Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights

History, Politics, Practice

Rajini Srikanth, Elora Halim Chowdhury, Rajini Srikanth, Elora Halim Chowdhury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351058414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études ethniques

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice is an edited collection that brings together analyses of human rights work from multiple disciplines. Within the academic sphere, this book will garner interest from scholars who are invested in human rights as a field of study, as well as those who research, and are engaged in, the praxis of human rights.

Referring to the historical and cross-cultural study of human rights, the volume engages with disciplinary debates in political philosophy, gender and women's studies, Global South/Third World studies, international relations, psychology, and anthropology. At the same time, the authors employ diverse methodologies including oral history, theoretical and discourse analysis, ethnography, and literary and cinema studies. Within the field of human rights studies, this book attends to the critical academic gap on interdisciplinary and praxis-based approaches to the field, as opposed to a predominantly legalistic focus, drawing from case studies from a wide range of contexts in the Global South, including Bangladesh, Colombia, Haiti, India, Mexico, Palestine, and Sudan, as well as from Australia and the United States in the Global North.

For students who will go on to become researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and activists, this collection of essays will demonstrate the multifaceted landscape of human rights and the multiple forces (philosophical, political, cultural, economic, historical) that affect it.

Part I

Human rights discourse: context and history

1 Imaginary and real strangers

Constructing and reconstructing the human in human rights discourse and instruments

Mickaella Perina

Introduction

As I reflect upon my experience teaching the introduction to human rights course at the University of Massachusetts Boston, I appreciate the various ways students’ questions and their engagement with class materials have impacted my own approach to human rights discourse and instruments. Consequently, I find it important to include in this essay relevant classroom experiences.¹

As they cautiously review human rights instruments (Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, etc.) at the beginning of the semester, students often ask how there can be so many human rights violations in the world if all humans have the rights asserted in these documents simply by virtue of being human. In doing so they point to the tension between the universality of the rights and the particular humans who have them but may not enjoy or exercise them at any given time. I suspect that what puzzles them is the intersection of universal human rights claims with the particularities of human experiences and the unequal responses to human rights violations and neglect across the globe.

The understanding of both “human” and “rights” in the phrase human rights has changed over time. The expression “universal human rights” has its roots in the UDHR proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, a declaration conceived of as “a common standard of achievement for all people and all nations” (UDHR, General Assembly resolution 217A). Human rights legal instruments, such as the UDHR, were often developed in response to gross human rights violations or human rights struggles where individuals and groups fought for the recognition of their rights as human rights and challenged established standards and understandings of human interests. The recognition of these rights often faced significant opposition and resistance from sovereign states, groups, or individuals with authority and power. As Paul Gordon Lauren rightly noted, visions of human rights “raised profoundly disturbing issues about what it means to be truly human, thereby directly threatening traditional patterns of authority and privilege, vested interests, and the claims of national sovereignty”(Lauren, 2003).

The tension between the universal standards created by the UDHR and the principle of independent and sovereign nations defined by controlled borders and recognized cultures is pervasive in human rights scholarship. While there seems to be widespread agreement about the validity of universal human rights, there has been significant disagreement about the categorization of particular conducts as human rights violations on the ground of cultural differences. As Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im argued, one of the main reasons behind such disagreements is the lack of cultural legitimacy of human rights standards as when insiders see a conduct sanctioned by the norms of a particular culture as legitimate, and outsiders see it as cruel, inhuman, or degrading (An-Na’im, 1992). How does one make sense of such disagreement and how can these standards gain cross-cultural legitimacy? How universal can human rights be? How universally can human rights be claimed?

