‘Citizenship and Human Rights: the Challenge of the Neo Liberal Noughties’,

Abstract

Human rights, defined as international standards and norms for economic rights (labor rights, housing and food rights), cultural rights and the right to protection from physical harm; challenge the construction of citizenship in its traditional liberal form. This traditional form, and the context in which it is created, needs to be subject to a process of continuous scrutiny within a paradigm of social and economic justice and subsequently reformulated. Currently a major impediment to this democratic and continuous process of reformulation is the practical and ideological imposition of neo liberal policy; conceived for and by ruling class interests. This paper discusses the dialectic of rights in citizenship, its antithesis neo liberalism and its synthesis Keynesianism. But the reintroduction of Keynesianism is only the tip of alternatives necessary to insert human rights meaningfully into the construction of citizenship within the context of state policy.