Jordan Roberts, University of Utah
Political Science
I explore the tragic collision between individual self-determination and collective self-determination. While the conflict between these two ideals exists in many forms throughout political life, I focus on an international manifestation of this collision: the conflict between national sovereignty (predicated on collective self-determination) and international human rights (predicated on individual self-determination). There are perhaps no two international values more acclaimed, and no two values that clash as intensely; to allow for sovereignty means to allow for human rights abuses and to intervene in the name of human rights means to deny sovereignty. Eschewing traditional political lenses, I employ a tragic framework that 1) allows fuller engagement with the conflict and 2) avoids the pitfalls of the traditional lenses, including one-sidedness (which fuels the continuation of the conflict) and detachment (which allows for inaction). I draw on Sophocles’ Antigone, interpreting the title character as an embodiment of individual self-determination and Creon as an embodiment of collective self-determination. Furthermore, I argue that prominent attempts at finding a compromise between the two forces caught in this tragic collision, exemplified by the emerging international norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), are blind to the collision’s inherently tragic nature, and thus subvert one or both of the values at stake. I also address how this tragic blindness of notable theorists working on questions concerning human rights and sovereignty reproduces the blindness of another Sophoclean character: Oedipus. While tragic conflicts do not lend themselves to neat and tidy outcomes, a tragic framework embraces the conflict, instead of sidestepping it, and works towards an ambiguous, unhappy solution.