ABSTRACT
This is a work of ethical theory in which I have examined the role of concepts of individual human rights in the practices of contemporary world politics. On the argument that I have presented, notions of individual human rights are not something marginal to the great events of world politics. It has been a central contention of this work that understanding many, if not most, actions in global politics in the contemporary world requires of us that we understand these acts to be situated in the two great practices of our time, civil society and the practice of democratic and democratizing states. I have argued that we only understand these practices once we have understood the rights claims we make within them and how these rights claims are internally related to the other major elements within these two practices.
