Understanding the Universal Right to Education as Jurisgenerative Politics and Democratic Iterations

ABSTRACT This article examines how the universal human right to education can be understood in terms of what Seyla Benhabib considers ‘democratic iterations’. Further, by referring to the concept of jurisgenerative politics, Benhabib argues that a democratic people reinterpret guiding norms and principles which they find themselves bound to, through iterative acts, so that they are not only the subjects but also the authors of laws. By examining the use of the Article of the universal right to education in the European Convention on Human Rights, not as an Article with an unambiguous meaning, but as an Article which from its very start was the subject of different interpretations and desires, the author argues for an understanding of the process of transforming universal rights into national law and norms as democratic iterations. This way of conceiving democratic iterations is examined empirically, with Sweden as an example, by analyses of three different discursive arenas: a political/legal arena; an arena concerning political contests over independent schools; and a more limited arena for advocating denominational schools. The conclusion is that two different disjunctions – between universal norms and national self-determination and between law as power and law as meaning – are productive interspaces for renegotiating and rearticulating universal law into local/national norms