Jack Donnelly

International human rights: a regime analysis

After laying out a typology of international regimes, eight international and regional human rights regimes are analyzed in order to (1) examine the utility of regime analysis in noneconomic issue-areas, and (2) assess the nature, extent, and evolution of international cooperation on human rights. There has been a remarkable growth of international action since 1945, when human rights were not even widely accepted as a legitimate issue-area. This growth can be explained largely by expanding perceptions of moral interdependence and community, increased national commitment, the growing ideological appeal of human rights, and changes in the distributions of international power. These same factors, however, suggest only limited future growth. On a broader theoretical plane, the case of human rights suggests a significant, if limited and principally heuristic, utility for regime analysis, especially to the extent that international relations is becoming increasingly concerned with specific issues.

Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization?

This is an edited text of the fifth John Vincent Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of Keele on 9 May 1997 in which Jack Donnelly attacks the still common scepticism about international human rights - although from an unorthodox angle.

Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Analytic Critique of Non-Western Conceptions of Human Rights

It is regularly argued that human rights are not a Western discovery and that non-Western societies have long emphasized the protection of human rights. Such claims, however, are based on a confusion of human rights and human dignity. A concern for human dignity is central to non-Western cultural traditions, whereas human rights, in the sense in which Westerners understand that term—namely, rights (entitlements) held simply by virtue of being a human being—are quite foreign to, for example, Islamic, African, Chinese, and Indian approaches to human dignity. Human rights are but one way that has been devised to realize and to protect human dignity. Although the idea of human rights was first articulated in the West in modern times, it would appear to be an approach particularly suited to contemporary social, political, and economic conditions, and thus of widespread contemporary relevance both in the West and the Third World.

Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Political Regimes

It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership.

Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power and International Society

How is unrivalled American power reshaping 21st-century international society? Is the United States an empire, in fact or in the making? This article attempts to elaborate the conceptual resources required to answer such questions. I focus on multiple forms of hierarchy in anarchy and diverse practices of sovereign inequality—concepts that most mainstream perspectives ignore, find paradoxical, or even dismiss as self-contradictory. After defining empire and hierarchy in anarchy, I present a typology of international orders tuned to thinking about empire and its alternatives. The central section of the article explores three classes of formal inequalities common during the Westphalian era—special rights of Great Powers, restricted rights for outlaws, and a wide range of particular practices of ‘semi-sovereignty’. I then sketch ten historically grounded models of hierarchical international relations. Two brief applications to contemporary American power seek to illustrate the value of this conceptual apparatus. Throughout, my focus is on appreciating the precise nature and considerable variety of international inequalities. I argue that the concepts of hierarchy in anarchy and sovereign inequality, but not empire, are essential for understanding the shape and development of contemporary international order.

Rethinking political structures: from ‘ordering principles’ to ‘vertical differentiation’ – and beyond

‘Structure’ in the discipline of International Relations, for all the criticism of Kenneth Waltz’ work, still typically means the Waltzian triad of ordering principles, functional differentiation, and distribution of capabilities. I argue, however, that this triad not only does not in Waltz’ particular presentation but cannot provide an adequate account of political structures. In its place I sketch a five-part framework of the elements of political structures. Three types of structural differentiation are identified: vertical differentiation, which establishes hierarchical ranking; horizontal differentiation, which establishes non-hierarchical segmentation; and unit differentiation, which assigns certain types of actors a privileged status. Two dimensions of structural elaboration are also identified: norms and institutions and technology and geography. This framework highlights the central place of ranking in international political structures, developing a tripartite account of ‘ordering principles’ that identifies autarchic, single-hierarchic, and heterarchic systems. It also draws attention to the diversity of international orders and opens structural analysis to the concerns and contributions of constructivism.

Assessing National Human Rights Performance : A Theoretical Framework

Comparative quantitative assessment of human rights is hampered by the length of the list of internationally recognized rights. Not only is the list so long that it is hard to imagine gathering adequate data without an army of researchers (the International Human Rights Covenants contain more than thirty substantive articles, encompassing at least twice as many separate rights), but the results of such a comprehensive effort would almost certainly be overwhelming and bewildering in their complexity. In this article we try to narrow the list of rights concerning which it is necessary to gather data by establishing a theoretical framework for assessing a states human rights performance. We identify a relatively small set of ten essential rights that separately are intrinsically essential and together provide good proxies for almost all other rights. An assessment of national performance on these ten rights, we argue, will approximate a comprehensive assessment of a countrys overall human rights record.

Human Rights, Humanitarian Crisis, and Humanitarian Intervention

invitation to contribute to this volume was the opportunity to reassess these views in light of the profound international changes of the past few years. The new political environment of the post-Cold War world is clearly somewhat less unconducive to humanitarian intervention. In fact, human rights, and issues of humanitarian politics more generally, have achieved an inter national prominence at least as great as at any other time in modern history. Nonetheless, I remain sceptical. Sovereign states and their prerogatives, I will argue, remain central in the post-Cold War world, even in humanitarian issues. We should not expect either hopefully or fearfully the imminent emer gence of an international practice of humanitarian intervention.2

Human Rights at the United Nations 1955–85: The Question of Bias

Charges of bias and “double standards” at the United Nations, arising from the organizations “capture” by the Third World and the Soviets, are commonplace. I seek to investigate the empirical validity of such changes as applied to the organizations human rights work over the last thirty years. Bias in the selection of priority rights is examined through a quantitative study of the use of meeting time in both ECOSOCs Commission on Human Rights and the Third (Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural) Committee of the General Assembly. Bias in the selection of regimes to be scrutinized and condemned is explored by comparing the treatment given to South Africa, Israel, and Chile with that accorded regimes guilty of comparable or worse human rights violations. I find that there is considerable bias, and argue that it is one of the most important impediments to increasing the effectiveness of the United Nations human rights work. There is, however, another, more appealing, side to the picture, and evidence of a modest but significant decline in bias in the eighties. The problem, therefore, would seem to be real, but neither fatal nor incurable.

The discourse of anarchy in IR

Contemporary International Relations (IR) typically treats anarchy as a fundamental, defining, and analytically central feature of international relations. Furthermore, it is usually held that IR since its inception has been structured around a discourse of anarchy. In fact, however, until the 1980s anarchy was rarely employed as a central analytical concept, as I show by examining 145 books published between 1895 and 1978. The conceptual and analytic centrality of anarchy is not imposed on us by international reality. Rather, it is a recent and contingent construction. Given the shortcomings of standard uses of ‘anarchy’ – especially the facts that there is no clear, generally agreed upon definition, that ‘the effects of anarchy’ are not effects of anarchy (alone), and that anarchy is not the structural ordering principle of international systems – I argue for returning to earlier practice and putting anarchy back in the background of IR.