The Community of Rights

Description

This book examines the simple yet nebulous concept of 'community' in relation to the notion of 'rights'. The authors assert that these terms are problematic since the notions of identification, symmetry, totality, and unity often promote hegemonic and totalitarian actions, by both the state and the corporations, in the name of the community. These actions, however, do not conform to the traditional sense of community rooted in the local conditions governing social and biotic relations. This volume, therefore, seeks to understand community as a complex allegory for relational identities in their human, environmental, historical, and contextual fullness. The authors go on to unravel the generally accepted notion of 'human' rights, which pays scant attention to the environmental conditions making humanity possible, and prioritizes individual rights over community rights. This privileging promotes the logic of neoliberal discourses of privatization and individual ownership through corporate entities. At the same time, the book also criticizes the privileging of the community in social practices that suppress and destroys individuals whose actions seem to challenge the notion of community values. The book proposes that a radical rethinking is necessary, in which the notion of rights does not depend on any privileging, but flows from the inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of the 'individual' and the 'community' in their complex relational dynamism along with multiple forms of relatedness—to the land, to other forms of life, and to inanimate beings.