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Human Rights And Powerlessness: Pathologies Of Choice And Substance, Makau Mutua
Human Rights And Powerlessness: Pathologies Of Choice And Substance, Makau Mutua
Journal Articles
The human rights corpus is a bundle of pathologies of choice and substance. But these pathologies are ideologically driven and inhere in the human rights movement because of the political choices and biases that are part of the cultural universe of human rights. In particular, the corpus is captive to thin notions of human rights that tend not to challenge deeply embedded social and economic assumptions and systems. The historical narrative of the human rights movement closely parallels the hegemonic rise of the West and hence the movement’s imprisonment in an intellectual project that casts the human being in the …
Savages, Victims, And Saviors: The Metaphor Of Human Rights, Makau Wa Mutua
Savages, Victims, And Saviors: The Metaphor Of Human Rights, Makau Wa Mutua
Journal Articles
This article critically looks at the human rights project as a damning three-dimensional metaphor that exposes multiple complexes. It argues that the grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext which depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other. The savages-victims-saviors (SVS) construction lays bare some of the hypocrisies of the human rights project and asks human rights thinkers and advocates to become more self-reflective. The piece questions the universality and cultural neutrality of the human rights project. It calls for the construction of a truly universal human rights corpus, one …
The Ideology Of Human Rights, Makau Wa Mutua
The Ideology Of Human Rights, Makau Wa Mutua
Journal Articles
This piece argues that although human rights is an ideology although it presents itself as non-ideological, non-partisan, and universal. It contends that the human rights corpus, taken as a whole, as a document of ideals and values, particularly the positive law of human rights, requires the construction of states to reflect the structures and values of governance that derive from Western liberalism, especially the contemporary variations of liberal democracy practiced in Western democracies. Viewed from this perspective, the human rights regime has serious and dramatic implications for questions of cultural diversity, the sovereignty of states, and the universality of human …