We are living in a world in which human rights are violated on an unprecedented scale, often by the states who claim to protect them. According to Giorgio Agamben, this is no coincidence: he argues that human rights are actually a sign of our growing powerlessness and political alienation.

Taking Agamben’s critique as their starting point, Lechte and Newman explore questions of statelessness, exclusion, the violence of securitisation and the visual representation of refugees and illegal migrants in the media. They propose a radical rethinking of human rights: as disengaged from humanitarianism, biopolitics, sovereignty and the society of the spectacle; as becoming genuinely political.