Human Rights A Political and Cultural Critique [Paperback]

In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with it a profusion of norms, processes, and institutions to define, promote, and protect human rights. Today virtually every cause seeks to cloak itself in the righteous language of rights. But even so, this universal reliance on the rights idiom has not succeeded in creating common ground and deep agreement as to the scope, content, and philosophical bases for human rights.

Makau Mutua argues that the human rights enterprise inappropriately presents itself as a guarantor of eternal truths without which human civilization is impossible. Mutua contends that in fact the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric construct for the reconstitution of non-Western societies and peoples with a set of culturally biased norms and practices.

Mutua maintains that if the human rights movement is to succeed, it must move away from Eurocentrism as a civilizing crusade and attack on non-European peoples. Only a genuine multicultural approach to human rights can make it truly universal. Indigenous, non-European traditions of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas must be deployed to deconstruct—and to reconstruct—a universal bundle of rights that all human societies can claim as theirs.

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Human Rights as a Metaphor
—The Metaphor of Human Rights
—The Grand Narrative of Human Rights
—The Metaphor of the Savage
—The Metaphor of the Victim
—The Metaphor of the Savior

Chapter 2. Human Rights as an Ideology
—The Authors of Human Rights
—A Holy Trinity: Liberalism, Democracy, and Human Rights
—Conventional Doctrinalists
—The Conceptualizers
—The Cultural Pluralists
—Political Strategists and Instrumentalists

Chapter 3. Human Rights and the African Fingerprint
—Africa in a Rights Universe
—HumalS>