Unbinding Repressions: The Conception of Resistance in and beyond Human Rights Discourse

This thesis concerns the function of human rights in relation to advancing a conception of resistance. It analyses counter-hegemonic approaches to human rights that highlight the contributions of anti-colonial and self-determination struggles as regenerative of human rights ideals. It utilises the psychoanalytic conception of resistance to assess the treatment of resistance in human rights as an agentic act against oppression. Firstly, it suggests a conception of resistance in human rights concerns recognising the struggles of the excluded – as ex-colonised societies and individuals. Such recognition aims to find value in their struggles to declare their autonomy. Secondly, the thesis offers a conception of resistance beyond human rights through psychoanalytic thought, in which resistance concerns a counter-force that sabotages the self-regulating autonomy and a foundational force that perpetually unbinds desires for domination in the political terrain. Thirdly, the thesis discusses whether advancing a right to resistance can sustain a resisting agency for the excluded. It suggests that the basis of agency in human rights is linked to maintaining race as a tool of identification. Race arise as naturalised in the biological determinism of the term ‘human’. Lastly, it examines the role of the Egyptian human rights network in the 2011 Egyptian uprising. It suggests the movement has reiterated the triumph of the uprising through western, progressive ideals while propagating the societal divide between modernist and fundamentalist ideals. The 2011 uprising challenges the utility of human rights practices as its forces disrupted redemptive practices and challenged societal relations. Its forces also question the repressed, as the colonial encounter, that manifests in every reiteration of a supreme Egyptian identity against political and social dissatisfaction. This thesis argues that advancing a conception of resistance beyond human rights ideals exposes its racialising normativity while nurturing resistance to envisioning post-slavery conditions.