Author: Upendra Baxi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195652894
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 celebrated as an age of human rights, has been marked both by explosive articulations of human rights standards and norms and by explosive articulations of human rights standards and norms and by their sustained critique. This work explores the achievements and shortfalls of human rights and 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.
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.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
An Age of Human Rights?
Two Notions of Human Rights:
Modern and Contemporary
The Practices of Contemporary Human Rights?
Too Many or Too Few Human Rights?
Politics of Identity and Difference
What is Living an