What are rights? In their most distilled form, rights are expectations of treatment or behaviour that are presumptively guaranteed by some authority tasked with creating the conditions for the enjoyment of those rights, and punishing violations of them. Since the rise of the political state, governments have served as the politically authorized guarantors of rights. Before that, clans or tribes served this function. Regardless of how temporally near or distant one might choose to locate the origin of rights—as close as the eighteenth-century ‘Rights of Man [sic]’ revolutions, or as far as the dim past of pre-state societies—it remains a truism that wherever rights-like expectations are present, there will be conflicts over the scope and fulfilment of rights. Rights conflicts typically take two forms. The first is contestation over who has a right to rights. That is, how extensive is the moral boundary that encompasses those who are assumed to have a rightful claim to the full suite of social benefits constructed as rights in a given society? Does it encompass all those in a society? Most people, but not all? A small elite, but few others? Or some other distinction between those who are believed to enjoy full rights, those who are accorded some, and those who are given none?