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Abstract
Notions of human rights and the technologies deploying those notions, legally, institutionally, in advocacy and social discourse, enact a tangled knot of contesting and asserting borders. Universalist assertions of human rights seek to transcend national borders, appealing to a wider grasp of the human, but the formal pursuit of rights establishes rights as mutually constitutive with the state. In advocacy, calling on human rights is a way of recognising people's political, economic and socio-cultural needs, dignity and suffering, beyond state borders. The idea of the human and the universal implicit in prevailing notions of human rights, however, reproduces dominant Eurocentric ontologies of individual and collective life, and patrols a narrowly conceived territory of the universal. These ontologies can be profoundly counterproductive in practice. Because notions of human rights are one of the few internationally available tools for working against the systemic imposition of suffering, we need to work with them in ways that are more open to different ways of being human and of grasping our individual and collective lives. The discussion concludes by sketching a more relational, dialogic conception of human rights.

Some recent scholarship has focused on concerns that implementation and compliance difficulties are undermining the legitimacy of European Union environmental policies and even the EU itself. Other officials and analysts, however, contend that environmental policy is one of the EU's most successful policy areas. While most discuss 'legitimacy' in unspecified or dichotomous terms, it is instead a more nuanced and contested concept. This study investigates several evolving and interacting bases of legitimacies associated with 'permissive acceptance' (based upon functional need, scientific and technical authority, and policy effectiveness), 'appropriateness' (based upon normative consensus, legalization, and adjudication), democracy (based upon representation, participation, and deliberation), and identity (based upon global leadership and 'othering'). These legitimacies vary in terms of their strength, stability, and durability among the multiple European actors and institutions.