The new online journal Re-public <www.re-public. gr/en> invites contributions for its upcoming special issue entitled "New rights, re-imagining democracy". The post-Cold war era has been marked by the proliferation of the notion of rights. Spanning from "human rights" to "animal rights", from "minority rights" to "religious rights", from the "right to a basic income" to the "right of freedom of exchange", this dominant political discourse of rights conjoins the whole political spectrum, the left and right, even those who claim to move beyond this binary. Whatever, its political usage has been, the concept of “new rights” encompasses a radically transformative potential for the field of democracy. That is, it presents a direct challenge to the primary categories through which modern democracy has been conceived and practiced: it subvert the dichotomies of citizen/alien, public/private, male/female, inside/outside and so on. New rights raise the promise of absolute inclusiveness. The special issue aims to explore the possibilities that the notion of new rights presents for re-imagining democratic theory and practice. Possible topics include:
- Beyond the citizen/alien distinction: migrants rights
- Beyond patriarchical democracy: Womens rights
- Beyond homophobia: Gay and lesbian rights
- Beyond the human/non-human binary: animal rights, the rights of machines
- Beyond the control of knowledge: Digital rights
- Beyond westernisation: Re-writing rights in the face of cultural, religious pluralism
Deadline for articles: 20 May 2007. Essays should be approximately 1.500 words long. Please submit contributions in any electronic format to:
For more information, see http://re-public.gr/en