Costas Douzinas

Identity, Recognition, Rights or What Can Hegel Teach Us About Human Rights?

Rights play a crucial role in shaping identity by organizing the recognition of self by others and by legal and social institutions. For Hegel, legal rights lead to an abstract type of recognition based on the universality of the law. The concreteness of the person, alongside the respect bestowed by legal recognition, calls for the acknowledgment of honour and esteem. Human rights move in this direction, by validating both the similarity of claimants with abstract humanity and their difference and uniqueness. But laws necessary generality cannot meet the demands for the full recognition of the postmodern self with its polymorphous desires and its complex struggles for recognition as a unique individual.

Humanity, Military Humanism and the New Moral Order

The post-WWII period has been characterized by an endless process of international humanitarian law-making, aimed at protecting people from their governments. After the collapse of communism, human rights have allegedly transcended their Eurocentrism and have become the first truly universal moral justification for the use of force. This essay explores the meaning and scope of humanity and questions the range of normative resources mobilized in its name. In view of these doubts, it argues that the recent combination of humanism and military force is the outward sign of an emerging moral world order, which is criticized from a number of pragmatic, principled and realist perspectives.

Human Rights and Postmodern Utopia

Human rights have triumphed globally but no other historical period has witnessed greater violations of their principles. Exploring this paradox through the work of Ernst Bloch and by using the psychoanalytical concept of the imaginary, the essay argues that human rights express the utopian hope for a society in which people are no longer degraded and despised. This hope however has been hijacked by governments, submerged into treaties and conventions and often leads to the dismembering and reassembly of people into synthetic entities-carriers of rights. The postmodern utopia is the hope of an (impossible) future existential unity.

The Legality of the Image

Intimate links exist between political power, law and images. Theology, philosophy and law have always developed elaborate rules about visuality. The iconophilic and iconoclastic traditions complemented one another and combined to construct subjectivity and to reconcile humanity with finitude. In modernity, law replaced religion and philosophy conceptualised legality through the aesthetic category of the sublime. The law understands the importance of the governance of images for the maintenance of the social bond and helps organise a regime of permitted images and forbidden idols which amounts to a complex legal administration of aesthetics and a related aesthetic organisation of law.

Postmodern Just Wars and the New World Order

A new ideal has triumphed on the world stage: human rights. It unites left and right, the pulpit and the state, the minister and the rebel, the developing world and the liberals of the West. After ...

The Cambridge companion to human rights law

The idea of human rights is rightly considered to be one of the very biggest of the big thoughts of the early twenty-first century. The object of this book is to capture a sense of the variety of the platforms within which human rights law is practised today and reflects the dynamic interrelationships that have grown up between these various levels. It also has a critical edge, where the chapters reflect on the way the subject has been handled in the authors sub-field, how it has achieved what has been expected (or has not) or produced unexpected side-effects, with judgments about the efficacy of human rights law (set against the standards of the field itself or some other goals) not being withheld where it is appropriate for these to be made. Written by world-class academics, this Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of human rights law.

The Face of Justice: a Jurisprudence of Alterity:

S THE millenium draws to a close, the old signs of epistemological certainty and the trusted grounds and resources of moral and political .jL act on lie weakened. The relentless critique of cognitive or practical discourses of foundation has accelerated the process of dissolution of foundations. The project of modernity is coming to completion; not in the sense of the achievement of the full rationalization of life prophesied by Habermas, but in the final accomplishment of MacIntyre’s ’moral catastrophe’. The melancholy of the end, the mourning for the weakening of the social bond have been paradoxically or predictably accompanied by a great call for a return to ethical values and moral principles throughout public life. ’Back to Basics&dquo; is the rallying cry of the 1990s. No area is experiencing this anxiety of morality stronger than law. The ’crisis of law’ has finally taken on a moral dimension, a demand for an ethics. The signs of this ethical concern are everywhere. There is widespread anxiety about access

