From a Generation of Rights to a Re-generation of Resistance: Solidarity and the Challenge to Global Domination and Hierarchy

Global crises generate cross-border threats to human rights, often because of action or inaction on the part of states and non-state actors far away. This reality complicates efforts to prevent and hold actors accountable for human rights violations, particularly in a field closely connected to the liberal international order that treats the nation-state as both the main protector and violator of the human rights of individuals within its jurisdiction. This article seeks to decouple international human rights law from liberal constraints by reconceptualising so-called ‘solidarity rights’. It argues that this category of rights did not emerge as a response from within the discipline itself to cross-border challenges but were rather the result of collective struggles against global domination and hierarchy. Reframing solidarity rights as emerging from practices of resistance reveals their potential to re-energise imaginations of rights. This ‘re-generation of resistance’ offers an alternative vision to challenge global power structures outside the constraints of the liberal international order.