The Human Rights of Non-citizens 11 principles and practices, as well as how resistance to law can constitute resistance to injustice. Refusal to observe border controls and even the very act of transit over boundaries reject global forms of apartheid and constitute a demonstration of agency – or “acts of citizenship.”35 Taken together, the chapters in this part underscore the limits of both global and domestic governance in securing the human rights of asylum seekers and refugees. They highlight the magnitude of injustice that is perpetuated by prioritizing national interests over the welfare of asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants. Maintaining draconian border controls and waging policies of deterrence, the Global North enforces a kind of global apartheid that has ramifications not only in the present, but also for future generations. part ii: belonging across borders Why do we – or should we – act to protect people who are suffering, when those people are not part of our political community and when their suffering is distant, both geographically and metaphorically? What underpins the human rights commitment to universality, the idea that every individual everywhere should have rights regardless of their political membership? Scholars across a range of disciplines have provided a variety of answers to these questions, some of which are highly pragmatic. Michael Perry, for example, points to ideas such as religion, altruism, and selfinterest as motivating the “spirit of brotherhood” that is called for in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.36 The altruistic perspective, Perry explains, rests in an individual’s self-perception of themselves as an altruist – as one who believes all life matters and is simply “wired” to care about suffering.37 Others point to empathy and other-identification as providing a basis for acting to protect those outside one’s own political community. Lynn Hunt, for example, argues that the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century was instrumental in promoting the idea of equality and expanding the capacity of the reader to have empathy with those separated by lines of class and other status.38 Novels, according to Hunt, provided the foundation for the idea of universal rights because they allowed the reader to see others “as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions.”39 As Alison Brysk has written, human rights is centrally about the mobilization of care, which itself “rests on empathy, and empathy requires humanization.”40 Serena 35 Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship. M. J. Perry, “Why Act Towards One Another ‘In a Spirit of Brotherhood?’: The Grounds of Human Rights,” in M. Goodale (ed.), Human Rights at the Crossroads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 45. 37 Ibid., pp. 55–56. 38 L. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 40. 39 Ibid. 40 A. Brysk, “‘Why We Care’: Constructing Solidarity,” in Goodale (ed.), Human Rights at the Crossroads, pp. 163, 167. 36 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press