The nature of rights and the history of empire (2006) (original) (raw)
Introduction: Human Rights, Empire, and After
Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics, 2020
This introductory chapter surveys the revisionist historiography on the history of human rights. It asks whether postcolonial actors were in fact engaged in human rights activity in their embryonic efforts to establish welfare states; in initiatives to ensure oversight and some means of remedy for citizens; and in land redistribution plans and women’s advancement. In doing so, they commonly invoked other rights traditions and languages – national rights, indigenous rights, treaty rights, civil and political rights, and so on—in justifying political reform. Rather than assume a stable meaning of human rights and “discover” these phenomena decades later, we ask: how did various rights languages intersect and morph through social and political contests and transitions? When, and how, did human rights language find form in the substance of policy, advocacy, or political transformation? Recent research has been largely confined to the Atlantic world with diffusionist assumptions of non-Europeans learning human rights from their colonial administrators or the UN; this book is a contribution to globalizing the history of human rights in the age of decolonization.
Routledge eBooks, 2007
Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics. Addressing the paradox of a contemporary humanitarianism that has abandoned politics in favour of combating evil, Douzinas, a leading scholar and author in the field of human rights and legal theory, considers the most pressing international questions.
The Imperialism of Rights: Tracing the Politics and History of Human Rights
2014
Voluminous scholarship that has followed ever since the advent of human rights has failed to sufficiently undertake a non-essentialist investigation of this seemingly attractive development of human history and progress. Rather than pursue critical tensions inherent in the obvious ambiguities of human rights, both as an ideology and a practice, scholarship has been devoted to the categorization of the colonizer and the colonized without probing the contradictions that beset each category. This essay identifies the otherness of the indigenous cultures in the calculation of the paternalistic, “superior” West as a problem that not only needs a critical probe, but also deserves to be the starting point of a more historically nuanced human rights discourse. It looks at the paradoxes of a human rights regime which touts common, equal, and universal humanity, while at the same time building and maintaining measures of legal and practical differences. As a major theme of this essay, the dif...
Human Rights as Swords of Empire?
Socialist Register, 2009
T]he transition from a nation-state world order to a cosmopolitan world order brings about a very significant priority shift from international law to human rights. The principle that international law precedes human rights which held during the (nation-state) first age of modernity is being replaced by the principle of the (world society) second age of modernity, that human rights precede international law. As yet, the consequences have not been thought through, but they will be revolutionary.
2021
This paper expresses the effort to reinterpret the history of the rights of man, and of human rights thereafter then (starting from 1948), from a non-Eurocentric perspective. This is a very specific project that naturally is not meant to retrace the phases of the Western history of rights, but neither is the point to compare the Western conception with those of other legal traditions, such as the Islamic one. In short, the attempt is not to read the history of the rights of man as a progression involving the recognition of increasingly large spheres of freedom carved out of the sovereignty of Western states (as Georg Jellinek saw it), nor is it to read that history as a slow and belated delimitation of national sovereignty in international relations since the end of World War II. To introduce a non-European perspective is instead to analyze the role of the Western conception in leading to the ascendancy of the West over other civilizations and cultures on the ground of the anthropol...
It is commonly considered now that the whole of human society has broken free from the tethers of Super-Power rivalry; and the iniquitous and antiquated systems which it consequently produced and sustained have subsequently withered. In lieu of this deemed ‘archaic model,’ it is said that the world system of states and its peoples have entered a new era of enlightenment captured by a wide-spread embrace of a ‘cosmopolitan’ ethos; pronounced particularly by eager academicians. Simultaneously, this contemporary era is depicted as fertile breeding ground for new forms of conflict: from genocide, to ethnic cleansing, to civil wars. The resurrection of this global cosmopolitan ethos has partly occurred in response to this modern illustration of the world. In turn, through the germination of the cosmopolitan seeds sown in this hostile environment, the cosmopolitan resolve which tended toward non-intervention in its nascent Kantian stage, has shifted to one of military interventions on behalf of humanity. Increasingly and mechanically, humanitarian military interventions have been absorbed into academic and political discourse and interpreted as the ultimate panacea to remedy the pandemic of human suffering, now spanning the globe. The unhesitant acceptance of this humanitarian antidote and its advocates’ readiness to its indiscriminate disbursement however elicits several problems. Principally, this allegiance toward humanitarian interventions on behalf of its champions presents a problem in that there has been a paucity of critical inquiry within the dominant human rights discourse on the role of disparate power relations and the subsequent considerations, justifications, and executions of humanitarian military interventions. This negligence presents a problem as it assumes that such interventions are suggested and conducted impartially and in the interests of the greater human society; far removed from the interests of great powers. Thus, the paradigmatic discourse on humanitarian intervention tends to avert analytical inquiry into the prospective influence of imperialism and western hegemony in determining where and when a humanitarian intervention is necessitated and in determining its execution as consequence. The purpose of the proceeding work is to scrutinise whether humanitarian interventions can be interpreted through imperialism theory; in other words whether humanitarian interventions could be interpreted as a project or instrument of Empire. Firstly, this thesis examines the concept of humanitarian intervention and the cosmopolitan discourse, Just War theory, and ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine which have shaped and moulded its deliverance and reception. Proceeding from this, this thesis engages theories of imperialism, their evolution through the Marxist school of thought, and the varying forms of imperial control, penetration and integration through military, economic, and political channels. Finally a definition of imperialism is constructed to guide the subsequent analysis. Three cases of humanitarian interventions are selected and examined: two interventions in the Republic of Haiti in 1994 and 2004, and one in the former Yugoslavia in 1999. The analysis imparted takes into consideration a range of factors both internal and external which contributed to the conditions which ostensibly ‘called for’ intervention, the conduct of the intervention, and the resulting ‘humanitarian’ climate the intervention later produced. Finally, the interventions selected are contrasted against the definition of imperialism employed and the forms of imperial control, penetration and integration to evaluate whether or not a parabiotic relationship between humanitarian intervention and imperialism can be substantiated. The conclusion of this thesis suggests that such a relationship is not only arguable in the three cases analysed, but that more generally the notion of humanitarian intervention fits comfortably within imperialism theory.