About a week or so ago, I posted a plea for help to Harry Giles. I was a bit confused about human rights. He replied...Thanks for writing to me! I think we can have some fun conversations. It made me laugh that this is what we began with, but maybe it's a nice way for me to say hi to your blog readership. Hi, blog readership.
First off, I'm totally happy to chew over ideas with you (or just about anyone), but I'm going to resolutely resist the rubric of "help" or anything that might cast me as experty. I blether about politics in the abstract and the specific a lot, but that doesn't make me an expert in any way. (I tend to be a lot better at theory than history, for a start). I tend to think everyone is the expert of the politics of their own lives. Also, because on Twitter I tend to be strident and angry and declamatory, people assume that I have loads of determined and considered views. The internet for me is mostly a space of thinking-things-through (like the theatre!), and in person I tend to be a lot more awkward and uncertain about things.
So, human rights? Hmm. My immediate reaction, with my anarchist hat on, is to be as sceptical of supra-national (neo)liberal institutions like the UN as I am of national institutions. They're an embodiment of the idea that if we create a state apparatus big enough, with enough hierarchical layers of representative democracy, then eventually we'll be able to sort everything out. Like in Star Trek, where there's a pan-Earth government that makes everything absolutely lovely for everyone, and all the conflict goes up to the interplanetary layer. Deep Space 9 is absolutely brill, because we finally properly see what happens when a massive liberal interstellar government (the Federation) comes into conflict with a local anti-Imperial resistance movement (the Bejorans) who are critical of Federation politics as erasing of their locality.
Anyway. So. I really like all the *ideas* in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but I want to examine to what use they're put: in practice, what structures of power do they help maintain? How are they used as a tool to maintain that power? And who do they leave out?
On that last question: I also tend to be sceptical of human universals. Whenever there's a universal declaration of something, I assume that some specificity, some locality somewhere is being ignored, erased and oppressed. In this case, for example, it's notable that the UDHR has since been supplemented with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
On that last question: I also tend to be sceptical of human universals. Whenever there's a universal declaration of something, I assume that some specificity, some locality somewhere is being ignored, erased and oppressed. In this case, for example, it's notable that the UDHR has since been supplemented with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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