Disability, Human Rights and the Limits of Humanitarianism

Book excerpt: Contemporary human rights discourses problematically co-opt disabled bodies as ‘evidence’ of harms done under capitalism, war, and other forms of conflict, while humanitarian non-governmental organizations often use disabled bodies to generate resources for their humanitarian projects. It is the connection between civil rights and human rights, and the concomitant relationship between national and global, which foregrounds this book’s contention that disability studies productively challenge such human rights paradigms, which troublingly eschew disability rights in favor of exclusionary humanitarianism.