Democratic Citizenship and the Practice of Rights

Abstract

We make rights claims for all kinds of reasons, under vastly different circumstances and in a host of distinctive contexts. And we do this all around the globe. But why do we make rights claims? What do we intend to do when we engage in this activity? And what is it that we actually do, regardless of our intentions, when we make rights claims? In this paper, I argue that making rights claims is an activity that is vital to the cultivation of democratic citizenship. More specifically, I suggest that it is through rights claiming that we come to learn and hone the important civic skills of persuasion and judgment and have the opportunity to challenge stigma and shape new conceptions of the self. I make this case by examining what two South African civil society organizations - the Treatment Action Campaign and Mothers2Mothers - have done to bring to fruition their country's Constitutional promise to protect and promote women's rights and access to health care. This analysis of rights as a practice of democratic politics poses a challenge to more traditional philosophical understandings of rights as trumps, whether these are affirmative or critical. And it does so by drawing on the insights of the philosophy of language and investigating rights through the lens of speech act theory. In addition, it engages with debates, particularly among feminists, about the means to and value of fighting for women's reproductive, sexual, and health rights.