ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what a suitably 'realistic' account of rights might be. It argues, tentatively, that a realistic account of rights must build some aspect of a social recognition thesis into the existence condition of rights. Many Indigenous political theorists in Australia and Canada are arguing for eschewing the recognition game with the state and instead asserting the validity of their rights claims as also inhering in their own normative and social orders, and thus a more complex set of practices of mutual recognition and legitimation. In political theory, a conception of 'political realism' has emerged in opposition to 'utopian' political theory and, in particular, to what people might call the 'high Kantianism' of Rawlsian normative political theory that has been so dominant in the Anglo-American world since the 1980s. Realism does not mean that there is not anything to say about either evaluating political regimes, or distinguishing between mere coercion and legitimate authority.
