Additive entanglement and intersectionality in UN human rights monitoring: Examining the inclusion of disability

This paper builds on intersectionality theory to provide a novel analytical approach for examining the inclusion of disability in the United Nations human rights monitoring processes. Notably, it develops the concept of additive entanglement to provide a lens for understanding the emergence of identity catalogues in human rights governance. To explain the effects of this type of entanglement, the article codes and analyses the references to disability in 2111 concluding observations of eight core United Nations Human Rights monitoring bodies from 2000 until 2018. By studying these types of discursive constructions, the article provides a conceptual approach to exploring the configuration of lists of identity categories in human rights governance. It offers an innovative technique for analysing how United Nations bodies form population clusters by privileging specific category combinations such as disability with age and gender when observing the human rights of persons with disabilities.