Replying to an article by Lenore Lyons in Critical Asian Studies (March 2009), the author of this essay argues that the tendency to treat a critique of rights as a rejection of rights betrays a modernist hesitation that refuses to treat rights and the subject imbued by them as ontologically unstable. Unproblematically, liberal prescriptions of rights and a strong civil society assume the presence of sovereign individuals with inherent rights that can be guarded by a politically independent civil society. The case study of Singapore, however, reveals the substantive emptiness of rights that is both susceptible to colonization by the state's instrumental interests and amenable to the humane interventions of civil society groups campaigning for the protection of foreign workers. By framing and reframing the rights of female migrant workers as complementary to the economic interests of the host society, the author illustrates how an awareness of the contingent nature of rights by Transient Workers Count Too and the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics allows them to perform their humanitarian work within an illiberal political terrain. By reconciling the seemingly universalistic nature of inherent rights with its situa-tional usefulness for political practice, the strategic maneuvers both groups made also contribute to a greater self-reflexivity about the unproblematic deployment of rights-based instruments in the political projects of our time. The author also argues that in failing to address the formulation of rights as ontologically unstable, Lyons's misplaced criticisms reflect a broader discomfort about the unsettling nature of postmodern critique that disrupts liberalism's moral foundations. © 2009 BCAS, Inc.

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immigration policy Singapore [Southeast Asia] liberalism civil society human rights sovereignty migrant worker colonization