The impasse currently affecting human rights as a language used to express struggles for dignity is, to a large extent, a reflection of the epistemological and political exhaustion which blights the global North. Since the global hegemony of human rights as a language for human dignity is nowadays incontrovertible, the question of whether it can be used in a counter-hegemonic sense remains open. Inspired by struggles from all corners of the world that reveal the potential but, above all, the limitations of human rights, this book offers a highly conditional response. The prevailing notion of human rights today, as the hegemonic language of human dignity, can only be resignified on the basis of answers to simple questions: why does so much unjust human suffering exist that is not considered a violation of human rights? Do other languages of human dignity exist in the world? Are these other languages compatible with the language of human rights? Obviously, we can only find satisfactory answers to these questions if we are able to envisage a radical transformation of what is nowadays known as human rights. Herein lies the challenge posed by the Epistemologies of the South: reconciling human rights with the different languages and forms of knowledge born out of struggles for human dignity.

"The impasse affecting human rights as a language used to express struggles for dignity reflects the epistemological and political exhaustion which blights the global North. Inspired by struggles from all corners of the world, this book offers a highly conditional response to the prevailing notion of human rights today"--

This book draws on a range of theoretical frameworks to challenge the limited conception of subjectivity upon which human rights are based. The book focuses on some of the ways in which dominant discourses are in tension with human rights’ fundamental claim to universality by ignoring multiple ways of being. Different theoretical and methodological approaches are used to analyse this creation of exclusions. These include Hannah Arendt’s figure of the refugee, posthumanist critiques and non-Western critical theories such as Black, Indigenous and decolonial approaches. Often these approaches are used in isolation, but together they reveal how the dominant concept of subjectivity has always needed an ‘Other’ and that the ‘human’ at the heart of human rights is not a universal concept. The book also pursues an analysis of visual discourses in the field of international human rights, with a focus on the ways in which exclusions are represented and entrenched through the visual. It argues that international human rights are based on a vision-centred sensorium and certain processes of reasoning that exclude emotions. Finally, the book considers how international human rights could embrace other forms of thinking and being in the world and recognize different sensory experiences. This original perspective on the limits of human rights will appeal to legal theorists, socio-legal scholars, and others working in politics, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies with an interest in contemporary approaches to social justice and critical approaches.

This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future. In order to probe how cultural production embodies the tensions between the abstract universality of human rights and the materiality of violations on individual human bodies and on determined groups, the volume asks the following questions: How does the transmission of historical traumas of Colombia’s past, through human rights narratives in various forms, inform the debates around the subjects of rights, truth and memory, remembrance and forgetting, and the construction of citizenship through solidarity and collective struggles for justice? What are the different roles taken by cultural products in the interstices among rights, laws, and social justice within different contexts of state violence and states of exception? What are alternative perspectives, sources, and (micro)histories from Colombia of the creation, evolution, and practice of human rights? How does the human rights discourse interface with notions of environmental justice, especially in the face of global climate change, regional (neo)extractivism, the implementation of megaprojects, and ongoing post-accord thefts and (re)appropriations of land? Through a wide range of disciplinary lenses, the different chapters explore counter-hegemonic concepts of human rights, decolonial options struggling against oppression and market logic, and alternative discourses of human dignity and emancipation within the pluriverse.

Palestinians have used the language of human rights to articulate their struggle against the Israeli occupation and internationalise the injustices they face. Palestinian young people learning about human rights at school experience a dissonance between the aspirational and internationalised framework of those norms and the layers of injustice of their own lived experience. Drawing on research in the occupied West Bank, this book explores the three layers of marginalisation faced by Palestinian young people – the Israeli occupation that denies them their humanity; the Palestinian pseudo-state that denies them a voice; and patriarchal structures that deny them agency – to show how these barriers influence their understanding of, and scepticism towards, human rights. Influenced by decolonial theories, this book illuminates how space needs to be created for the counter-narratives of the oppressed in human rights discourse, which may not align with more conventional representations of human rights. It contends that human rights and, by extension, human rights education in the Palestinian context (and beyond) needs to be critiqued, decolonised and ultimately transformed.

This ground-breaking volume examines enduring and emerging discourses around communication rights in Africa, arguing that they should be considered an integral component of the human rights discourse in Africa. Drawing on a broad range of case studies across the continent, the volume considers what constitutes communication rights in Africa, who should protect them, against whom, and how communication rights relate to broader human rights. While the case studies highlight the variation in communicative rights experiences between countries, they also coalesce around common tropes and practices for the implementation and expression of communication rights. Deploying a variety of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches, the chapters scrutinise different facets of communication rights in the context of both offline and digital communication realities. The contributions provide illuminating accounts on language rights, digital exclusion, digital activism, citizen journalism, media regulation and censorship, protection of intellectual property rights, politics of mobile data, and politicisation of social media. This is the first collection to consider communication in Africa using a rights-based lens. The book will appeal to researchers, academics, communication activists, and media practitioners at all levels in the fields of media studies, journalism, human rights, political science, public policy, as well as general readers who are keen to know about the status of communication rights in Africa.

Mind and Rights combines historical, philosophical, and legal perspectives with research from psychology and the cognitive sciences to probe the justification of human rights in ethics, politics and law. Chapters critically examine the growth of the human rights culture, its roots in history and current human rights theories. They engage with the so-called cognitive revolution and investigate the relationship between human cognition and human rights to determine how insights gained from modern theories of the mind can deepen our understanding of the foundations of human rights. Mind and Rights argues that the pursuit of the human rights idea, with its achievements and tragic failures, is key to understand what kind of beings humans are. Amidst ongoing debate on the universality and legitimacy of human rights, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive analysis of great practical and political importance for a culture of legal justice undergirded by rights. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights, thus enabling us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.

The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles: Memory, Politics and Uses of the Past presents a critical and comparative analysis on the memory of the colonial and liberation wars that led to a regime change in Portugal and to the independence of five new African countries: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Covering more than six decades and based on original archival research and critical analysis of sources and interviews, the book offers the first plural account of the public memorialisation of this contested past in Portugal and in former colonised territories in Africa, focussing on diachronic and synchronic processes of mnemonic production. This innovative exercise highlights the changing and crossed nature of political memories and social representations through time, emphasizing three modes of mnemonic intersections: the intersection of distinct historical times, the intersection between multiple products and practices of memory and the intersection connecting the different countries and national histories. The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles: Memory, Politics and Uses of the Past a major output of the research developed by CROME – Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence, a project funded by a Starting Grant (715593) from the European Research Council (ERC). The book advances current knowledge on Portugal and Lusophone Africa and deepens ongoing conceptual and epistemological discussions regarding the relationship between social and individual memories, the dialectics between memory, power, and silence, and the uses and representations of the past in postcolonial states and societies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

The notion of human dignity plays a central role in human rights discourse. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognition of the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. The international Covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and on Civil and Political Rights state that all human rights derive from inherent dignity of the human person. Some modern constitutions include human dignity as a fundamental non-derogable right; others mention it as a right to be protected alongside other rights. It is not only lawyers concerned with human rights who have to contend with the concept of human dignity. The concept has been discussed by, inter alia, theologians, philosophers, and anthropologists. In this book leading scholars in constitutional and international law, human rights, theology, philosophy, history and classics, from various countries, discuss the concept of human dignity from differing perspectives. These perspectives help to elucidate the meaning of the concept in human rights discourse.