Second-generation rights as biopolitical rights

This chapter is a preliminary attempt to grapple with the implications posed by the proliferation of different regimes of human rights – commonly described as second- and third-generation human rights – to the concept of human rights itself, especially its normativity. One common argument is that the proliferation of different types of human rights attests to the genuinely infinite and open-ended normativity of human rights as an ideal project because it shows a prodigious capacity for accommodating multiple universalisms that contest and compete with each other. This would lead to a gradual refining of human rights so that they can attain the greatest degree of universality possible in a current historical conjuncture. In this chapter, I suggest that regimes of human rights that focus on positive duties to fulfill human needs radically put into question the rational–normative structure of human rights because it puts their juridical form into communication with something else – the biological or natural dimension of human life – that deforms and even explodes this juridical form. We see this deformation in some of the negative consequences that mark the implementation of second-generation rights. I suggest that we can better account for these consequences by understanding these rights in terms of biopolitics. Second-generation human rights: the mistaken opposition of sovereignty and human rights Despite the clear indication of the structural connection between universal human rights and positive law in the stipulation of the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “human rights should be protected by the rule of law,” the juridical form of modern human rights has often been called into question on the grounds that their normative validity is extra-legal and precedes and transcends sovereign states because they are “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” that are grounded in “the inherent dignity” of all human beings. Accordingly, it is customary to point out that modern human rights are influenced by ideas about natural liberties from the modern philosophy of natural rights, whereby rights are liberties ( jus ) that are prior to laws ( lex ), which imply obligation and, therefore, coercion and compulsion from a sovereign authority.

Torture and systems theory

Abstract Niklas Luhmann’s attack on the rhetoric of the ›indispensable values‹ brigade is important and timely. Self-evidently good norms have political usefulness but no philosophical value. However replacing values with rights and entrusting decisions to lawyers displaces rather than solves the problems of indeterminacy and conflict of law and rights. The (falsely) ascetic commitment to description coupled with the acceptance of the social order makes systems theory useless as a tool for improving society. Philosophy tends the distance between the naturally and socially given and the eternal aspiration to resist and transcend it, by exploring both the justice internal to law and the justice which holds the whole of law to account.

HUMAN RIGHTS, HUMANISM AND DESIRE

Human rights entered the world scene after the Second World War. The history of their invention has been repeatedly and exhaustively told and will not be attempted here.1 Its symbolic moments include the signing of the Charter of the United Nations (1945), the Nuremberg (1945Ð46) and Tokyo (1946Ð48) trials and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Following these foundational acts, the international community launched a long campaign of standardsetting. Hundreds of human rights conventions, treaties, declarations and agreements have been negotiated and adopted by the United Nations, by regional bodies, like the Council of Europe and the Organisation of African Unity, and by states.2 Human rights diversified from Òfirst generationÓ civil and political or negative rights, associated with liberalism, into Òsecond generationÓ economic, social and cultural or positive rights, associated with the socialist tradition and, finally, into Òthird generationÓ group and national sovereignty rights, associated with the decolonisation process. The first generation or ÒblueÓ rights are symbolised by individual freedom, the second generation or ÒredÓ rights by claims to equality and guarantees of a decent living standard, while the third generation or ÒgreenÓ rights by the right to self-determination and, belatedly, the protection of the environment. But what lies behind this apparently unstoppable proliferation of human rights? The most obvious change in the transition from natural to human rights was the replacement of their philosophical ground and institutional sources. The belief that rights could be protected either through the automatic adjustment of the entitlements of human nature and the action of domestic legal institutions or through the legislative divinations of popular sovereignty proved unrealistic. As Hannah Arendt put it, Òit is quite conceivable that one fine day a highly organised and mechanised humanity will conclude quite democratically Ð namely by majority decision Ð that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.Ó3 Her statement, phrased as a prediction, has already become a terrible historical fact. The ÒmarketÓ of human dignity and equality did not conceal a Òhidden hand,Ó and people voted and still vote for regimes and parties determined to violate all human rights, as the examples of HitlerÕs Germany and MilosevicÕs Yugoslavia show. If the French Revolution and the first proclamation of rights were reactions against monarchic absolutism, the international law of human rights was a response to Hitler and Stalin, to the atrocities and barbarities of the war, and to the Holocaust. In this latest mutation of