We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights.
Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.
We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights.
Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.
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We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights.
Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804795036 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/29/2015 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Human Rights |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 479 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
If God Were a Human Rights Activist
By Boaventura de Sousa Santos
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9503-6
CHAPTER 1
Human Rights
A Fragile Hegemony
THERE IS NO QUESTION TODAY about the global hegemony of human rights as a discourse of human dignity. Nonetheless, such hegemony faces a disturbing reality. A large majority of the world's inhabitants are not the subjects of human rights. They are rather the objects of human rights discourses. The question is, then, whether human rights are efficacious in helping the struggles of the excluded, the exploited, and the discriminated against, or whether, on the contrary, they make those struggles more difficult. In other words, is the hegemony claimed by human rights today the outcome of a historical victory, or rather of a historical defeat? Regardless of the answer, human rights are the hegemonic discourse of human dignity and thus insurmountable. This explains why oppressed social groups cannot help but ask the following questions: Even if human rights are part of the selfsame hegemony that consolidates and legitimates their oppression, could they be used to subvert it? Could human rights be used in a counterhegemonic way? If so, how? These questions lead to two others: Why is so much unjust human suffering not considered a violation of human rights? What other discourses of human dignity are there in the world, and to what extent are they compatible with human rights discourses?
The search for a counterhegemonic conception of human rights must start from a hermeneutics of suspicion regarding human rights as they are conventionally understood and sustained, that is to say, concerning the conceptions of human rights that are more closely related to their Western, liberal matrix. The hermeneutics of suspicion I propose is very much indebted to Ernst Bloch ([1947] 1995), who, for example, wonders about the reasons why, from the eighteenth century onward, the concept of utopia as an emancipatory political measure was gradually superseded and replaced by the concept of rights. Why was the concept of utopia less successful than the concept of law and rights as a discourse of social emancipation?
We must begin by acknowledging that law and rights have a double genealogy in Western modernity. On the one hand, an abyssal genealogy. I understand the dominant versions of Western modernity as having been constructed on the basis of an abyssal thinking that divided the world sharply between metropolitan and colonial societies (Santos, 2007a). This division was such that the realities and practices existing on the other side of the line, that is, in the colonies, could not possibly challenge the universality of the theories and practices in force on the metropolitan side of the line. As such, they were made invisible. As a discourse of emancipation, human rights were historically meant to prevail only on one side of the abyssal line, that is, in the metropolitan societies. It has been my contention that this abyssal line, which produces radical exclusions, far from being eliminated with the end of historical colonialism, continues to exist and that its exclusions are carried out by other means (neocolonialism, racism, xenophobia, and the permanent state of exception in dealing with alleged terrorists, undocumented migrant workers, and asylum seekers). International law and mainstream human rights doctrines have been used to guarantee such continuity. But, on the other hand, law and rights have a revolutionary genealogy on the metropolitan side of the line. Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were fought in the name of law and rights. Bloch maintains that the superiority of the concept of law and rights has much to do with bourgeois individualism. The bourgeois society then emerging had already conquered economic hegemony and was fighting for political hegemony, soon to be consolidated by the American and French Revolutions. The concept of law and rights fitted perfectly the emergent bourgeois individualism inherent both to liberal theory and to capitalism. It is, therefore, easy to conclude that the hegemony enjoyed by human rights has very deep roots and that its trajectory has been a linear path toward the consecration of human rights as the ruling principle of a just society. This idea of a long-established consensus manifests itself in various ways, each one of them residing in an illusion. Because they are widely shared, such illusions constitute the common sense of conventional human rights. I distinguish four illusions: teleology, triumphalism, decontextualization, and monolithism.
The teleological illusion consists in reading history backwards, beginning with the consensus that exists today concerning the unconditional good human rights entail, and reading past history as a linear path inexorably leading toward such a result. The choice of precursors is crucial in this respect. As Samuel Moyn comments: "these are usable pasts: the construction of precursors after the fact" (2010: 12). Such an illusion prevents us from seeing that at any given historical moment different ideas concerning the nature of human dignity and social emancipation were in competition and that the victory of human rights is a contingent result that can be explained a posteriori, but which could not have been deterministically foreseen. The historical victory of human rights made it possible that the same actions—which according to other conceptions of human dignity would be considered actions of oppression and domination—were reconfigured as actions of emancipation and liberation when carried out in the name of human rights.
