Vanessa Wills, "Who Has Human Rights? Liberal Consensus, Left Critique, and Authoritarian Crisis" скачать в хорошем качестве

Vanessa Wills, "Who Has Human Rights? Liberal Consensus, Left Critique, and Authoritarian Crisis"

Vanessa Wills, George Washington University Center for Global Ethics and Politics on October 9, 2024 Who Has Human Rights? Liberal Consensus, Left Critique, and Far-Right Authoritarian Crisis The Second World War and its aftermath importantly structure contemporary human rights discourse, with its insistence that human beings possess a set of inviolable boundaries and entitlements which do not depend upon their nationality, geographical location, or specific historical context. Leaving aside right-wing critics of the liberal human rights project, left-wing criticisms have argued that beneath the appearance of universality lurk the particular interests of the ruling classes of wealthy, powerful, and Western nation-states such as the U.S., the U.K., and Germany. “Humanitarian interventions” led by these countries are often justified by liberal appeals to human rights, even where such interventions worsen the material reality for the human beings they are supposed to help and, perhaps not so coincidentally, strengthen the geopolitical position of rich countries already wielding an outsized influence in global affairs. In more recent years, the international and liberal human rights consensus threatens to give way, but not to some normative schema better suited to advance the interests of the world's exploited and oppressed. Rather, with the resurgence of far right authoritarianism worldwide, we seem to be witnessing initial tremors of a total collapse of the very notion in international affairs that there are objective, universal, and inviolable norms which govern how human beings may or may not be treated. From Guantanamo to Gaza, we must ask, “Who has human rights?” In the present moment, who is considered a bearer of these rights? Whom does human rights discourse serve? And if human rights discourse only ever offered slight protection to the vulnerable, what must we expect and how ought we to respond, as authoritarianism grows and liberal consensus seems to totter?