In 2011, revolutionary movements swept the Arab world, first in Tunisia, then in places like Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. Listening to slogans like “irfa’ raasak fawq, inta masri” (Raise your head high, you are Egyptian), which were heard elsewhere with substitutions for the country name and coupled with people’s basic demands for hurriyeh, karameh wa ‘adaleh ijtima’iyeh (freedom, dignity and social justice), one notices that a key demand of the people has been karameh or dignity. This paper will explore and problematize this notion of dignity that people have been demanding all across the region. What happens when we take dignity as an analytical category to think through political mobilization? And what can anthropology tell us about the micro-workings of this specific human right of dignity (its everyday practices, embodiments and emotions) for political struggle? In this paper, I will move beyond dignity as a predetermined category as one would gather from the UN charter, where nations are called upon to reaffirm faith “in the dignity and worth of the human person.” Rather, I will propose thinking of dignity as contested and contextual, denoting a sense of struggle, and as a political emotion that gives people and their lives meaning and power. I ask how claims for greater dignity situate the body as a site of contestation and political struggle, and how bodies, as collectivities, are configured, subjected, and mobilized by this discourse of dignity. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and an attention to discourses in the Arab world in the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions, I will show how dignity becomes contested and conflicted in a crisis of legitimacy. Finally, I place this discussion in the framework of an international system that conditions state legitimacy on the right to protect its citizens. In this sense, dignity as a political emotion implicating the body becomes intricately tied to notions of human security and the state’s provision of protection. This paper will expand on these arguments as they arise from conversations and negotiations in the field.