1 Performing Human Rights: the meaning of rights in the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights Anthony J. Langlois Asia has long been the only region without an institutionalized human rights framework. It is difficult to envisage the form a human rights mechanism might take for the whole of such a heterogeneous region as “Asia.” For a sub‐region such as that already institutionalized through the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), however, the latent possibility for such a mechanism has been the focus of human rights proponents for several decades – a focus which has very recently, in 2009, resulted in an ASEAN human rights body: the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (the AICHR). How should we best interpret this development? What might it mean for the realization of human rights in the region? What impact will it have on democratic participation and citizenship rights in ASEAN’s member states? How will it impact ASEAN’s interstate relations, and member states relations beyond the region? Crucially, how will the already multiple meanings of human rights in the political discourses of the region continue to change and evolve? The creation of the AICHR, on the surface, marks a radical change in the region’s engagement with human rights. But what has changed, and in what ways? In the 1990s the region was famous for adversarial stances (particularly from political and intellectual elites) towards Western notions of and politics around human rights; but it was also known as a site of rights advocacy, with advocates trying to hold states to their own standards, as well as to international standards. In this chapter I want to think critically about how we might regard the idea of human rights as it now becomes more concretely institutionalized regionally. Of particular interest is how this institutionalization (in the various forms it will take under the aegis of the AICHR) interacts with the various kinds of politics which are traditionally associated with human rights in and beyond the region: the politics of universal values (in both the senses of advocacy for and critique of these alleged universals); practices of political dissent, democratic participation and citizenship; and ideas of emancipation. In the following discussion I use recent theoretical work on human rights by Neil Stammers (on institutionalization) and Karen Zivi (on the performativity of making rights claims) to elaborate a critical account of the establishment and probable further evolution of the AICHR and of the altered human rights politics which already flows from these institutional developments within ASEAN. Contextualizing the appearance of the AICHR For most casual observers of the Southeast Asian region, the creation of the AICHR will need some contextualization (see also: Langlois 2011). The region is not known for its pursuit of intergovernmental cooperation over the promotion and protection of human rights. Quite the reverse: its most famous association with human rights (and democracy more broadly) is the controversy over the so