(DOWNLOAD) "Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood (Debate)" by Ethics & International Affairs ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood (Debate)
- Author : Ethics & International Affairs
- Release Date : January 01, 2002
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 296 KB
Description
In the lexicon of rights, the concept of human rights can play a wide variety of roles. Human rights can be defined as substantive natural rights that transcend politics and culture or as the rights that underlie political and cultural differences. They can be defined narrowly as rights that could be asserted against enemies in war or, more broadly, as the aspirational goals to which governments are held accountable by their citizens and the world. Despite their lack of recognition in covenant and positive law through much of the twentieth century, human rights are increasingly asserted on the basis of such recognition. To some, human rights are simply the sine qua non (procedural? biological?) for asserting other rights, whatever these may be. In this paper I do not choose among these uses of the concept of human rights by propounding a single definition; neither do I defend or criticize human rights in general. My focus, rather, is on a specific political use of human rights discourse that emerged in the 1990s: a fin de siecle triumphalism that sees human rights as a global secular religion, prophesied at the end of World War II and proselytized in the "third wave democratizations" that accompanied the long wind-down of the Cold War. (1) According to this view, the Cold War (in which both sides claimed the mantle of human rights) was a fifty-year-long hiatus in the ability of the "international community" to enforce the consensus on "crimes against humanity" that emerged from Nuremberg and that was embodied in the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both of which were adopted in 1948. This emerging politics of human rights was heralded by journalists beseeching "the West" to use its military might to avert humanitarian disasters throughout the world (2); it was later celebrated by a generation of "mainstreamed" human rights activists who viewed the growing willingness of Western powers to heed their message as a (more or less qualified) vindication of the promise of 1945-48 that they would "never again" stand by while large-scale atrocities were committed. (3)