2008] The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights 175 “positive” formulations, and the danger of capture into vocabularies of institutional jurisdiction or justiciability. The virtue of disaggregating these approaches lies in understanding the root of the conceptual co nfusion. The resulting clar ity helps us to distill several competing operations for the concept: in pres cribing content, ranking obligations, signaling extr aterritoriality, and introd ucing a new language of claiming. Many of these operations are not, in the end, suited to the concept of the minimum core. First, positive oblig ations often rely on benchmarks to become operational and ne gative obligations often ra ise questions of state action and responsibility. The substance of both is informed by a rigorous interpretation of rights, not cores, and thus to the interests that are important to shield from politics or co st-benefit analysis. Second, limitations on rights are likewise made permissibl e by the exercise of ba lancing, rather than by minimizing on the interpreta tion. Third, challenges of extr aterritoriality raise the same questions of obligations and their negative and positive implications, but these are made mor e complex by t he additional difficult questions of causality, mutual interdep endence, or responsibility outside of the statist frame. And finally, the language of ri ghts claiming matters—it requires critical analysis, rather than mere ac ceptance, especially when misrecognition and stigma are so quick to accompany the claims of the poor. It is thes e operations that are obscured by t he minimum core concep t and warrant the attention—and the ambition—of advocat es of economic and s ocial rights. Their future answers will be important indeed.