Human Rights and the Political: Insurgent Citizenship at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra, Australia 1972-

Following Hannah Arendt, the right to have rights is the right to belong to a political community in which one's opinions are significant and one's actions are effective. This project will examine how marginalized groups such as indigenous people enact the right to have rights through practices of insurgent citizenship. In this context, the project will address a practical and a conceptual paradox.

The practical paradox concerns how best to understand the politics of human rights exemplified in the struggle of the Aboriginal tent embassy in Australia. The movement for Aboriginal sovereignty began in Australia in 1972 when several young indigenous men claimed to establish an embassy in front of Parliament House on behalf of the Aboriginal nation. In this demonstration, immanent outsiders to a polity (indigenous people) claimed a right that they did not have within existing practices of citizenship. Human rights are commonly viewed as universal entitlements that we have as human beings irrespective of our membership in a particular political community. But the demonstration of Tent Ambassadors seem to reverse this common sense: the protesters demonstrate their universal entitlement as human beings by both insisting on their status as 'aliens' within the Australian polity and acting as if they are citizens of a Sovereign Aboriginal Nation.

The conceptual paradox follows from this and concerns the paradox that Arendt's notion of the right to have rights gives rise to. Arendt's prescient analysis of the perplexities of the rights of man, published just after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, seemed to show that it is only by virtue of citizenship that we have any rights at all. In inter-war Europe, stateless people found themselves in precisely the situation in which they needed to invoke their human rights. Yet they were effectively rightless. Consequently, Arendt claimed that the only true human right is the right to have rights. But this leads to the question in what sense those who become rightless (by virtue of being excluded from citizenship) might claim the right to have rights. The project will address this paradox by examining how Arendt's analysis of the right to have rights has been developed within three paradigms in contemporary political theory, exemplified in the work of Seyla Benhabib (Frankfurt school), Giorgio Agamben (Heideggerian) and Jacques Rancière (post-Marxist).

The project will analyse the languages and practices through which immanent outsiders invoke human rights to engage in acts of insurgent citizenship. The study of languages will inquire into what can be said. It will do so by investigating Arendt's conception of the right to have rights and how it has been interpreted in contemporary political theory. The study of practices will inquire into what can be done. It will investigate the strategies of insurgent citizenship exemplified by the Tent Ambassadors and their impact on the practices of citizenship they contest. Rather than distinguishing sharply between theory and practice, the specialized discourse of political theorists and the political activism of the social movements will be treated as different aspects of generalized political thinking ('the political') that is the proper object of reflection of a political theory of politics.

A workshop will be held in Canberra to engage Aboriginal activists and scholars in the project. The main outcomes will be a sole-authored monograph and a co-edited book (with Shino Konishi, ANU), including a contributing chapter and co-authored introduction.

The project will benefit activists involved with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Australia by deepening our understanding of the nature of their political activity and the effectiveness of their strategies. The project will provide an opportunity for activists to develop links with academics through participation in the workshop. It will also provide institutional resources for activists to reach a broader audience through the public conference that will be held in Canberra following the fellowship. The project will ensure that activists associated with the Tent Embassy protest and the Working Group for Aboriginal Rights benefit from the research by actively involving them from the outset and by providing them with an opportunity to address both an academic and broader popular audience.

The research will also benefit human rights activists and organizations more generally. The theory of human rights that the project aims to develop has the potential to benefit human rights activists more broadly by providing a new vocabulary in which to articulate and develop strategies for social transformation. The project aims to maximize the impact of the research findings by presenting them at a public conference to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Tent Embassy.

The research will benefit the wider public by deepening our understanding of the nature of democratic citizenship and its relation to the politics of human rights. We commonly understand ways of being political in terms of the dominant representation of citizenship by ruling groups in society. This project will deepen our understanding of practices of citizenship by demonstrating how they are dependent on the immanent outsiders they exclude. It will also enrich our understanding of citizenship by demonstrating how immanent outsiders contest and transform the self-understanding of citizens though enacting the right to have rights. Moreover it will challenge our prevailing humanitarian view of the politics of human rights.