Related to the teleological illusion is the illusion of triumphalism, the notion that the victory of human rights is an unconditional human good. It takes for granted that all the other grammars of human dignity that have competed with that of human rights were inherently inferior in ethical and political terms. This Darwinian notion does not take into account a decisive feature of hegemonic Western modernity, indeed its true historical genius, namely, the way it has managed to supplement the force of the ideas that serve its purposes with the military force that, supposedly at the service of the ideas, is actually served by them. We need, therefore, to evaluate critically the grounds for the alleged ethical and political superiority of human rights. The ideals of national liberation—socialism, communism, revolution, nationalism—constituted alternative grammars of human dignity; at certain moments, they were even the dominant ones. Suffice it to say that the twentieth century's national liberation movements against colonialism, like the socialist and communist movements, did not invoke the human rights grammar to justify their causes and struggles. That the other grammars and discourses of emancipation have been defeated by human rights discourses should be considered inherently positive only if it could be demonstrated that human rights, while a discourse of human emancipation, have superior merit for reasons other than the fact that they have emerged as the winner. Until then, the triumph of human rights may be considered by some as progress, a historical victory, while by others as retrogression, a historical defeat.
This precaution helps us to face the third illusion: decontextualization. It is generally acknowledged that human rights as an emancipatory discourse have their origin in eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the American Revolution. What is seldom mentioned, however, is that since then and until today human rights have been used in very distinct contexts and with contradictory objectives. In the eighteenth century, for instance, human rights were the central language of the ongoing revolutionary processes. But they were also used to legitimate practices that we would consider oppressive if not altogether counterrevolutionary. When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798, this is how he explained his actions to the Egyptians: "People of Egypt: You will be told by our enemies, that I am come to destroy your religion. Believe them not. Tell them that I am come to restore your rights, punish your usurpers, and raise the true worship of Mahomet." Thus was the invasion of Egypt legitimated by the invaders. The same could be said of Robespierre, who fostered the Terror during the French Revolution in the name of piety and human rights. After the 1848 revolutions, human rights were no longer part of the revolution imaginary and became rather hostile to any idea of a revolutionary change of society. But the same hypocrisy (I would call it constitutive) of invoking human rights to legitimate practices that may be considered violations of human rights continued throughout the past century and a half and is perhaps more evident today than ever. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, human rights talk was separated from the revolutionary tradition and began to be conceived of as a grammar of depoliticized social change, a kind of antipolitics. At best, human rights were subsumed under the law of the state as the state established a monopoly over the production of law and the administration of justice. This is why the Russian Revolution was carried out, unlike the French and American revolutions, not in the name of law, but against law (Santos, 1995: 104–7). Gradually, the predominant discourse of human rights became the discourse of human dignity consonant with liberal politics, capitalist development, and its different metamorphoses (liberal, social-democratic, neoliberal, dependent, Fordist, post-Fordist, peripheral Fordist, corporative, state capitalism), and colonialism (neocolonialism, internal colonialism, racism, slave-like labor, xenophobia). And so we must bear in mind that the selfsame human rights discourse has had very many different meanings in different historical contexts, having legitimated both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary practices. Today we cannot even be sure if present-day human rights are a legacy of the modern revolutions or of their ruins, or if they have behind them a revolutionary, emancipatory energy or a counterrevolutionary energy.
The fourth illusion is monolithism, which is a main focus of this book. This illusion consists in denying or minimizing the tensions and even internal contradictions of the theories of human rights. Suffice it to remember that the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man is ambivalent as it speaks of the rights of man and of the citizen. From the very beginning, human rights foster ambiguity by creating belongingness to two different collective identities. One of them is humanity, supposedly an inclusive collectivity, hence human rights. The other is a much more restrictive collectivity, that of the citizens of a given state. This tension has burdened human rights ever since. The goal of regimes and international institutions of human rights and of the adoption of international declarations was to guarantee minimal dignity to individuals whenever their rights as members of a political collectivity did not exist or were violated. In the course of the past two hundred years, human rights were gradually incorporated into constitutions and were reconceptualized as rights of citizenship, directly guaranteed by the state and adjudicated by the courts as civic, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. But the truth is that the effective, ample protection of citizenship rights has always been precarious in the large majority of countries and, further, that human rights have been invoked mainly in situations involving the erosion or particularly serious violation of citizenship rights. Human rights emerge as the lowest threshold of inclusion, a descending movement from the dense community of citizens to the diluted community of humanity. With neoliberalism and its attack on the state as the guarantor of rights, particularly social and economic rights, the community of citizens is diluted to such a degree that it becomes indistinguishable from the community of humans and citizenship rights, as trivialized as human rights. The priority granted by Hannah Arendt (1951) to citizenship rights over human rights, once pregnant with consequences, slides into normative emptiness. In the process, immigrants, especially undocumented migrant workers, descend even further to the "community" of subhumans.
