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Description
The languages and the logics of human rights have been deeply contested regionally, nationally and globally. The second half of the twentieth century, justly celebrate as an age of human rights, has been marked both by explosive articulations of human rights standards and norms and by their sustained critique. This work explores the achievements and shortfalls of human rights their future in an era of globalization.
While celebrating the rhetoric of the ‘Universality’ of human rights, Upendra Baxi alerts us to the promises, as well as the perils, of statist and emancipatory discourses. Human rights proclamations and movements owe their emergence to increased sensitivity to the politics of cruelty beginning with the Holocaust and Hiroshima-Nagasaki. The ‘New’ social movements – such as women’s struggle to feminize human rights practices, postmodernist critiques of universalistic idiom of human rights and movements in the politics of identity – present inaugural ways of relating human suffering to human rights.
The work explores the paradigm shift in human rights theory and practice that subordinates, even sacrifices, human rights of individual human beings and subaltern peoples to the needs and interests of the managers and agents of globalization. It traces the community of concerns that now reshape the activist energy and power of human rights movements everywhere.
The future of Human Rights is essential reading for all concerned with human rights and human futures.
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Contents
1. An age of Human Rights?
2. Two Notions of Human Rights: ‘Modern’ and ‘Contemporary’
3. The Practices of ‘Contemporary’ Human Rights?
4. Too many or Too Few Human Rights
5. Politics of Identity and Difference
6. What is Living and Dead in Relativism?
7. Human Rights Movements and Human Rights Markets
8. The Emergence of an Alternate Paradigm of Human Rights
References and Bibliography
Author Index
Theme Index
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Author Details
Upendra Baxi, former vice chancelor of the Universities if South Gujarat and Delhi, is currently professor of Law, University of Warwick.
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