The End of Human Rights: Readings for October 3

The readings for this week are, in my opinion, the most interesting ones we have had so far. They are all about the limit of human rights, and what it means to understand and respect them. We are finally moving away from the idealized intellectual frameworks of human rights to the reality of them. In these articles, people seem almost to be arguing against human rights, in the sense that they are saying that the way they are viewed is flawed and that there have been many failures.

I was really drawn to the idea of nationhood as the defining factor of being a human being. There was this idea that if you loose that attachement to your nation, if you become a refugee, then your human rights also disappear. Cut off from your cultural setting, your place of origin, you are no longer viewed as a complete human. This explains the systematic rights abuses so often commited to refugees. It is easy to say that you are open to "the other" until the other is all around you. It also begs the question: what does it mean to be human? Are we our culture, or is there something more, some underlying tread uniting us in our common humanity and making us all worthy of the same rights?

I would also like to address the idea of human rights being a Western concept. In many ways, I very much agree with this. Western countries have been at the forefront of the articulation of human rights as we know them; therefore, Western values and ideals are heavily present in them. Does this make them wrong? I do believe that the Western world have too often used human rights as an excuse to march into a country guns blazing and try to impose peace and democracy, as if that ever works. Human rights as a pure and untainted concept, however, looses a lot of it's meaning for me if I start thinking of it simply as a construct of the West. The solution, then, would probably be a more inclusive discourse, one that includes minority groups and refugees and countries other than the West. But would any agreement ever be reached? And if so, would it be respected?

I'm starting to feel terribly disillusioned.