Human Rights, Democracy, and the Inescapability of Politics; or, Human Dignity Thick and Thin

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 358-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yehudah Mirsky
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Advisory Opinion ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
The Icj ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
The Cold War

The essay places the ICJ opinion in a broader legal and political context and argues that the failure to distinguish between democratic and non-democratic regimes characterizing the ICJ advisory opinion reflects broader trends with potentially ruinous consequences for the enterprise of human rights promotion itself. The ICJ opinion's willful ignoring of Israel's democratic character yielded a tendentious and inconsistent ruling. By contrast the Israel High Court of Justice's decision invalidating portions of Israel's security wall reflects a healthy understanding of a democracy's needs and limitations, as reflected in that court's proportionality standard of review. The ICJ willingly blurred crucial distinctions between democratic regimes that genuinely adhere, however imperfectly, to principles of human rights in their own governance, and those states and actors that do not, a distinction made all the more imperative by the events of September 11.The judicialization of human rights in the post-Cold War era takes place against the background of a tensile relationship between human rights advocacy and democracy promotion during the Cold War. While human rights represent an essentially legal idea, democracy a political idea. In closing, the essay lays out one basic, hopefully workable, conceptual division of labor between human rights and democracy as complementary elements of a broader project of human dignity, in which human rights represents a “thin” universal conception of human dignity, while democracy offers a process whereby that conception can be “thickened” in various political, social and cultural contexts around the globe.

scholarly journals After International Law: Anthropology Beyond the “Age of Human Rights”

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 289-293
Author(s):  
Mark Goodale
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
The Cold War

This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the Cold War. It argues that anthropological research has made important contributions to the wider understanding of international law as a mechanism for social and political change, a framework for protecting vulnerable populations, and a language through which collective identities can be expressed and valorized. Yet, over time, international law has lost many of these expansive functions, a shift that anthropologists have also studied, although with greater reluctance and difficulty. The essay explains the ways in which particular categories of international law, such as human rights and international criminal justice, grew dramatically in importance and power during the 1990s and early 2000s, a shift whose complexities anthropologists studied at the local level. As the essay also explains, anthropological research began to detect a weakening in human rights implementation and respect for international legal norms, a countervailing shift that has broader implications for the possibilities for international cooperation and the resolution of conflicts, among others. At the same time, the retreat of international law from its highpoint in the early post-Cold War years has given way to the reemergence of non-legal strategies for advancing change and accounting for past injustices, including strategies based on social confrontation, moral shaming, and even violence.

Words Are Not Enough

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-111
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Latin American ◽  
First Year ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the early development of the Carter administration's human rights agenda, built in tandem with a new approach to U.S.–Latin American relations during its first year in office. From the outset, the Carter administration envisioned a human rights policy that would simultaneously mitigate human rights violations abroad, build U.S. credibility and stature in the international sphere by reasserting a moral and ideological pole of attraction, and signify a move away from the excessive secrecy and power of the Cold War presidency at home. Although Carter largely shared the premises of the Movement's vision, differences over the implementation and signifiers of this policy in high-level diplomacy created rifts between like-minded advocates and policy makers. Carter found himself grappling with the legacies of both U.S. intervention in the region and also congressional and public distrust stemming from past excesses of the Cold War presidency. The administration's options in implementing its policy were bounded by both past regional relations and human rights advocacy itself.

Principles in Power

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
International Power ◽  
The Cold War

This book explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the U.S. government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. The book shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, the book shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in diverse places. The book tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, it explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

New national organization of Europe: nationalism and minority rights after the end of the Cold War

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Matti Jutila
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
National Minorities ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

Post–Cold War Europe witnessed the resurgence of different forms of nationalism and also the re-establishment of a minority rights regime. At the surface level, rights of national minorities seem to undermine nationalism as a political organization principle, but on a closer investigation the relationship between the two is more complex. This article uses insights from the English school’s theorizing on primary and secondary institutions to investigate the relationship between the primary institution of nationalism and secondary institution of minority rights regime. After a brief discussion of nationalism as a primary institution and its influence on the implementation of universal human rights, this article presents a detailed study of the minority rights regime analysing how it challenges, transforms and reproduces nationalism as a primary institution of contemporary European society of states.

Broadening the Cultural History of the Cold War: The Emergence of the Polish Workers' Defense Committee and the Rise of Human Rights

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 104-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Brier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
International Context ◽  
East European ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opposition Group ◽  
The Cold War

The historiography of the Cold War has witnessed a revived interest in non-material factors such as culture and ideology. Although this incipient cultural history of the Cold War has focused mainly on the period from 1945 until the early 1960s, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 turned ideas into potent factors of international politics when East European opposition groups began to expose how their governments violated the accord's human rights provisions. By putting the emergence of one such opposition group, the Polish Workers' Defense Committee, in an international context, this article extends Cold War cultural history into the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how human rights ideas affected international and domestic politics. The Communist states' willingness to put up with the human rights provisions in the Helsinki Final Act was not sufficient to “shame” them internationally. Instead, what happened is that Western leftists, after encountering East European dissidents, increasingly perceived human rights as a precondition for the success of their own political project and hence revoked what Robert Horvath calls the “revolutionary privilege” long granted to Communist regimes. Because Communism's identity was so closely related to its struggle with the West, this criticism was particularly damaging. Only within the dynamics of a cultural framework from earlier stages of postwar history did transnational human rights advocacy become effective.