Multiple articles and books, positing the need for universal agreement about human rights, have pointed to ways in which disagreements can be resolved or at least mitigated (An-Na’im, 1992; Donnelly, 2007; Sen, 2005). While I do not question the merit of such analysis, in this essay I explore different aspects of disagreements about the universal legitimacy of human rights standards. I distinguish between processes through which disagreements manifest themselves but do not preclude consensus building and processes through which disagreements are used as an excuse to sustain limits to the exercise and enjoyment of universal human rights in a world of states associated with borders and membership. First I make a case against the idea that the diversity of cultural values across the world is the paradigmatic obstacle to universally claimed and enjoyed human rights; in my view this diversity creates disagreements but does not necessarily prevent consensus building. Second, I argue that the creation of strangers (real and imagined) central to the current conception of citizenship, coupled with the assumption that all members of a citizenry have, and organize their lives around, shared values constitute a crucial obstacle to the universal enjoyment of human rights. Here, cultural disagreements are presupposed and used to justify differences in the exercise and enjoyment of human rights. Since the diversity of cultural values, real or assumed, is not the ultimate barrier to universal human rights claims and enjoyments, notwithstanding existing beliefs in insurmountable barriers between cultural values, we need to examine other, perhaps more effective, obstacles. Through a brief analysis of the experience of migrants, I argue last that the state-centric approach to international human rights discourse and instruments is an inherent limit to the universal enjoyment of these rights. State-centrism and the strong drive to identify who belongs and deserves to have her human rights protected and who is a stranger to the state and has no protection constitute major obstacles to the realization of universal human rights.

Universal human rights, cultural diversity, and cross-cultural legitimacy

The validity of universal human rights claims and international human rights instruments is often questioned on the basis of the world diversity of cultures and values. The argument takes various forms but can be roughly restated as follows: given the diversity of cultures, cultural practices, and values in the world, any given human right claim that is valid in one culture may be invalid in another; likewise the identification of a human rights violation may in fact be the condemnation of a cultural practice.² The cultural divide may be conceived of as a divide between the West and the rest of the world thereby making universal human rights Western and non-Western cultural practices potential violations. It can also be conceived of as a divide between universal rights and universal aspirations justifying the absence of enjoyment of said universal rights (and not their violations) in some communities and not in others. Consequently, fundamental cultural differences make it inherently impossible to have and protect universal human rights everywhere at all times. I propose that this claim is grounded in two deeply problematic assumptions, namely that a) cultural differences are necessarily incompatible differences between cultures and do not exist within cultures and b) cultures are constant, invariable, unchanging, or homogeneous.

Questioning assumption 1: different cultures necessarily have irreducible incompatible norms and values

In a divided world where universalism has historically been used to mask forms of cultural imperialism and where cultural autonomy and cultural appropriation are often in conflict, it is not unreasonable to apply special scrutiny to universal human rights claims and claims about human rights violations. After all, human rights talks have in various cases promoted a Eurocentric or Western notion of culture. However, to take the diversity of cultures and values seriously is one thing, to conclude that cultural values are inherently and necessarily incompatible or that universal human rights claims are invalid is another. One can be committed to both the autonomy of cultures and the universality of claims about human rights. In other words, the idea of universal human rights can cover and protect a range of differences, interests, and moral principles.

Disagreements about universal human rights and about human rights violations are often moral and political disagreements. International human rights law provides valuable legal instruments to protect human rights, but most disagreements concern practices or conducts that appear illegitimate to some and legitimate to others; often the ground for this conflict about legitimacy is morality,³ a code of conduct or set of standards of good and bad, right and wrong. In fact, the broad category of universal human rights includes both claims that are recognized as valid because of a set of legal rules, and claims that owe their validity to a set of moral principles. The latter claims can be challenged when the interests being protected by them, such as life, education, or bodily integrity, are not universally recognized as valuable or are understood differently.

Philosophers often distinguish between thin and thick moral concepts; on such account thin universal moral concepts or principles become thicker when adapted to historical contexts. For instance while we all have a general concept of the good, at different times and in different spaces different conducts will be regarded as good. But do moral concepts start thick or thin? Do we start with the general or with the particular? Michael Walzer offers a useful conception of the relationship between thick and thin concepts: “Morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant, and [it] reveals itself thinly only on special occasions, when moral language is turned to specific purposes” (Walzer, 1994). If Walzer is right, we start with thick moral concepts and it is through moral deliberations that the thin concept is uncovered. Is it through moral deliberation that we can all agree that “everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of persons” (UDHR, article 3) or that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude” (UDHR, article 4)? Do all people agree that humans have a right to autonomy and self-determination over one’s own body, and against potential abuses of such right by states and government through forced labor, torture, or cruel punishment? How have these principles been historically integrated in particular societies and cultures to become a universal moral rule?