The other tension illustrating the illusory nature of monolithism is the one between individual and collective rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the last century's first major universal declaration, and which was followed by several others, recognizes only two lawful subjects: the individual and the state. Peoples are recognized only to the extent that they become states. When the declaration was adopted, it should be noted, there were many peoples, nations, and communities that had no state. Thus, from the point of view of the epistemologies of the South, the declaration cannot but be deemed colonialist (Burke, 2010; Terretta, 2012). When we speak of equality before the law, we must bear in mind that, when the Declaration was written, individuals from vast regions of the world were not equal before the law because they were subjected to collective domination and that under collective domination individual rights provide no protection. At a time of bourgeois individualism, the Declaration could not take this into account. This was a time when sexism was part of common sense, sexual orientation was taboo, class domination was each country's internal affair, and colonialism was still strong as a historical agent, in spite of the setback constituted by India's independence. As time went by, sexism, colonialism, and the crassest forms of class domination came to be acknowledged as human rights violations. In the 1960s, anticolonial struggles were adopted by the Declaration and became part of UN affairs. However, as it was understood at the time, self-determination concerned peoples subjected to European colonialism alone. Self-determination thus understood left many peoples subjected to internal colonization, indigenous peoples being the paramount example. More than thirty years had to go by before the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination was recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly in 2007. Lengthy negotiations were needed before the International Labor Organization approved Convention 169 regarding indigenous and tribal peoples. Gradually, these documents became part of the legislation of different countries.
Since collective rights are not part of the original canon of human rights, the tension between individual and collective rights results from the historical struggle of the social groups that, being excluded or discriminated against as groups, could not be adequately protected under individual human rights. The struggles of women, indigenous peoples, African people under colonial regimes, Afro-descendants, victims of racism, gays, lesbians, and religious minorities marked the past fifty years of the recognition of collective rights, a recognition that has been always highly contested and always on the verge of being reversed. There is no necessary contradiction between individual and collective rights, if for no other reason than because there are many kinds of collective rights. For instance, we can distinguish two kinds of collective rights, primary and derivative. We speak of derivative collective rights when the workers organize themselves in unions and confer upon those unions the right to represent them in negotiations with their employers. We speak of primary collective rights when a community of individuals has rights other than the rights of their organization, or renounce their individual rights on behalf of the rights of the community. These rights, in turn, may be exerted in two ways. The large majority of them are exerted individually, as when a Sikh policeman wears the turban; an Islamic female doctor wears the hijab; or a Brazilian Afro-descendent, an indigenous person, or a member of a low caste in India takes advantage of the affirmative action provided in their communities. But there are rights that can only be exerted collectively, such as the right to self-determination. Collective rights are there to eliminate or abate the insecurity and injustice suffered by individuals that are discriminated against as the systematic victims of oppression, just for being who and what they are, and not for doing what they do. Only very slowly have collective rights become part of the political agenda, whether national or international. At any rate, the contradiction or tension vis-à-vis more individualistic conceptions of human rights is always there.
Bearing in mind these illusions is crucial for building a counterhegemonic conception and practice of human rights, particularly when they must be based on a dialogue with other conceptions of human dignity and the practices sustaining them. I consider the conventional understanding of human rights as having some of the following characteristics: human rights are universally valid irrespective of the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they operate and of the various human rights regimes existing in different regions of the world; in our time, human rights are the only oppositional grammar and language available to confront the "pathologies of power"; the violators of human rights, no matter how horrendous the violations perpetrated, are to be punished in compliance with human rights; questioning human rights in terms of their supposed cultural or political limitations helps perpetuate the evils that human rights are designed to fight against; the recurrent phenomenon of double standards in evaluating compliance with human rights in no way compromises the universal validity of human rights; human rights are premised upon the idea of human dignity, itself grounded on a conception of human nature as individual, self-sustaining, and qualitatively different from non–human nature; freedom of religion can be secured only to the extent that the public sphere is freed from religion, which is the premise of secularism; what counts as a violation of human rights is defined by universal declarations and multilateral institutions (courts and commissions), and established global (mostly North-based) nongovernmental organizations; violations of human rights can be adequately measured according to quantitative indicators; the respect for human rights is much more problematic in the Global South than in the Global North.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from If God Were a Human Rights Activist by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts2The globalization of political theologies chapter abstractClaiming religion as a constitutive element of public life is a phenomenon that has been increasingly gaining worldwide relevance in the past few decades. It challenges secularism, the paradigm of religion and state relations which is at the core of western-centric modernity and has spread across the globe through colonialism and globalization. According to this paradigm, Christian values are recognized as "universal" but institutional Christianity activism is relegated to the private sphere. This resolution of the "religious question" is being challenged in many parts of the world, the western world included, by political theologies for which the distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere is not valid. This chapter distinguishes different types of theology (pluralist and fundamentalist; progressive and traditionalist) showing that the relations among political theologies, forms of globalization, secularism and human rights are not univocal or monolithic.
