This book demonstrates how human rights instruments and values have brought different movements together in the struggle against free trade under the banners of state duty and law enforcement with their underlying principles of equality and human dignity. Special emphasis is placed on how subjectivities influence identification with certain values and legal or political strategies. Furthermore, by focusing on the understanding of human rights by social agents the book also shows that specific human rights have more political potential for certain types of subjects in the struggle against free trade than others, such as the right to development, the rights of women and the right to food. This analysis is conducted with a specifically Latin American theorization of human rights that challenges both Eurocentric scholarly works on the issue and the arguments of European activists directed at the allegedly Western authorship of human rights discourses.

Social conflict involving migrants, which includes terrorism, migrant trafficking and kidnappings, and riots and the occupation of public places, is a direct result of the systematic refusal of receiving countries to recognize that migrants have universal human rights. Analysis of this causal relationship indicates that certain elements of migration policy in Europe and North America--such as the securitization of border controls and development cooperation policies, the use of foreigner internment camps as part of a tougher asylum policy, the criminalization of irregular migration, and social exclusion resulting from widespread discrimination--lead to violent social conflict. These violent conflicts of potentially global impact could be prevented were countries that receive migrants to adopt a system of justice--a decolonized global justice--that recognizes the human rights of migrants.

Using examples from the United States-Mexico border, Central America, and South America, this book argues that forced migration is not a spontaneous phenomenon, but rather a product of necropolitical strategies designed to depopulate resource rich countries or regions. Estevez merges necropolitical analysis with postcolonial migration and offers a new framework to study the set of policies, laws, institutions, and political discourses producing a profit in a legal context in which habitat devastation is legal, but mobility is a crime. Violence, deprivation of food or water, environmental contamination, and rights exclusion are some of the tactics used in extractivist capitalism. Private and state actors alike, use necropower, both its first and third world versions, to make people, living and dead, a commodity.

This book discusses and theorizes Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, the politics of death, in the specific context of North America. It works to characterize and analyze the particularities and relational differences of American and Canadian necropowers vis-a-vis their devices, subjectivities, necroempowered subjects, and production of spaces of death in their geographical and symbolic borderlands with the Third World: the US-Mexico border, indigenous lands, migrant and Black-American neighborhoods, and resource rich geographies. North American necropowers not only profit from death, but also conduct disposable populations to death throughout the region. The volume proposes a postcolonial perspective that characterizes the political power of North America as a necropower-or the sovereign power to make die. Each chapter therefore theorizes and analyzes the specificities of necropower, examining different necropolitics that range from asylum and migration restrictions to the economic exploitation and abandonment of deprived populations and policing of ethnic minorities, in particular Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples, and African Am erican communities.

This book discusses and theorizes Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, the politics of death, in the specific context of North America. It works to characterize and analyze the particularities and relational differences of American and Canadian necropowers vis-a-vis their devices, subjectivities, necroempowered subjects, and production of spaces of death in their geographical and symbolic borderlands with the Third World: the US-Mexico border, indigenous lands, migrant and Black-American neighborhoods, and resource rich geographies. North American necropowers not only profit from death, but also conduct disposable populations to death throughout the region. The volume proposes a postcolonial perspective that characterizes the political power of North America as a necropower-or the sovereign power to make die. Each chapter therefore theorizes and analyzes the specificities of necropower, examining different necropolitics that range from asylum and migration restrictions to the economic exploitation and abandonment of deprived populations and policing of ethnic minorities, in particular Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples, and African Am erican communities.

This book uses human rights as part of a constructivist methodology designed to establish a causal relationship between human rights violations and different types of social and political conflict in Europe and North America.

This book demonstrates how human rights instruments and values have brought different movements together in the struggle against free trade. Estevez employs a specifically Latin American definition of human rights, thus challenging Eurocentric and Western discourses.