Disagreements and conflicts do exist but they are not necessarily signs of fundamental incompatibility; they may be only prima facie conflicts. Appiah suggests that instead of dismissing values that are foreign to us as primitive and irrational, one can try and hope to understand how this value might motivate someone (2006). It may seem difficult to take other people’s interests seriously, especially when such interests are unfamiliar, but it is possible to use our imagination to understand why they hold these interests. And it is easier to do so when the apparent unfamiliar practice happens to be shared by someone we know. I think for example of my student X, who, in the context of a class discussion on the right to bodily integrity, explained why scarification was valued in the community she originally came from, why it was valuable to her despite the fact that her parents made the choice for her when she was very little and unable to choose, and why she did not conceive of it as a violation of her right to bodily integrity. X was a conscientious and well-regarded member of the class who had migrated to the US from West Africa with her parents when she was a young child, something most of her classmates ignored until she mentioned it that day. X sharing her interest in scarification made the practice less foreign to other students, allowing for new ways of seeing this practice while making it possible to discuss different practices of body modification within and outside the United States. Students were able to examine how conceptions of the right to bodily integrity and cultural body modification practices could differ even when there was agreement on the value of a right to bodily integrity. They were able and willing to see scarification through the eyes of their classmate and to see their own practices and other practices familiar to them as other people might see them. They were able to understand what might motivate someone to have an interest in scarification and more broadly to examine why some practices are more scrutinized than others in different contexts. Consequently, they were able to question the assumed opposition between universality and cultural specificity, to understand that universality should not be constructed as historical or anthropological since “claims to historical or anthropological universality confuses values such as justice, fairness, and humanity with practices that aim to realize those values” (Donnelly, 2007). The point here is that understanding the universality of human rights implies understanding the diversity of human values and practices, the possibility of cross-cultural legitimacy, overlap or consensus, and the ongoing struggle to ensure protection to all; universal human rights do not require universal practices.

Questioning assumption 2: cultures are constant, invariable, unchanging, or homogeneous

One correlated questionable assumption is that insurmountable differences exist across cultures but not within cultures. It is often wrongly assumed that there is agreement about fundamental moral standards and social norms within cultures that simply does not exist across cultures. But cultures are not homogeneous or static; they are dynamic and made of both continuity and change. Different norms and principles get defended and dropped at different times within any given culture; cultures are subjected to internal debate and internal contradictions. Moreover, it is widely accepted that cultures often experience some level of cultural alteration, although there is debate about the value of such alteration. It would be difficult today to find cultures that would be completely immune to any external or foreign influence. Consequently, it is mistaken to assume that disagreements about practices occur mainly across cultures and not within cultures. Agreements about the type of human interests that qualify as human rights and the type of conducts that qualify as human rights violations require cross-cultural legitimacy.

Here again An-Na’im’s account (1992, p. 21) can be helpful: “Having achieved an adequate level of legitimacy within each tradition, through this internal stage, Human rights scholars and advocates should work for cross-cultural legitimacy, so that people of diverse cultural traditions can agree on the meaning, scope, and methods of implementing these rights.” In his view people are more likely to observe normative propositions if they are sanctioned by their own cultural traditions, and observance of human rights standards can be improved by enhancing the cultural legitimacy of these standards. Fostering understanding and recognizing that agreement about practices is not a necessary condition to the validity and force of universal standards can enhance such cultural legitimacy. To say that is not to suggest that all practices are acceptable or permissible; the very concept of toleration requires the intolerable. There is a fundamental difference between objectionable, wrong, or bad practices that can be tolerated and the intolerably wrong or intolerably bad practices that must be rejected. To recognize the possibility of cross-cultural legitimacy in matters of international human rights is to be committed to both the universality of what is owed to humans and the pluralism of the cultures in which they are situated. The idea that some cultures have definitively reached a satisfactory level of legitimacy and others have not and must be demonized needs to be scrutinized. The plurality of cultures, norms, and principles both within and across cultures is not the paradigmatic obstacle to the enjoyment of universal human rights; the assumption that differences are necessarily insurmountable and need to be questioned and overcome for cross-cultural legitimacy to ...