Human Rights, Security Politics and Embodiment

Major theories of securitization have been indispensable in shedding light on how governmental security politics have been articulated through discourses or through institutionalized practices. While theorists in the field have acknowledged their state-centred focus, they have yet to remedy this. This book provides a rare opportunity to consider such theories in a non-state centred way, focusing instead on ‘virtuous’ or supra-national organizations such as judicial human rights institutions in Europe. This book aims to explore the ways such organizations, illustrated with particular but not exclusive, reference to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), have been complicit in governmental security agendas to the extent of losing their role as neutral arbiter of state actions to colluding with state-led security politics. Thus, it will link the socio-legal study of human rights with the politics of securitization and with European Studies, re-appraising the aspect of the ‘European Project’ that anticipated closer harmonization and integration of nation-states through the operation of supranational courts like the ECtHR. The situation in the United States will be used for comparative purposes. 

The first theme of the book will be to consider the relationship between human rights, embodiment and the violation of bodily integrity. It will demonstrate and explain the subordination of international rights to national security through the issue of ‘embodiment’, the most fundamental of human rights being to protect bodily integrity. 

The book seeks to tease out the contextual background to the way women’s bodies have been treated by judicial human rights. Building on a decade of research by the author, it shows that the steady expansion – in democratic countries – of laws restricting women’s dress and conduct, and [Muslim] women’s lack of success in contesting this via the national or supranational judiciary, are in part due to the liberal individualism that has characterized human rights from their inception.