Critical Perspectives on Human Rights - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786600145 ISBN 13: 9781786600141

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Critical Perspectives on Human Rights provides cutting-edge interventions into contemporary perspectives on rights, ethics and global justice. The chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, make a significant and timely contribution to critical human rights scholarship by interrogating the significance of human rights for critical theory and practice. While the contributions engage sensitively yet thoroughly with the regulatory, disciplinary, and exclusionary effects of human rights, they do so without giving up on the transformative potential of human rights. By thinking productively through the exclusions, paradoxes and aporias of human rights, Critical Perspectives on Human Rights is a key reference text for students and scholars in this important area of inquiry.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Birgit Schippers is Senior Lecturer in Politics at St Mary's University College Belfast.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Critical Perspectives on Human Rights

By Birgit Schippers

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2019 Birgit Schippers
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-014-1

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Introduction Birgit Schippers, ix, 
Part I: Troubling Human Rights, 
1 Language and Freedom in Critiques of Human Rights Rachel Wahl, 3, 
2 Human Rights Trouble?: Judith Butler and the Performative Refusal of Human Rights Ben Golder, 25, 
3 Rethinking the Human in Human Rights Moya Lloyd, 47, 
4 Towards a Posthumanist Conception of Human Rights? Birgit Schippers, 63, 
Part II: Practising Human Rights, 
5 Practice, Justification and Queer: Human Rights Meets Sexuality and Gender Diversity Anthony J. Langlois, 85, 
6 Human Dignity and Human Rights: Lessons from the Fight for Marriage Equality in the United States Karen Zivi, 103, 
7 The Political Movement for a Human Right to the City Joe Hoover, 121, 
8 Peasant Activism and the Ambiguity of Human Rights Robin Dunford, 139, 
Part III: The Geopolitics of Human Rights, 
9 Eurocentric and Third-World Histories of Human Rights: Critique, Recognition and Dialogue José-Manuel Barreto, 159, 
10 Critical Theory, Sociology and Human Rights Mark Frezzo, 179, 
11 Borders of Human Rights: Territorial Sovereignty and the Precarious Personhood of Migrants Ayten Gündogdu, 191, 
Afterword: Situating Human Rights in the Postpolitical Landscape Upendra Baxi, 213, 
Bibliography, 219, 
Index, 249, 

CHAPTER 1

Language and Freedom in Critiques of Human Rights

Rachel Wahl

Since before the ink was dry on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights framework has been the subject of heated criticism. Philosophers have focused their attention on what some see as the ethical impoverishment of a rights-based approach (e.g., Badiou 2002; Taylor 2008). Anthropologists have warned that claims to universalism threaten cultural diversity and that efforts to protect rights too often fail to take local realities into account (American Anthropological Association [AAA] 1947; Englund 2006; Esteva and Prakash 1998). Although some scholars of international relations debate the empirical evidence regarding whether the human rights regime has promoted justice (Simmons 2009; Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003), others decry the deceptive ways it legitimizes and sustains global inequalities in power (Inayatullah and Blaney 2012a).

Should such criticisms be understood as fundamentally opposed to a rights-based approach or as requiring modifications to current practice? In other words, might these critics be satisfied only with the dismantling of the human rights regime, or could they be understood as strengthening it by pointing out areas in need of improvement?

In what follows, I will suggest that the answer to this question depends in part on critics' premises in regard to the relationship between language and human agency. Diverse literatures across multiple disciplines have offered nuanced conceptions of 'agency' and 'freedom' as well as identified problems with these terms. For the aims of this discussion, I use the terms agency and freedom to describe the capacity for reflective insight into one's own ideas and assumptions and the possibility of choice in relation to one's ethical commitments. I suggest in what follows that whether the human rights framework contains irresolvable ethical, cultural and political weaknesses is contingent on how one views the human capacity for self-awareness and discernment in relation to the language in which concepts are articulated.

I first review three common types of critiques of human rights, which I categorize according to their focus on ethics, culture and politics. Given space constraints, I briefly summarize these critiques and the traditions from which they emerge, rather than delve into the complexity of their intellectual orientations and the diversity within each one. I do so to discuss how these critiques are dependent partly on conceptions of agency in relation to language, which I address subsequently. Next, I examine a case study of police officers participating in a human rights course in India that is suggestive of how people may enact a discourse even as they question and negotiate it. I draw on this case to suggest a cautious optimism in regard to the possibility that people are not defined by the ideas that helped to form them. I close with a discussion of how the rights movement might accommodate the ethical, cultural and political critiques, provided one assumes the possibility of some measure of human freedom in relation to concepts and language.

HUMAN RIGHTS AS INSUFFICIENT: THE ETHICAL CRITIQUE

Although they share a sense of the insufficiency of human rights as ethical ideals, these critics occupy two poles: those who mourn the loss of revolutionary politics and those who see human flourishing as rooted in strong institutions, traditions and communities. The former insist that the human rights movement has garnered its strength from the destruction of more radical and hopeful visions of change. The philosopher Alain Badiou (2002, 9), for example, laments that the recourse to rights fails to provide an aspirational ethics. Rights protections proscribe the worst human behaviour but say little about the best. On a similar note, the historian Samuel Moyn (2012) traces how the narrowing of justice to individual political rights was possible only in the regrettable decline of bolder movements such as for economic justice. It is only with the death of movements to transform the political landscape, such critics suggest, that the prevention of the basest actions could seem like the only worthy endeavour.

Philosophers in what is often referred to as the communitarian tradition also lament that a narrow focus on individual rights is a weak substitute for a more all-encompassing ethics. But for them, it is not revolution but coherent tradition that individual rights eclipse. For Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), for example, it is tradition kept alive by cohesive community and the practices that its adherents cultivate that allow the ethical life to flourish. Similarly, Charles Taylor (1992) and Will Kymlicka (1991, 1995) have defended the importance of collective identity against a sole focus on individual rights, based on the reasoning that our affiliations and relationships constitute much of who we are and what makes life good. In an even more daring departure from liberalism, Taylor (2008, 742) warns that rights codes risk valorising justice at the expense of love.

In their focus on radical social transformation or on communities that sustain nonlegalistic ethics, these critiques offer alternatives to liberal rights-based claims. Yet the concerns they express have the potential to complement human rights. Articulated within the liberal tradition, rights aim to protect the ability of people to live out their conceptions of the good life. At a minimum, rights are meant to create safeguards that prevent the intrusion of powerful agents — in particular, states — into the lives of the less powerful. When these protections are routinely and pervasively violated, this may be a — though not the only — reason to call for radical social change such as through revolution. When they are upheld, rights protect the ability of people to live out their more comprehensive visions of flourishing.

One response to the ethical critique, then, is to view it as unproblematic. Many liberal theorists would...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786600145
• ISBN 13: 9781786600141
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 274
• Herausgeber: Schippers Birgit
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland