The Pluriverse of Human Rights: The Diversity of Struggles for Dignity

The Diversity of Struggles for Dignity

Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Bruno Martins, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Bruno Martins, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Bruno Sena Martins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000395709
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Law
• Index: Social Sciences

The impasse currently affecting human rights as a language used to express struggles for dignity is, to a large extent, a reflection of the epistemological and political exhaustion which blights the global North. Since the global hegemony of human rights as a language for human dignity is nowadays incontrovertible, the question of whether it can be used in a counter-hegemonic sense remains open. Inspired by struggles from all corners of the world that reveal the potential but, above all, the limitations of human rights, this book offers a highly conditional response. The prevailing notion of human rights today, as the hegemonic language of human dignity, can only be resignified on the basis of answers to simple questions: why does so much unjust human suffering exist that is not considered a violation of human rights? Do other languages of human dignity exist in the world? Are these other languages compatible with the language of human rights? Obviously, we can only find satisfactory answers to these questions if we are able to envisage a radical transformation of what is nowadays known as human rights. Herein lies the challenge posed by the Epistemologies of the South: reconciling human rights with the different languages and forms of knowledge born out of struggles for human dignity.

Part I

Human Frontiers

Chapter 1

Human Rights, Democracy and Development

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Introduction

The constellation of human rights is nowadays in turmoil. This state of affairs is emerging primarily as an impasse, revealing the limitations of conventional human rights, a language of dignity whose hegemony is nowadays indisputable. Since I reject any monolithic vision of human rights, recognizing the different power relations and bodies that mobilize them, it is necessary to explain what I have in mind when I refer to the hegemonic or conventional version of human rights. I consider that any conventional understanding of human rights has the following characteristics: rights are universally valid regardless of the social, political and cultural context in which they operate and the different human rights systems that exist in different parts of the world; they are based on a concept of human nature which sees it as individual, self-sustaining and qualitatively different from non-human nature; violations of human rights are defined by universal declarations, multilateral institutions (courts and commissions) and non-governmental organizations (which are mainly based in the North); the recurring phenomenon of the double standards deployed to assess the observance of human rights does not in any way compromise the universal validity of human rights; respect for human rights is much more problematic in the global South than in the global North (Santos, 2015).

This current turmoil within the constellation of human rights also enables us to discern promising horizons for emancipatory agendas which aim to transcend conventional understandings of human rights. These horizons, which are being defined in various regions of the world, point towards effective recognition for the limitless experiences of the world in the light of the epistemologies of the South, in the belief that any understanding of the world far exceeds a Western understanding of the world. As I have formulated them, the epistemologies of the South are a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge that has emerged out of the struggles of those who have resisted the systematic oppression of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy (Santos, 2014). Hence I have argued for an intercultural conceptualization, in the light of which human rights can, and should, be reformulated on the basis of experiences which confront us with a pluriverse, composed of world views which permeate and extend beyond the borders of modern Western thinking (Santos, 1999).

As Arturo Escobar clearly notes (2016: 13), in taking the limitless experiences of the world as its premise, the epistemologies of the South lay claim to a distinct ontological dimension. Hence, I believe that activists and thinkers who still acknowledge the emancipatory possibilities of human rights should consider the challenge presented by the social struggles, epistemologies and political ontologies through which different populations and collectives have been reclaiming the world in which they live. Many of the appropriations of human dignity which nowadays shape the most promising emancipatory plans for a subaltern cosmopolitan legality (Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, 2005) are associated with non-European concepts which, combined with ancestral world views and intercultural political ontologies, reveal the close bond between post-abyssal humanity and non-human nature.

I would identify three tensions which are constitutive of the current turmoil and, at the same time, represent a challenge for any emancipatory resignification of human rights in the light of the epistemologies of the South. The first refers to the tension between the right to development and the ceaseless destruction of the environment. The second refers to the tension between the collective aspirations of indigenous and peasant communities of Africa, Latin America and Asia, and the individualism that defines the original human rights canon. The third refers to the tension that results from the inadequacy of the language of rights, in particular human rights, in terms of recognizing the existence of non-human subjects.