scholarly journals Harnessing Human Rights to the Olympic Games: Human Rights Watch and the 1993 ‘Stop Beijing’ Campaign

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Keys
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
Moral Legitimacy ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
Human Rights Organizations ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Olympic Games

In 1993 Human Rights Watch, one of the two most influential human rights organizations in the world, launched a major campaign to derail Beijing's bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. This article situates this highly publicized campaign in the context of Sino–US relations, the end of the Cold War, and the ‘victory’ of human rights as a global moral lingua franca. It argues that Human Rights Watch's decision to oppose Beijing's bid stemmed from its new post-Cold War focus on China combined with the organization's search for new ways to secure media attention and the funding that flowed from publicity. The campaign most likely swayed the International Olympic Committee's close vote in favor of Sydney. It also brought Human Rights Watch a windfall of favorable publicity among new audiences. The article argues that the campaign irrevocably inserted broad-based human rights considerations into the Olympic Games, decisively moving moral claims-making around the Olympics beyond the playing field. It also linked Human Rights Watch's moral legitimacy to US power in problematic ways and triggered a powerful anti-US backlash in China.

Human rights and the global politics of resistance: feminist perspectives

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (S1) ◽  
pp. 161-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Market Capitalism

Talk of human rights is, currently, nearly as ubiquitous as talk of globalisation. While globalisation has been described as ‘the most over used and under specified term in the international policy sciences since the end of the Cold War’, the same could reasonably be said of ‘human rights’. Human rights are a product of the immediate aftermath of World War II, and thus they developed, in their contemporary form, in the context of the Cold War. The philosophical and political roots of human rights, of course, date back at least to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and some would say even further, to the Stoics of Ancient Greece. Globalisation, too, has unfolded mainly in the late twentieth-century and has reached a position of prominence in the post-Cold War context; at this juncture, and according to popular perception, the spread of market capitalism, Western culture and modern technology fit comfortably with the death of socialism and the ‘end of history’. But globalisation too has roots that date back much earlier – as early as, it has been argued, the fourteenth century.

Post-Cold War Reflections on the Study of International Human Rights

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 97-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Political Liberalization ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
International Human ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The 1993 World Human Rights Conference, only the second UN-sponsored global conference on human rights ever held, provides an appropriate occasion to reflect on the state of the study of international human rights. The first global human rights conference, held in Tehran in 1968, came on the heels of the rise of the Third World to a position of international prominence. The Tehran Conference helped to initiate an era in which issues of economic, social, and cultural rights and development received steadily increasing attention in international human rights discussions. The 1993 Vienna Conference reflected the new international context characterized by the end of the Cold War and the global trend toward political liberalization and democratization. Substantively, the Vienna Conference was perhaps most notable for its emphasis on the university of international human rights—an emphasis, as I will argue below, that is reflected in the development of the academic human rights literature as well.

Post-Cold War International Political Theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-58
Author(s):  
David Martin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Order ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Communicative Reason ◽  
Ideological Dimension ◽  
The Cold War

The way the Cold War ended and the triumph of market capitalism constituted the global, economic preconditions and the liberal democratic premises for abstract speculation about how the evolving world order ought to be governed. Release from the ideological straightjacket of the Cold War stimulated interest in social justice, emancipation, human security, human rights and international law. Ethics and culture replaced economics and historical materialism as subjects of academic inquiry. Human rights and social justice had been cards of low value in the Cold War ideological pack. Now, global values and shared norms trumped everything. The return of Grand Theory in a progressive guise saw otherwise obscure philosophical speculation concerning social justice and communicative reason form the basis for progressive theories of a communitarian, feminist and cosmopolitan character devoted to the ethical transformation of a global society. Political thought, once concerned with liberty and equality within the democratic state, now assumed a radical, emancipatory international dimension. It came to dominate the thought and practice of the western campus as well as form the tacit ideological dimension informing a new progressive, post political and post historicist third way.

scholarly journals An Oil Company as a Force for Good? How Statoil put Norway’s Identity as a‘ Champion of Ideals’ to the Test

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-40
Author(s):  
Ada Elisabeth Nissen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
International Activism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Global Arena ◽  
Oil Company

This article explores how Norway’s quest for moral authority to be recognized as a “champion of ideals” came under strain in the 1990s when the Norwegian state’s oil company (Statoil) expanded its operations in- and outside Norwegian borders. While we know a lot about Scandinavia’s international activism after the end of the Cold War, we know less about Scandinavian business’ responses to this policy. Neither do we know much about business’ potential impact on this policy. The aim of this article is therefore to begin address this issue by examining Statoil’s response to some of Norway’s moral and ethical aspirations in the post-Cold War global arena. Particular attention is paid to the tension between Norway’s ambition to be an early mover for sustainable development and a human rights advocate, and Statoil’s approach to environmental problems and human rights violations. As such, the article explores the role of state-owned enterprises in profit-making and global expansion during a formative decade when economy became an increasingly important determinant of Norwegian foreign relations, and ethical and moral objectives with roots in earlier decades were revitalized through an unprecedented number of international initiatives.

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