Property is justifiably at the core of inquiries on the nexus of law, power and political economy. While it has been at the receiving end of a diverse range of critical perspectives—most prominently Marxism—that ultimately see it as the institutional backbone of exploitation and social domination, for others, property retains an emancipatory promise rooted in the values of autonomy, self-authorship or social participation. This tension animates and forms the backdrop for Laura Dehaibi’s attempt at synthesis in Property, Power and Human Rights: Lived Universalism In and Through the Margins. Situating her contribution squarely in international human rights law, Dehaibi challenges the liberal underpinnings of the right to property and criticizes its ultimately pernicious social effects while at the same time attempting to rescue an emancipatory core within property’s ‘social potential,’ drawing from lived experiences ‘in and through the margins.’

The book starts with a conceptual challenge to abstract universalism as the foundation or moral underpinning of the idea of human rights. Drawing from Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Dehaibi deconstructs mainstream claims of universalism by showing how their ‘abstraction’ obscures the political character of the norms they seek to universalize.Footnote ¹ The human rights ideal is, from this perspective, a historically situated—rather than an ahistorical—project, characterized by a positivist aspiration to permanently fixate abstract rules in isolation from their environment. However, Dehaibi follows Upendra Baxi in distinguishing between the historical tendency of ‘universalizing’ Western liberal values and the idea of universal rights as moral claims.Footnote ² In Dehaibi’s ‘localized universalism,’ the universality of human rights derives from lived experience and consists of enabling social participation. This speaks to the fundamental need for social interaction and the fact that rights always evolve within a concrete social context rather than made in the abstract.

This is the line of thinking that ultimately grounds the nuanced and conditional defense of property as a human right. If the right to property were to be seen in light of ‘the needs of marginalized people in location’ (p. 34) rather than through the prism of abstract, liberal rights, then it could enable people’s meaningful social participation and contribute to a more responsive and empathic human rights agenda. Social inclusion, for Dehaibi, may be understood as an intrinsic feature of the human right to property. This means that the social benefits of property derive from the act of ownership rather than from its limitations (p. 52). Yet, for Dehaibi, this reflects a human rights ethos that is not directly reproducible in private law concepts, where the right to property is often rooted. Therefore, Dehaibi objects to the transfer of domestic notions of property, aimed at the protection of a liberal market economy, to the realm of international human rights. In fact, Dehaibi makes a strong case for how the original version of the right to property in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) reflected the drafters’ acknowledgement of a differentiation between property rights associated with a liberal capitalist economy and the right to property as a basic human right. The ability to draw this distinction also constitutes an attempt at the kind of synthesis Dehaibi is after: In the original Article 22 of the UDHR, the human right to property was limited to personal property (as opposed to market-oriented property), with other forms of property being subject to state regulation.

The book then turns to regional case law on property to examine whether human rights adjudicative bodies have perpetuated or challenged this conflation. Drawing from the receptiveness of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) primarily and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights secondarily to the lived experience and human dimension of cases relating to property, Dehaibi shows how such a conceptualization of the right to property may flesh out the social potential of property. Dehaibi is keen to stress how the presentation of lived experiences of property within the process of adjudication can lead to the reinterpretation or reshaping of the normative standards of courts otherwise deferential to liberal ideals, like the ECtHR.Footnote ³

Despite the book’s overall commitment to a contextual reading of the right to property as an enabler of social participation, Dehaibi pre-empts some critiques by highlighting how meaningful social participation cannot be concretized through the right to property alone. Looking beyond the right to property, social participation can be more holistically approached as a ‘claim of access’ (p. 192). The inadequacy of property is particularly visible in the context of informal or extra-legal arrangements, where the promise of formalization does not necessarily match the aspirations of those in need of access and enablement. While the recognition of the limitations and dangers of viewing social participation solely through the lens of the right to property is a crucial and welcome nuance to the book’s narrative, it almost undermines the initial normative thrust. For instance, Dehaibi acknowledges that the IACtHR’s generous reading of the right to property and the recognition this has meant for indigenous peoples’ autonomy insidiously perpetuates the narrative that it is only through property that people may gain social and political visibility (p. 195). Yet, this observation is, in some ways, a challenge to the book’s overarching project: If the perpetuation of a narrative that ultimately legitimates inequalities of resources and access is a latent danger in the defense of even a contextual reading of property, why attempt this reappropriation and recasting of the right to property in the first place?