These three tensions reveal the abyssal genealogy of human rights—as discussed in the introduction to this book—which are the product of an itinerary characterized by the precedence and universalist ambitions of the liberal world views that have become hegemonic in Western modernity. As previously noted, the dominant versions of Western modernity are constructed on the basis of abyssal thinking, which divides the world abyssally into metropolitan and colonial societies (Santos, 2007, 2014). It has divided it in such a way that the realities and practices on the other side of the line, in the colonies, pose no threat to the universality of the theories and practices that prevail in the metropole, on this side of the line. As an emancipatory discourse, human rights was historically designed to apply only on this side of the abyssal line, in metropolitan societies. I have argued that, far from having been eradicated at the end of the colonial period, this abyssal line, which produces radical exclusions, continues in other forms (neocolonialism, racism, xenophobia, the permanent state of exception regarding terrorists, undocumented immigrant workers, asylum seekers or even ordinary citizens who are the victims of austerity measures dictated by financial capital). International law and conventional human rights doctrines have been used to ensure this continuity. Hence, it is crucial to distinguish between what are nowadays conventional human rights and the possibility, identified in this text, of establishing human rights as part of an ecology of post-abyssal dignities.

The Right to Development versus Environmental Degradation

In most countries the history of the different types of human rights is contingent, uneven and full of discontinuities, advances and retreats. Nevertheless, it is clear that in establishing different types of human rights, different political processes are set in motion. Civil and political rights were always at the heart of liberal theory, constituting rights won from the state in order to restrict state authoritarianism. In other words, human rights originated in an anti-state initiative which has contained contradictory political meanings over the last two hundred years. Unlike civil and political rights, economic and social rights consist of benefits provided by the state, assuming the active cooperation of the latter, and are based on a political struggle for the social appropriation of the surpluses amassed by the state through taxes and other sources of revenue. The realization of these human rights depends entirely on the state and therefore implies a change in the political nature of state activity. This transformation occurred with the transition from the liberal or constitutional state to the welfare constitutional state in the global North, and the developmentalist or neo-developmentalist state in the global South. These are very different political processes, although it may be said that, in general, whilst the democratic conservative camp maintained an anti-state position and favoured a liberal concept of human rights, focussing in particular on civil and political rights, the progressive camp of the anti-neocolonial nationalisms or the various democratic lefts has defended the central role of the state as crucial to building social cohesion and has tended to favour the social-democratic or Marxist concept of human rights, paying greater attention to economic and social rights. Over the years, the idea of the indivisibility of human rights has been gaining (more theoretical than practical) acceptance and, consequently, the idea that only recognition of the different types of human rights ensures respect for any individual right.

The collective right to development, claimed in particular by African countries, was only recognized much later and even then only very selectively. The first steps towards establishing the right to development came with the Declaration on Social Progress and Development (1969) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981) and came to the fore following the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development (1986) and the various UN World Conferences held during the 1990s. The right to development was based on ideas similar to those that would later be enshrined in dependency theory. The philosophy of the Non-Aligned Movement would come to fruition in the demands made by countries of the then Third World for international guarantees to ensure the essential conditions for their development, which basically involved contesting the unequal trading conditions on the international market. One example of this inequality was the fact that Third World countries were condemned to exporting raw materials at prices fixed by the countries that needed them, rather than by the countries that were exporting them. However, it also emerged out of the Cold War. The right to development in the context of the Cold War meant that it was possible to choose between capitalism, enmeshed in a process of globalization, or the always latent socialist alternative for development. In the mid-1970s this demand evolved into the New International Economic Order movement, which the developed countries, led by the US, firmly and steadfastly opposed. The response of the global North, which intensified after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, was neo-liberalism, through which the right to development became the obligation to develop. Having neutralized any potential for development that was not governed by the norms of the Washington Consensus, with compliance ensured by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and later the World Trade Organisation, capitalist development was imposed as a cast-iron condition.

