Are human rights inevitably colonial? What can we do? - Zac

 

              What is the purpose of human rights? Are they a desirable framework? These are some of the questions I've had about Bietz's account especially as articulated. I understand Bietz isn't offering a justification for human rights but simply an explanation for how they operate, but in doing so I fear he's ignoring the important colonzing role of how they have and continue to operate, and creating a faux neutrality (or even assumed positivity) on the ethics of human rights. 

    The two major categories of justifications from human rights appear to be eitheir those which appeal to human rights on the basis of being natural rights bestowed on humans by nature, or those which appeal to human rights as a useful pragmatic political tool for international relations or diplomacy. Both of these seem ripe to be used to justify international action for colonizing purposes, whether it be a justification of restoring "natural" human order, or for geopolitical pragmatism and ensuring states' interests.

    When thinking about these problems I came across a publication by Makau ini the harvard international law journal on this colonizing issue, which I found thought provoking. Specifically they draw analogous parallels between early stage colonialist justifications i.e christianization and "civilizing" missions that I found difficult to unsee as similar to rhetoric around human rights, and intervention for the sake of improving those rights seem familiar to intervention for the sake of giving people Christianity and more education.

 "The historical pattern is undeniable here. It forms the long queue of the colonial administrator, the Bible-wielding Christian missionary, the merchant of free enterprise, the exporter of political democracy, and now the human rights zealot. In each case the "native" culture is pushed to transform by the European culture. The local must be replaced with the European, the "universal."" (Makau, ‘A Third World Critique of Human Rights’ Savages, Victims, and Saviors: the Metaphor of Human Rights, HARVARD INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL vol. 42: 201-245)

    I found it similarly thought provoking to step aside the notions of human rights as a universal objective concept, standardized and set by europe, to something that seems needs to be adaptable based on societal and cultural norms. Thus it seems like non-european views on human rights aren't necessarily always wrong, and correspondingly there is no need for cultural intervention to change societies such that the European human rights model fits. 

"In scholarship by Western academics, the same sharp contrast is drawn between human rights and the cultural or political savage who must be civilized by human rights... The coercive maneuver is intended to civilize the offending state. Thus Western states frequently use human rights as a tool of foreign policy against non-Western states. The United States, which Henkin calls "a principal ancestor of the contemporary idea of rights,"95 views human rights as designed to perform this civilizing role in non-European states.96 Henkin argues that because individual rights "dominate [America’s] constitutional jurisprudence, and are the pride of its people, their banner to the world,"97 such missionizing is perfectly normal.]” (Makau, ‘A Third World Critique of Human Rights’ Savages, Victims, and Saviors: the Metaphor of Human Rights, HARVARD INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL vol. 42: 201-245)

 A related problem that seems to make human rights as used fundamentally colonial is the right to intervene always lies with colonial powers. Colonized countries don't have the ability nor international right to invade the US when the US fails to provide human rights for marginalized groups.

To clarify this is not just a question of doing human rights right, and being committed to a decolonial human rights. It is fears that the practice and conceptions of human rights via the natural rights or political pragmatism model, inevitably are colonial practices which reproduce colonial effects. Thus going forward:

How can human rights be modified such that they can handle/address (not simply ignores) these structural concerns? Should it be built out of a natural rights conception, a political pragmatist view, or something new? Or is there an alternate framework we should move to to replace human rights?

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