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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Mehmet Kucukozer
The Historical Saga Behind the Complexity of Human Rights
March 17, 2009
José Alvarez raises some important issues in his post on the ‘relative “powerlessness” of human rights vis-à-vis states.’ He writes, “It may involve a more complex saga of the power(s) behind and in human rights.” Alvarez’s discussion reminded me of Hans Joas’ talk given here at the Graduate Center about a year ago on the sociology of our contemporary human rights regimen. It dealt with the inherent tensions between philosophy and history. Whereas philosophical principles claim to transcend time and space (the universal), history always intercedes. As Alvarez pointed out, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights “emerged as a reaction to the Holocaust and atrocities committed in the course of WWII.” Joas, in his talk, argued that the document, written by the victors of WWII, failed to take into account other “histories of violence,” such as the kind that Stalin unleashed in the Soviet Union. Certainly, I would imagine that history interceded again in the creation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a response to what Marc Edelman (2000), in his “Persistence of the Peasantry” (peasantry often signifying indigenous peoples) wrote of rural struggles taking shape in developing countries under transition in the 1990s: …”peasants are at the forefront of unprecedented confrontations with governments…” as well as other types of organizations, including private corporations from more developed countries.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Agnieszka Kajrukszto
On the Human Rights of Women
March 18, 2009
It is shameful that while we live in a world where, for the first time in centuries (ever?), enough wealth has been produced globally to fulfill the needs of the human race to live free from want and deprivation and with dignity, inequalities are growing apace, between countries, between the rich and the poor and between men and women. On the one hand, concerned citizens and organizations all over the world are interacting with various international agencies, many of them affiliated to the United Nations, to promote human rights and are calling upon these agencies and national governments to intervene strongly to make this a reality. On the other, financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF and trade regulatory bodies like the WTO are advocating and insisting on national governments following policies that institutionalize violation of these rights by increasing exploitation and inequality. National governments are being expected to assume the responsibility to ensure economic, social and cultural justice at a time when their policies are informed more and more by the buzzword of privatization and budgetary cutbacks. The global capital market now concentrates sufficient power and legitimacy to command accountability from governments regarding their economic policies. This often clashes with the government’s human rights obligations.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Andrew Bast
Universal Ideas, Universal Means
March 19, 2009
Following on the discussion, it seems that the challenges that have faced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are much of the same that made globalization unequal and now threaten an approach to a comprehensive, worldwide economic recovery program. While the concepts -- human rights, globalization and growth, and the global economic system -- are indeed transnational in nature, the tools that actually deliver them to people are based on individual state policies. So, individual liberties, wealth distribution and now stimulus programs are all state-based, in the face of international issues.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Patricia Mathews-Salazar
We The Peoples
March 19, 2009
Jose Alvarez has effectively outlined important concerns about the problems of human rights as Western-made ideas and the risks of becoming tools of power by a few states over others. As Ashley raises concerns about the use of human rights in the configuration of new political, economic and military power, John’s posting also reminds us of the genuine universality of the principles despite the problems of implementation and promotion of these rights as they appear in the 1948 Declaration. Examining this issue of Western power several years ago, Talal Asad argued, “ However, if our primary concern is to understand what human rights do in the world –what they do as legal rules deployed by sovereign states and as moralizing discourses produced by individuals—then I think this kind of talk about Western hypocrisy isn’t useful. Instead, we should look at the variable functions of the nation state, the shifting structures of international power, and the moral languages in which injustice is identified and its elimination advocated.” Asad also reminds us that while a ‘legal-rights’ culture protects individuals in situations where capitalist transformation has increasingly isolated them and made them more vulnerable, modern international law itself facilitates capitalist transformations. And, as Jack Donnelly said, “to the extent that other countries were forced or coerced into participating in world markets, and to the extent that repressive states in the Third World are a legacy of Western colonialism and neocolonialism, the West can also be blamed for creating the conditions that required human rights in order to guarantee human dignity” (Donnelly, 1989:65). There are too many issues to discuss here starting with concepts of what is “West” or “Westerner” to what we mean by “human,” ‘culture’ or ‘rights,’ but I would like to leave them for now and move towards the second document.
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SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Corey Robin
On Rights
March 20, 2009
On my first reading of both declarations – I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read either before – what surprised me most was how complementary they are. Based on my reading in political theory, which has had a decades-long debate about the conflict between individual rights and group identities, and some of the blog posts here – which have emphasized the western provenance of the 1948 declaration, its prioritization of political rights over social and economic rights, and the utility of rights as an instrument of western power – I was expecting to find in the 2007 declaration a real departure from the 1948 declaration.
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