Informational Logic of Human Rights

Josh Bowsher is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex, following a recently completed Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Brunel University. Broadly speaking, Josh’s research explores the often-fraught relationships between human rights discourses, contemporary capitalism and radical change. His work has been published in Social & Legal Studies, The European Journal of Social Theory, New Formations, and Theory & Event.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Beyond the Neoliberal Critique?1. Cybernetic Capitalism/Informational ‘Politics’2. Seeing Violations as Events: Technologies of Capture and Cutting3. Doing Rights as Indicators: Informatizing Social and Economic Rights4. When Violations Become Vectors: Human Rights Work in the Era of Big Data5. After Informational Logic: Rethinking Information/Rethinking RightsNotes

Into the struggle to understand how human rights politics arose in tandem with the neoliberal economics of our times steps Josh Bowsher with a revelatory new framework. The age of human rights has also been the age of information -- and the informational mode prevalent in our phase of capitalism has caged a potentially radical politics. Exploring how this has happened, often reducing movements to shame and stigma, without engaging distribution and redistribution as readily, this intrepid book also looks to a future liberated from existing limitations.