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Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Tawia B. Ansah
International human rights law's claim to universality, at the level of normative formation, has been shaped by conceptions of the self over time. The metaphysical reconfigurations of the self, from the Enlightenment to the present, have marked the human rights narrative in particular ways. This essay will suggest that since World War II, a conception of the self within a narrative of rights has been replaced, or at least countermanded, by a conception of sacral evil, with profound implications for the normative claim to universality of the human rights discourse. The essay begins with a synoptic analysis of the rise …
Genocide And The Eroticization Of Death: Law, Violence, And Moral Purity, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Genocide And The Eroticization Of Death: Law, Violence, And Moral Purity, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Tawia B. Ansah
In this article, I ask: What is the relationship between law and morality in response to mass violence and suffering abroad? How does law shape and determine our moral response to mass death and suffering? We repose in the law itself a desire to define the moral and the ethical parameters of legal-political action. Thus, when faced with mass violence and suffering abroad, law functions as a proxy for morality. The legal prohibition under the Genocide Convention defines morality, or cabins the variety of moral responses into a single and universally applicable ethical-legal norm of response to genocide. The moral …
Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah
Tawia B. Ansah
Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, the government issued broad new laws outlawing the use of ethnic categories, with a view to uniting all Rwandans under a single Rwandan identity. This self-erasure of ethnic identity is deployed primarily within the borders of the state, to enable reconciliation after the genocide in 1994. Outside the borders, the state deploys ethnic identity as one of the rationales for its cross-border wars (in the Democratic Republic of Congo).