Contingent pasts and contingent futures: Reformulating strategies of governance, autonomy and critique through sovereignty and human rights

Despite serious challenges to their epistemological bases, sovereignty and rights remain important concepts through which we make sense of ourselves and our relationships with others. This thesis investigates transformations of sovereignty and rights through shifts from liberal to neo-liberal governmental rationalities taking place in late-modernity. It seeks to determine the effects of these new formulations for the autonomy and critical capacities of individuals. It argues that these shifts have only re-formulated and reified certain constitutional meanings, effectively rendering the liberal understandings of political life they evoke more immutable now than ever before. To disrupt their increasing fixity and to demonstrate their contingency this thesis undertakes genealogies of both sovereignty and human rights, and draws connections to the transformations taking place in governmental rationalities. The final pages present a provocative argument that challenges the formulation of human rights and neo-liberal governance as essentially oppositional. I suggest that human rights may actually help bolster and secure neo-liberal governmentality.