States of Human Rights

States are in a paradoxical position in relation to human rights. On one hand state actors are to be held accountable as the violators of human rights (1). On the other hand, states are addressed in international human rights law as the guarantors of human rights.

Sociologists (and indeed, political theorists), have, however, barely begun to address questions that are raised by the paradoxes of ‘states of human rights’. The purpose of this paper is to open up these questions by shifting focus from the activities of human rights activists and their attempts to legitimate their rights-claims in order to make law or to make law count, to look at the structures with which they must engage in trying to realise human rights in practice. How are states structured in ways that facilitate or impede the realisation of human rights?