Human rights and cultural conflict

Conclusion In speaking of a right in relation to identity formation, I have avoided many important questions, including questions about how properly to understand identity formation itself. Evoking such a right does draw from existing trends, but it remains speculative. Nonetheless, it captures one valuable insight in criticisms of human rights as a Western imposition, namely the insight that an important kind of oppression figures in the imposition of identities. By affirming a human right in relation to identity formation, we can not only confront this kind of oppression but see that it has specific weight in contemporary globalizing politics, economics, and culture. Moreover, we see that human rights can offer a critical relation to that kind of identity assertion and cultural imperialism that has itself employed the language of universal principles. One reason to emphasize this possibility of human rights discourse is to explore how this discourse offers more generally a significant normative perspective for challenging various kinds of oppression and domination today. Emphasizing such possibilities is a way of exploring the respects in which any viable notion of democracy must provide an important place for human rights.     

Human rights and discourse theory: some critical remarks

In this short piece, I suggest that Seyla Benhabib’s discourse-theoretic account of human rights succeeds in avoiding the charge of anti-parochialism only at the cost of failing to provide concrete and plausible enough guidance in identifying the holders, duty-bearers, and objects of human rights. I then conclude with a few reflections on what type of guidance may be plausibly expected from a discourse-theoretic approach.