ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a descriptive analysis of the discursive, disciplinary, and historical relationship of human rights and rhetoric. In order to point out the complex foundational and potentially problematic role that rhetorical theory has played and continues to play in the enablement and critique of human rights discourse since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and suggest that a rhetorical approach is ultimately necessary to parse the normativity that underlies and forms the discourse of rights. Since the ratification of the UDHR, the declaration and instruments of human rights have perpetuated a normative discourse, what Inderpal Grewal calls a human rights "regime," based on first generation or civil and political rights. The chapter turns to the rhetorical concept of kairos and, ultimately, to converse akairos as a rhetorical methodology that tests the limits of normativity in order to further understand the normativity and how it constantly shifts in its engagement with various interlocutors as it comes into being.