A key contribution of Property, Power and Human Rights is its plea for context, its resolute defense of lived experience as a normative yardstick and its challenge to presumably apolitical abstraction that functions as an internal critique of the human rights project. Its attempt for a synthesis in the dialectics of property as domination vs. property as freedom builds on this prioritization of context. For the families of El Mozote, with which the book opens, the right to property could be integral in their survival and an avenue for social participation. At the same time, as the readers of the Business and Human Rights Journal are acutely aware, for transnational corporations, the right to property is a means to legitimate exclusion and establish market dependence for survival, which in turn forms the basis for relations of domination and social hierarchy. The question is, what are the limits of this contextualization? Are there aspects of ‘property,’ the defense of which in certain contexts only legitimizes their invocation in others? Ultimately, this begets a question about abstraction in legal thinking and practice. If legal systems rely on and reproduce abstraction in the form of juridical personhood and general principles, as well as through a form of systematicity and analogical reasoning, then the scope for contextualization is structurally limited. Aspects of property will be canonized; formal equality will require their application regardless of material conditions. In other words, the legal form as such imposes structural limitations to Dehaibi’s call for substantive justice by means of an adjudicative process able to differentiate between market-oriented and non-market-oriented property, defending property’s enabling function for those who need it while circumscribing it for those who gain undue power from it.

Yet, there is also a substantive question that Dehaibi’s contextual defense of the right to property stops short of asking. Can the owners’ private authority—even in concreto—be circumscribed in such a way that does not go beyond its contribution to self-determination and social participation? Dehaibi’s choice to focus on lived experience in settings where property will not manifest as domination allows them to bypass this challenge. However, the key argument about property’s social potential is arguably transferable beyond ‘lived experience in the margins.’ In that sense, there is an unacknowledged continuity between Property, Power and Human Rights’ focus on property as an enabler of social potential with progressive liberal defenses of property that see the mission of property law not in its self-limitation but in a proactive expansion of ‘people’s opportunities for individual and collective self-determination while restricting options of interpersonal domination.’Footnote ⁴ This is visible when Dehaibi argues that ‘the idea of [property’s social] potential suggests that ownership can foster a person’s autonomous capacity to develop into a full social being, in harmony with the community’ (p. 52). This establishes the foundation for a broader normative argument beyond the focus on ‘marginalized people in location’ (p. 34) and introduces tension within the book. On the one hand, if the analysis extends to property’s social potential in general, the attempted synthesis will have to face these difficult questions—most importantly, at what point social participation becomes the domination of others. On the other hand, if the argument remains confined to ‘the subaltern,’ it is compelling, but, as Dehaibi herself demonstrates, it is ultimately incomplete and potentially subsumable within a more holistic ‘claim of access.’ In other words, in this reading, there is nothing intrinsically valuable about the concept of property—it is about what it can achieve, and if there are better ways to achieve it, then, presumably, property needs not to be defended.

Overall, readers of the Business and Human Rights Journal would have a lot to gain from reading Property, Power and Human Rights. In particular, Dehaibi’s concept of ‘lived universalism,’ developed through an internal critique of human rights universalism and grounded in lived experiences ‘in and through the margins,’ aligns with reconstructive efforts within the BHR community to conceptualize power in a contextualized way. Yet, the emphasis on context and lived experience also casts a shadow of doubt on the effectiveness of a major policy development in the business and human rights field: human rights due diligence legislation. As companies are tasked with assessing the risks in their supply chains and devising mitigation plans, the absence of a nuanced understanding of the context of localized production reveals a potentially significant shortcoming in how ‘universal’ human rights will be understood and effectively safeguarded. Without a deep understanding of the context in which supply chains operate, companies are bound to engage in the project of ‘abstract universalism’ that Dehaibi critiques. In turn, this paves the way for a critical question on how human rights due diligence could align with the vision of a ‘localized universalism’—a question that is beyond the scope of this review. Nevertheless, this discussion highlights how the concepts developed in Property, Power and Human Rights may offer critical insights into the evolving business and human rights debates and, thus, be valuable to the readers of the Business and Human Rights Journal.