Joseph Hoover

Rereading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Plurality and Contestation, Not Consensus

In this article, I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterize the development of the UN human rights regime. The central argument is that within the founding text of the contemporary human rights movement there is an ambiguous account of rights, which exceeds easy categorization of international rights as universal moral principles or merely an ideological imposition by liberal powers. Acknowledging this ambiguous history, I argue, opens the way to an understanding of human rights as an ongoing politics, a contestation over the terms of legitimate political authority, and the meaning of “humanity” as a political identity.

Towards a politics for human rights: Ambiguous humanity and democratizing rights

Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. Some defenders of human rights accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, but opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in human rights terms because of their limitations as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this article, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of ‘humanity’ as a political identity and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics.

The human right to housing and community empowerment: home occupation, eviction defence and community land trusts

Critics of human rights are hesitant to reject them outright for fear of undermining the work they may do in resisting oppression. This pragmatic justification is central to celebrations of human rights as well, but is it more than a failure to move beyond liberal hegemony? I argue that human rights have radical potential because the act of claiming such rights uses the ambiguous but universal identity of ‘humanity’ to make claims on the established terms of legitimate authority. The potential of human rights to fight for social change is examined by looking at the movement for a human right to housing in the USA. I explore how homeless individuals, public housing tenants and low-income urban residents realise their human right to housing through eviction defences, the occupation of ‘people-less’ homes, and attempts to remake the structure of home ownership through community land trusts.

Reconstructing responsibility and moral agency in world politics

Assigning responsibility is increasingly common in world politics, from the United Nations assertion that sovereignty entails a ‘responsibility to protect’ to the International Criminal Courts attempts to hold individuals responsible for international crimes. This development is welcome but problematic as the model of moral agency that our contemporary practices of responsibility are based on leads to a number of problematic consequences that impede efforts to make world politics more just. In particular, our contemporary practices of responsibility are excessively focused on the obligations of individual and collective actors, at the expense of enabling conditions, and on holding specific perpetrators accountable, neglecting the need for wider social transformations in response to mass violence and suffering. Alternative understandings of moral agency, which better serve international/global practices of responsibility, are possible and here I defend an understanding of moral agency based on the philosophy of John Dewey. The critical insights and practical possibilities of this alternative understanding of moral agency are explored with reference to international interventions in Sierra Leone and Uganda.

Human Rights Contested

The central tension of human rights is that they propagate a universal and singular human identity in a fragmented political world. No one writing about human rights ignores this tension, but the most important question we face in judging the value of human rights is how to understand this tension and the divisions it creates. The expected divisions between good and evil, between moral universalists and dangerous relativists, between dignified interventionists and cowardly apologists, have long given shape to human rights, as both an ideal and a political project. These divisions can be seen in the forms of moral authority cultivated by groups like Amnesty International, an organization whose fight against evil Stephen Hopgood (2006) has analysed to great effect. They can also be seen in the always-ongoing defence of the universality of human rights, a project that has no more able defender than Jack Donnelly (2003). And the fraught question of intervention has been answered by many voices over the past decade, some confident and fulsome like Fernando Téson’s call for the moral use of military intervention (2005), others more measured like Nicholas Wheeler

Reconstructing Human Rights: A Pragmatist and Pluralist Inquiry into Global Ethics

This work sets out to critically reconstruct human rights as both an ethical ideal and a political practice. I critique conventional moral justifications of human rights and the related role they play in legitimating political authority, arguing that the pluralism and political content of human rights cannot be eliminated. I reconstruct the relationship between ethics and politics through an engagement with pragmatist and pluralist moral theory, which I then develop into a democratising account of human rights by incorporating work on agonistic democracy. The resulting view of human rights is situated and agonistic, seeing the act of claiming human rights as a political act that makes demands on the social order in the name of a particular ethical ideal. Rather than seeing the political act of claiming rights as undermining human rights as universal moral principles, it becomes essential to global ethics as such. The international political aspect of rights is then examined by looking to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in historical context, and contrasting human rights practice as expressed in popular social movements with conventional state-centric and legalist accounts. In the end the defence of human rights that is offered aims to preserve the transformative power of human rights claims, their democratising content, while undermining their totalising tendency, in which a singular conception of humanity provides certain moral principles to legitimate political authority.

Book Review: Toni Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of ‘Dislocated Communities’ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 277 pp., £45.00 hbk)

839 European citizens do not always understand the missions, symbol and importance of the EU. They perceive it as a supra-bureaucratic institution above national governments. The connection between European citizens and European institutions is missing. This lack of understanding and confidence in European institutions could in the long term have negative consequences on both the deepening and widening of the Union. This specific dilemma is growing inside the ‘security community’, and could have been integrated in Cottey’s section on the Europeanisation of European security (T.W. Pogge, ‘Creating SupraNational Institutions Democratically: Reflections on the European Union’s “Democratic Deficit”?’ The Journal of Political Philosophy 5, no. 2 [1997]: 163–82; M. Koenig-Archibugi, ‘The Democratic Deficit of EU Foreign and Security Policy’, The International Spectator [April 2002]: 61–73). The author makes an interesting analysis of the evolution of the world order since 1945 until today. Cottey concludes that ‘Europe has thus since the 1990s become the primary advocate of a liberal global order based on international norms, multilateralism, constraints on power and the primacy of political and economic (rather than military) instrument’ (p. 223). He believes that one of the main European challenges of the 21st century will be to represent, support and export this model of ‘liberal international order’. In summary, Security in the New Europe is a capably written book putting into perspective the present and future challenges faced by the European Union and Europe in the area of international security. Cottey correctly identifies the new global security agenda by mixing hard and soft security issues. By integrating soft security issues into the global agenda, Andrew Cottey is acknowledging Barry Buzan’s argument on the necessity to incorporate such issues in view of their direct consequences on the international stage. Security in the New Europe deserves attention and credit for analysing and explaining this broad topic of European and global security. It provides readers with the appropriate tools to understand the challenges that the EU will be facing during this forthcoming century.