Chapter 18: Cosmopolitanism, (counter) humanism and the politics of rights Flashcards
What is international normative theory?
It is a sub-field of IR that draws from political theory to examine the ethical dimensions of world politics.
What topics does the literature on international normative theory cover?
The literature on international normative theory covers a wide variety of topics, including global distributive justice, humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect, international criminal law, cosmopolitan democracy, and the ethics of aid and development.
How is the literature on international normative theory often framed in terms of approaches?
The literature on international normative theory is often framed as a debate between cosmopolitan and communitarian (or universalist and contextualist) approaches.
Characteristics of cosmopolitan thinkers
- human beings are the central unit of moral significance
- communities are only valuable if they promote the individual
- it is built on Kant’s deontological ethics and that principles of justice should apply to all humans regardless of nationality
– justice should be understood in a global sense
Characteristics of communitarian thinkers
- emphasise the importance of the community and cultural diversity
- they say that cosmos overlook that language, tradition, and customs are constitutive of human identity and conceptions of the ‘good’
- justice is contextual, not universal
- draws on Hegel, who emphasises the contextual nature of ethical principles
What are the three critiques of human rights?
- human rights are wedded to western imperial interests
- relation between human rights and neo-liberal capitlaism
- symbiotic relationship between human rights and the state
Explain the first critique against human rights
Human rights are wedded to western imperial interests
It is parochial, self-interested and Eurocentric (d’Souza, 2018), (Hopgood, 2013), (Mutua, 2013)
Mutua (2013) explains that human rights frequently act as a civilising mission based on saving the victims of the global south
Human rights is a tool of power: as the language of the imperial metropole against the periphery
Explain the second critique of human rights
Examines the relation between human rights and neo-liberal capitlaism
Moyn (2019) and Whyte (2019) show that human rights gained prominence in the very moment that neo-liberalism triumphed
The promotion of human rights directly aligned with neo-liberal attempts to combat socialism and demands for post-colonial economic justice
The global spread of human rights cannot be understood in the absence of neo-liberalism. Moyn (2019) says it is not a coincidence that the era of human rights has been ‘the era of inequality’ and ‘an age of victory of the rich’
Explain the third critique of human rights
Symbiotic relationship between human rights and the state
While NGOs and civil society organisations are often seen as revolutionary counterweights to the state, critics have argued that human rights actually help to legitimise and strengthen state power
Arendt (1973) argues that human rights are effectively meaningless without the state: the rights of man are the de facto rights of citizens
Perugini and Gordon (2015) explain ‘the threat that human rights produce is ultimately not a threat to the state’ - human rights are based on bringing people into the state; hence if the state ever dissolves, then human rights would also dissappear
What does Wynter (2004) argue about the racialized nature of Western conceptions of the human?
Wynter argues that the birth of the modern/colonial world was the birth of Western bourgeois Man as the universal human, alongside its constitutive outside: the racialized Other. European humanism, according to Wynter, was linked to the dehumanization of others from its inception.
How does Wynter characterize Enlightenment humanism?
Wynter characterizes Enlightenment humanism as an ethnohumanism—a Western bourgeois form of humanism tied to normative grids that frame the enslaved, the colonized, and the poor as aberrations from Man. She sees it as inherently tied to the degradation of those outside its normative boundaries.
What solution does Wynter (2004) propose to the hierarchy of humanness?
Wynter proposes a politics of global liberation beyond the genocidal shackles of Man. She calls for rescuing the human from European humanism and crafting a new, counterhumanist project that confronts necropolitics and false universalism.
How does Wynter (2004) connect her ideas to contemporary struggles?
Wynter sees contemporary struggles related to race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and environmental issues as differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. She argues that abolishing white, imperial, and bourgeois Man is necessary for the liberation of the human.