3The case of Islamic fundamentalism chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the globalization of some forms of Islamic political theology commonly designated as Islamic fundamentalism. This is a minefield in which claims of conceptual difficulty are often mixed with implicit or even explicit assumptions about real or imagined political threats. It is thus imperative to counter the monolithic conceptions of Islam prevalent in the West today. Even when militantly anti-Western, the different Islamic political theologies differ as to what it means to be anti-Western, as the rejection of Western modernity as a cultural imperial project may or may not involve the rejection of global capitalism. This chapter gives special attention to the relations between Islam, and particularly fundamentalist Islam, on the one hand, and women's rights and the struggle against sexual discrimination, on the other.
4The case of Christian fundamentalism chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the globalization of some forms of Christian political theology commonly designated as Christian fundamentalism, especially in its Protestant strain. The expansion of Christian fundamentalist movements throughout the world, whether by means of proselytizing missions or through electronic resources, has significant political impact. It tends to strengthen political conservatism, if not far right politics. While liberation theologies tend to valorize grassroots, popular culture, Christian fundamentalism is becoming a mass culture phenomenon, mixing the alien and the familiar, the ancestral and the hypermodern, as if they were homogeneous components of the same religious artifact. Although a fierce defender of global capitalism, it rejects the Western society for having "liberalized" the family, education, sexual and reproductive rights, which they consider a betrayal of Christian values.
5Human rights in the contact zones with political theologies chapter abstractPolitical theologies promote conceptions of human dignity, social regulation and social transformation that often contradict those conventionally associated with human rights. New contact zones among rival conceptions are thereby generated and, with them, new forms of political, cultural, and ideological turbulence. This chapter analyzes the following dimensions and manifestations of such turbulence: the turbulence among rival principles; the turbulence between roots and options; and the turbulence between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, the transcendent and the immanent. This analysis sheds new light on the limits of conventional human rights politics on a global scale and calls for a deep reconstruction, or even reinvention, of human rights, if they are to provide credible answers to the strong questions raised by global injustice.
6Toward a post-secularist conception of human rights: counter-hegemonic human rights and progressive theologies chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the possibilities for mutually enriching interactions between counter-hegemonic conceptions and practices of human rights and liberation theologies. Since the 1960s, pluralist, progressive theologies and community-based religious practices have emerged, for which God seems to be revealed in unjust human suffering, in the life experiences of all the victims of domination, oppression, and discrimination. As a consequence, to bear witness to this God means to denounce such suffering and to struggle against it. If both revelation and redemption take place in this world, a contact zone is thereby generated with the ideals of social and political liberation underlying the utopia that another more just and free world is possible. One of the paths towards counter-hegemonic human rights lies in the possibility of connecting the return of God to a trans-modern, concrete insurgent humanism.
Conclusion chapter abstractThis book identifies the major challenges that the rise of political theologies pose to human rights with the objective of exploring the possibility of transforming human rights into a much stronger instrument of emancipatory politics in an unjust, globalized, but resiliently intercultural world. In the background of the arguments developed in this book is the concrete experience of the World Social Forum in which converge activists in social struggles for socio-economic, historical, sexual, racial, cultural, and postcolonial justice who base their activism and their claims on Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous religious beliefs and spiritualities. They represent a political inter-subjectivity that seems to have deserted conventional secular critical thinking and political action: the combination of creative effervescence and intense and passionate energy, on one side, with a pluralistic, open-ended, non-violent and yet radical conception of struggle, on the other.
1Human Rights: a fragile hegemony chapter abstractThis chapter briefly traces the genealogy of the western-centric human rights conception. Nowadays, there seems to be no question about the global hegemony of human rights as a discourse of human dignity. Yet, a large majority of the world's inhabitants are not the subjects of human rights, but rather objects of human rights discourses. Thus the question is: are human rights helping the struggles of the excluded, the exploited, and the discriminated against, or, on the contrary, making these struggles more difficult? The hegemony enjoyed by human rights is commonly viewed as the product of an historic linear trajectory towards their consecration as the ruling principle of a just society. The chapter challenges this view by identifying four illusions underlying it: teleology, triumphalism, decontextualization, and monolithism. Being widely shared, such illusions constitute the common sense of conventional human rights.