Title: When Human Rights Go Wrong
Description: This dissertation analyzes the limits of international human rights law (IHRL) in the Arab region. It examines two case studies representing opposing ends of the human rights spectrum. The first focuses on Tunisia, understood to be the only democratic and free country in the region, while the second pertains to the occupied Palestinian territories, which continues to endure the longest territorial occupation in modern history. These two cases illustrate circumstances under which extralegal strategies for diminishing human suffering become not only possible but necessary. In both contexts, arguments rooted in the normative logic of international human rights law have failed and its formal legal and procedural mechanisms have been exhausted. This dissertation seeks to examine precisely the extralegal and sometimes radical logics that have arisen in this new liminal space as alternatives to and complements of the formal structures of IHRL.