Since the official formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) three years later, human rights have undergone a never-before-seen internationalizationâa form of globalization of its own. Having become, according to Bertrand Badie (1999), âhumanityâs first common goods,â human rights are now found almost everywhere and invoked at all levels of societyâfrom micro practices to global treatiesâby completely different types of actors. This internationalization of human rights fuels the paradox of todayâs politics of human rights: they are claimed by Northern and Southern countries alike, and by governments as much as by private stakeholders and NGOs. Sometimes, actors contest the legitimacy of human rights; in other circumstances, the same actors are quick to call on these same rights to reinforce their own activities, policies or laws. Human rights are also used to justify the actions and practices of actors on all sides of the political spectrum.
This paradox fuels the reflections investigated here, where human rightsâunderstood as fundamental commitments made by statesârepresent a reference point for political action and âcommonalityâ regardless of the obvious limits that are exposed on a daily basis to their concrete implementation. Human rights discourses and practices are, in some sense, used as a legitimization tool that helps the oppressed participate vocally in violent societies no matter their accomplishment. This book explores the struggles and new meanings emerging from the use of human rights as a political tool in the context of this conflicting commonality.
As with any shared rules and norms governing what human beings have âin commonâ (Blouin-Genest and Paquerot 2016), human rights are neither neutral nor objective: they are political, contested and conflictual. They involve what we call political âbattlefieldsâ (idem), which refers to political spaces that undergo constant changes and in which political conflictâand the struggles for meaning (Laclau and Mouffe 1985)âis expressed by translation and transformation processes. We argue that these processes contribute to the modification of the scope and understanding of human rights, as will be explained in depth in Chap. 2 of this volume where the theoretical and conceptual framework are developed.
Yet, even in cases where stakeholders and social actors have clearly re-appropriated rights discourse, any innovations or breakthroughs are often seen as having been allowed by international laws (Lavaud and Lestage 2006), as though actors were detached from and âobjectsâ of human rights, instead of subjects. This perspective is particularly true when the cases at stake involve oppressed or subaltern actors, which is demonstrated in several chapters in this volume: the intersectional nexus of oppression involving women, children and Indigenous Peoples is revealed through the struggles of âhuman rights from belowâ (see the Chaps. 8 by Das, 9 by Carranza Ko and 10 by Doran). It is particularly important to document the dynamics of the re-appropriation, and even the reformulation, of human rights practices by social actors who are directly involved in conflicts and contestations that have been framed by the human rights context, rather than from the exclusive perspective of states and international institutions. That being said, the very important transformation dynamics at play within the institutional context are also revealed through these processes of translation. The role of institutions in the conceptual translation of human rights is very clearly documented in several chapters of this volume, including those by Bosvieux-Onyekwelu (Chap. 3), Paquerot (Chap. 4), Kamiloglu (Chap. 5) and Blouin-Genest & Erb (Chap. 11).
Notwithstanding their current inscription in international laws, documents and practices, human rights are consistently and dynamically used by actors as political tools to justify their actions, regardless of the dominant meaning of those rights and the âstruggles for meaningâ that stem from these re-appropriations (Doran 2016). Far from being fixed and imposed, human rights are flexible objects that adapt well to contexts, situations and uses, and thus their meanings or understandings can be modified without necessarily being anchored to new international law documents or practices. We suggest that these malleable meanings allow us to shed new light on the political processes that are at the heart of movements and actions that contest and change human rights through new and often unconventional practices. These practices may even challenge spaces conquered by political forces or legal mechanisms that are presented as being on the side of the oppressed, as some of the chapters in this book reveal particularly in Chap. 6 by Bessant and Watts, as well as in Chap. 12 by Cristiano).
Interestingly, it is the internationalization and flexibility of human rights that have made them contentious political objects: human rights are at the same time everywhere and nowhere, easily claimed and used to support contested practice, only to be repudiated the moment they no longer fit the main narrative of the actor(s) in question. They structure political conflicts, as rights are both the causes of and solutions for such encounters. Some have criticized this situation, arguing that human rights lost their effective power because they are constantly being translated and modified, without ever truly being implemented. Indeed, as indicated by Slaughter (2009), human rights have become âbanalized.â
The normalization, generalization and overall banalization of human rights is not, however, a limitation on the human rights research agenda, as we demonstrate in this volume. On the contrary, such a recognition of how human rights are being harnessed by multiple structures and actors represents a unique opportunity to understand what human rights have created, rather than focusing only on their legal interpretation, as framed by international documents, treaties and practices. In short, it opens human rights research to the study of new practices that are changing and redefining the meaning, understanding and use of human rights.
In this context, this edited volume seeks to understand the roles and functions of human rights, both in todayâs international society as well as in diverse national contexts, what is created by them instead of what they consist of, and how they are defined per se through international law. This approach requires us to look at how new and contemporary human rights practices emerge from social/political struggles and conflicts, and position themselves as standards, rules or values that are used as political tools to defend specific issues, ideas or projects. Understood as such, human rights appear to emerge from below (De Sousa Santos and RodrĂguez-Garavito 2005), that is, from local and micro actors, issues or contestation, rather than being exclusively imposed from above, and most notably, by international law documents or practices.
It is this political and conflictual dimension of human rights practices that this book explores, thus adding a layer of complexity to the existing literature and research on human rights. As such, the key questions organizing this edited volume are:
- What role do human rights play today, beyond their origin and inscription in international law ?
- What political function can be attributed to the debates surrounding these rights, and the conflicts in which they are situated?
- To what extent are human rights active agents of social and political change, particularly when consideration is given beyond their technical implementation and recognition?
Through recognizing that human rights become a type of âargument for authorityâ (Arendt and Mattei 1972) as well as a legitimization tool, the research problems that guide this edited volume challenge the idea that they are an obligatory point of passage in the development of new law...