The language of rights is central to how language problems are approached today. Policy documents and academic literature put language rights at the heart of their analysis. Language rights-based policies are displacing traditional language planning, while sociolinguistic studies have become studies of language rights. Language rights are also increasingly discussed as human rights, inspired by the remarkable expansion of international human rights advocacy over the last couple of decades. Human rights have been looked to as values for a ‘godless’ or post-political age (Klug, 2000; Laidi, 1998). In recent decades radicals and reformers have turned to law to address the spectrum of social concerns, disappointed with the inability of politics and economics to change societies globally (Bowring, 2008; Brown and Halley, 2002; Grigg-Spall and Ireland, 1992; King, 1997; Klug, 2000; Shute and Hurley, 1993). This turn to law contrasts with earlier left- wing scepticism towards law, which highlighted undemocratic legal power, legal abuses and miscarriages of justice (Griffith, 1977). International law is particularly associated by human rights advocates, with non-violence, and international politics with war and state violence (Robertson, 1999). This pattern was observed over seventy years ago by the international relations historian E.H. Carr (Carr, 1939, p. 219).