In Give a Man a Fish, James Ferguson tells the tale of a housing rights workshop in Cape Town, organised by a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) in order to inform a group of shack-dwellers—who had been seeking better living conditions to no avail—of their legal entitlements:

There is nothing surprising about this disillusionment with the language of the law, especially in contexts where the presence of a legal right does not translate to the enjoyment of the substance of the right. Most human rights lawyers likely have at least one such anecdote at hand at any given point of time. What this story made me think about, however, was the fact that conversations about legal rights are not efforts at constructing inviolable obligations which prevent the breach of duty. Instead, they are conversations about the construction of remedies to be invoked in the face of widespread violations. This is to say that the existing socio-political context obstructs access to the substance of the right. When the right has already been legally articulated, the inability to check its violations is predominantly chalked down to political unwillingness and tardy implementation. It is not usually acknowledged that a legal right is constructed within an existing legal landscape that has, more often than not, posed as a hindrance to the realisation of the right.