Domesticating Human Rights: A Reappraisal of their Cultural-Political Critiques and their Imperialistic Use

Thesis advisor: David M. RasmussenFollowing the idea that human rights are anchored in many cultures and find their support in many traditions, the contemporary human rights corpus is a fruit of a long history whose roots can be traced back to different societies in addressing the universal questions of injustice. If one adopts such a historical evolution of human rights, their universality might be affirmed on the assumption that they are coexistent to every human society. This view is, however, challenged by scholars who claim that the current human rights regime does not owe anything to other cultures, since they are essentially Western. The consequence of such an understanding touches the heart of the human rights’ perennial question concerning their universality, and it is the source of the Third World’s critiques. Indeed, if conceptually, culturally and historically, human rights are Western, how do they become universal? This question was first raised by the American Anthropological Association in its now well-known 1947 statement, even before the existing human rights instruments were framed. Today, it has been taken up by some Third World critics. For them, human right movement is an imperialistic swirl of Western liberalism upon other societies under the banner of United States of America that has replaced the former European imperialistic powers such as France and United Kingdom. According to these critics, there is no other area where human rights are imperialistically used by the West than in the so-called humanitarian intervention. Usually evoked as an urgent need to protect human rights, humanitarian intervention is seen as another name for the neo-colonialism in the Third World, as it is carried out by Western Powers against states in the Third World. Two challenges arise from these views. On the one hand, because of their Western origin, human rights are decried as Western and, therefore, they should not be imposed on other cultures. On the other hand, their imperialistic use by the West is an acute difficulty stemming from the global political context after the fall of Communism as a competing ideology with liberalism in 1990s. These challenges affect the theoretical justification as well as the implementation of human rights. For, according to the critics, human rights are purposely framed in liberal terms because they have to pursue and advance the Western project of conquering the whole world. Therefore, they claim, the actual spread of Western liberalism under human rights label is neither incidental nor accidental; it is a continuation of the Western imperialism which started long ago with economic exploitation, slavery and colonization of the rest of the world. Human rights is only a neutral term to translate the same reality. To those who reply that the contemporary human rights regime, starting with Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a fruit of an international group with a diverse background, the critics respond that all of them were trained in the Western culture. And if one presents the role of the local human rights activists in the non-Western world, the critics consider them as Western mercenaries in local colors. That is why, while it springs from the cultural critique, the imperialistic challenge to human rights is a serious one because it attacks the human rights regime in its purpose and in its practice. It does not reject human rights only because they are extrinsic to the non-Western culture –cultural relativism—; rather, human rights are rejected because they are channels of oppression and exploitation as was and has always been the Western imperialism. The question now is: what do human rights become in this case? Is it possible to rescue them from both the cultural critics and imperialistic crusaders? Such a project would aim at maintaining and affirming their historicity as Western, yet showing that they are open to the possibility of being practiced in other cultures and other contexts. That it is the goal of this dissertation whose thesis is that, by domesticating human rights we retrieve the purpose of human rights of protecting and enhancing human dignity and, at the same time, it becomes possible to satisfactorily address the cultural and imperialistic challenges. Indeed, instead of thinking that people adopt and use human rights discourse because they like their individualistic side, the domestication of human rights pays attention to the process through which human rights as moral norms are incorporated in local cultures. Relying on the anthropological works that focus on the way human rights norms are integrated in different cultural contexts, this project endeavors to build a normative account of human rights based on these local practices. Philosophically speaking, domestication of human rights takes up Beitz’s insight of human rights as an emerging practice, and brings it to the beneficiaries of human rights purpose, instead of remaining at the legal level where only states are accepted as credible interlocutors, while they are the most suspected violators of human rights.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Philosophy