Within the ambivalent central position which the state has always occupied as a threat and guarantee of human rights, notwithstanding the accepted liberal and progressive versions, I believe it is important to emphasize how development, whether as a celebration of the civilization of the global North or an anti-imperialist aspiration of the global South, remains, even in the twenty-first century, the unchanging hallmark of state political projects, even those in the global South that claim to pursue social justice in the face of colonial and imperialist legacies. In fact, one of the most enduring legacies of colonialism, clearly reflecting a genealogy based on Western concepts, is precisely the representation of Asia, Africa and Latin America as underdeveloped Third World continents and the creation of developmentalism as a structural discursive field for the social reality and politics of the post-war world (Escobar, 1995).

The ubiquity of developmentalism is evident in the way in which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, progressive governments which embraced developmentalism came to power in many states in the global South, particularly in Latin America, seeing the boom in natural resources as a great opportunity to give them the freedom to introduce social policies and redistribute income. This model, which some have called neo-developmentalism or neo-extractivism,¹ has without doubt enabled important policies based on redistribution and fighting poverty to be implemented. However, despite its more nationalist, statist profile, since this is a model based on neo-extractivism, it reflects a neo-liberal rationale which does nothing to contest the global argument for capitalist accumulation. The weaknesses of this model as a political proposal are easily exposed by the economic difficulties which are the immediate result of international fluctuations associated with natural resources.

The neo-developmentalist model is part of a concept of progress in which one of the deadliest consequences is environmental destruction. The driving forces behind mining, oil, natural gas and agricultural frontiers are becoming increasingly powerful, and anything that stands in their way and blocks their path tends to be destroyed as an obstacle to development. These highly attractive forces excel in transforming the increasingly disturbing signs of the immense environmental and social debt they create into the inevitable cost of “progress”. It is difficult to produce any political assessment of this model because its relationship to human rights is complex and easily suggests that we are faced with incompatible, rather than indivisible, human rights. In other words, according to the frequently cited argument, we cannot aspire to improve social and economic rights, the right to food security for the majority of the population or the right to education without inevitably accepting violations of the right to health and the environmental and ancestral rights of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples to their territories. It would only be possible to show that the said incompatibility masks a mismanagement of indivisibility through different time scales, which is virtually impossible given the urgent short-time demands. Under these conditions, it becomes difficult to activate precautionary principles or long-term arguments. And when will the boom in natural resources come to an end? When will it become clear that the investment in natural resources has not been duly offset by investment in human resources? When there is no money for generous compensation schemes and subtle impoverishment creates resentment that is difficult to manage in a democracy? When the levels of environmentally related diseases are unacceptable and overburden the public health systems until they become unsustainable? When water contamination, impoverishment of the land and destruction of the forests become irreversible? When indigenous populations and Afro-descendant and river-dwelling peoples who have been expelled from their land wander through the outskirts of cities, demanding the right to the city that will always be denied to them?

In an age in which the fight against global warming and environmental destruction, which is disproportionately affecting populations in the global South, is imposing itself as an agenda that forces us to question the system of capitalist accumulation (see, for example, Klein, 2014), it appears to make little sense to defend the sacrificial narrative that characterizes the ideology of progress. In fact, modern Eurocentric thinking is based on the idea that progress demands reasonable sacrifices in the interests of a future that will, as a result, be able to offer greater benefits. The issue here is that the fairness of these sacrifices has been justified by the existence of an abyssal line which ensures that the benefits produced in metropolitan societies and social interaction are recognized, whilst minimizing the sacrifices made in colonial societies and social interaction, where the present losses have never been offset by future benefits. Hence there are two faces to the ideology of progress: the one which shows a relative symmetry between...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Human Frontiers
• PART II Struggles and Emergences