Hoover Reconstructing Human Rights DoT blog 2016 - as published.docx (original) (raw)
Related papers
[The historian's] role is to put in order in its historical setting what we experience piecemeal from day to day, so that in place of sporadic experience, the continuity of events becomes visible. An age that has lost its consciousness of the things that shape its life will know neither where it stands nor, even less, at what it aims.
Human rights in the 21st century: Take a walk on the dark side
Sydney L. Rev., 2006
This article unpacks three normative claims on which the human rights project is based and exposes the dark side of the project. The author examines the larger context within which human rights has taken shape, and critiques the claim that human rights is part of modernity's narrative of progress; interrogates the assumption that human rights are universal, challenging its dehistoricised, neutral, and inclusive claims; and unpacks the atomised, insular liberal subject on which the human rights project is based and its correlating assumptions about the 'Other' who needs to be cabined or contained lest she destabilises or undermines this subject. The author makes some tentative proposals as to how we can engage with human rights once its dark side is exposed.
Back to the future: human rights beyond the rights approach
This essay recognizes human rights as something more profound than legal rights. In the context of the rise of global capitalism, being faithful to human rights’ intrinsic counter-hegemonic nature requires contemplating a picture larger than rights litigation. This involves reassessing the efficacy of human rights instruments in order to address the structural causes impairing human rights.
Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era
2021
In a turbulent era, with illiberal nationalism on the rise and international laws and institutions under persistent threat, this book asks what future the international human rights system has. It rejects the claims of those who view human rights law and advocacy as ineffective or worse in challenging injustice. Instead, it presents an experimentalist account of human rights which emphasizes the ongoing engagement between domestic activists and international and domestic institutions and actors in promoting rights-based change. Rather than the monolithic movement depicted in some academic critiques, it discerns a rich and diverse human rights movement which has helped significantly to challenge injustice and advance progressive change in many contexts. Drawing on case studies of gender justice, disability rights, children’s rights and reproductive justice from Pakistan, Argentina and Ireland, the book argues that the human rights movement has made an important difference around the ...
Human Rights in the 21st Century: Taking a Walk on the Dark Side
28 Sydney Law Review 665, 2005
This article unpacks three normative claims on which the human rights project is based and exposes the dark side of the project. The author examines the larger context within which human rights has taken shape, and critiques the claim that human rights is part of modernity’s narrative of progress; interrogates the assumption that human rights are universal, challenging its dehistoricised, neutral, and inclusive claims; and unpacks the atomised, insular liberal subject on which the human rights project is based and its correlating assumptions about the ‘Other’ who needs to be cabined or contained lest she destabilises or undermines this subject. The author makes some tentative proposals as to how we can engage with human rights once its dark side is exposed