demolitions in informal,unrecognised settlements. The case shows how human rights discourses tend to silence the agency of political subjects, victimizing and patronizing those who seek emancipation. The ethnographic insights emphasize the role of a range of carnivalesque and spontaneous acts ofresistance, which subvert the patronizing implications of the human rights language.

The Democratic Dynamics of Government Consultations. Speaking Freely and Listening Properly

There is a growing use of consultation and e-consultation procedures by governments. This chapter seeks to examine the role of consultation as part of a new technology of government. Consultation on policy development can reinvigorate democratic engage- ment but often it can silence views through a sort of participatory disempowerment; it can loosen the democratic anchorage of the public service within the state. The chapter develops a governmentality perspective interrogating what participation, democratic engagement and free speech mean in this context, and how ideas of publicness are constructed, managed and controlled. The focus is on the nature of consultation, its relationship to ideas of free speech and speaking freely, and its potential to empower subaltern counterpublics which can formulate oppositional interpretations and urge alternative conclusions. The aim is to develop an idea of the democratic adequacy of the consultation process and draw out a sense of how democratic engagement here can be structured – for good or ill.

Silence and the Image: Raymond Depardon's New York, N.Y.

What was given up in giving up the silence of film, in particular the silence of the city? Echoing Stanley Cavell, this essay contemplates Raymond Depardon’s experimental documentary New York, N.Y. (1985), a film that travels between sound and silence, quietly addressing questions concerning the nature of the photographic medium itself.