18 Molly Land, Kathryn Libal, and Jillian Chambers one another57 – what Alison Brysk calls “care” – “giving attention and worth to someone else’s experience, in a way that makes us available for solidarity with that person.”58 Care, in this view, is ultimately a political act and (as Kanstroom would attest) in some instances an act of civil disobedience. Brysk writes: “Care is how we speak love to power.”59 As Ramji-Nogales notes, “only by hearing and uplifting the voices of undocumented migrants can we push human rights law closer to its emancipatory potential, redeeming the humanity of migrants and citizens of destination states alike.” This vision of human rights as acts of care/empathy/solidarity is a vision of human rights not as law, but as action. Human rights are not ensured, but claimed. And it is the process of claiming those rights that helps create the sense of social responsibility needed to ensure rights.60 In Ramji-Nogales’ vision, for example, the value of a treaty is not in the law it might create, but in the networks and relationships that mobilization around a treaty might foster. Transnational advocacy to create international instruments promotes relationships between those in different political communities, thus providing a foundation for the development of greater shared understandings of the meaning of rights. This approach resonates with human rights scholars such as Alicia Ely Yamin, who emphasize the importance of rights-based practices, in addition to rights-based results. Thus, for Yamin, human rights are “social practices that create spaces for vital deliberation on how to arrange social institutions to meet population needs, especially of the most disadvantaged.”61 Of course, this does not mean that law is irrelevant. As Chapters 2–4 illustrate, legal reforms are clearly needed. It does mean, however, that human rights cannot be achieved by law alone. Blitz’s argument about the wrong turn that the UNHCR has taken in focusing solely on top-down technocratic arguments is law at its worst – what Yamin critiques as “top-down formalistic legal tools anchored by fixed understandings of norms.”62 Instead, Yamin argues for understanding human rights as “an incremental process by which they [human beings] can express their diverse views.”63 Richard Wilson has called this “the potential for human rights law to be a form of ‘politics by other means,’ rather than as wholly ‘depoliticizing.’”64 The chapters in this book make a compelling case that we must begin the work of prioritizing the voices of migrants and refugees caught in law’s gaps. Even if the Faulk, “Solidarity and Accountability,” p. 106. Brysk, “‘Why We Care’,” p. 163. 59 Ibid., p. 164. 60 Faulk, “Solidarity and Accountability,” p. 105. 61 A. E. Yamin, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why the Matter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 65. 62 Ibid., p. 247. 63 Ibid. 64 R. A. Wilson, “Tyrannosaurus Lex: The Anthropology of Human Rights and Transnational Law,” in M. Goodale and S. E. Merry (eds.), The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 342, 355. 57 58 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press