ABSTRACT
At an international level, the proliferation of extralegal practices—from “Enhanced Interrogation Tactics” carried out at “Black Sites” to mass surveillance and disappearances of dissidents abroad—have coalesced into informal institutional arrangements and convenient alliances that explicitly condemn human rights as threats to stability and national security. Similarly, too many democracies have been weakly representative and accountable, more democratic in form than in substance. Pushing toward a more substantial integration of human rights into democratic governance would be one way of powerfully responding to the rise of anti-democratic, anti-rights nationalism. In the current political moment, it is essential that human rights discourse make more explicit the pluralistic vision of democratic political community informed by intersectional social identities that have long been implicit in human rights’ principles.
