Refuting West-Centric Narratives of Human Rights: A Three-Pronged Critique

Happy new year everyone. Here's a present.

Refuting West-Centric Narratives of Human Rights: A Three-Pronged Critique
Ai Chaobang, Tokyo, 4 December 2012

CONTENTS

Overview

1) Narratives of ESSENCE: the Universal Origins of Human Rights

a) The "Right" Human Rights – Who Decides?

b) Contributions to Human Rights

c) Contributions Against Human Rights

d) Strengths and Weaknesses

2) Narratives of FORM: the Universal Establishment of Human Rights

a) The Western Declaration of Human Rights?

b) The Universal-Except-The-West Declaration of Human Rights?

c) Resonance and Dissonance

3) Narratives of RELEVANCE: the Universal Enemies of Human Rights

a) Charybdis: The Whirlpool of Universal Human Wrongs

b) Scylla: The Multi-headed Monster of Inhuman Diversity

c) Through the Straits and Around the World: A Tool for Global Problems

Conclusion: In It Together

Overview

Human rights are many things simultaneously. What looks at first a simple concept is loaded with highly contextualized theoretical, political, and normative agendas, beliefs, aspirations, dreams and passions. In the wider story of humanity, human rights have their own story which as any story, can be told from multiple perspectives.

Some have dominated unduly. In this paper I seek to comprehensively refute a set of influential narrative forces in the human rights story: those which draw its centre of gravity towards the "West".¹ I will argue that such Western-centric narratives, or indeed any territorializing narratives regardless of who is at their centre, are neither an accurate nor a helpful telling of the human rights story. Rather, I will present that human rights are, and should be, universal, and in so doing will overarch and consider some of the major ongoing debates in human rights discourse.

That discourse is enormous, and the territorializing narratives in question occur throughout. We shall confront them on three levels:

1) Narratives of essence: of humanity's development of the human rights idea;

2) Narratives of form: of twentieth-century attempts to implement human rights in practice, and the modern international human rights framework of laws and norms; and

3) Narratives of relevance: of the place of human rights today in relation to diverse human cultures, histories and problems.

At each level I aim to critically assert the universality of human rights, as well as the inaccuracies or dangers posed by elevating the story's Western characters above others.

Throughout, we must bear in mind the essential problem. Thomas Paine lamented in 1776 that 'Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart.'² He might as well have said that this morning. Every society, today and in the past, has abused human beings in ways that any meaningful concept of human rights must embody. Every society, regardless of location or culture, has had its politically, socially, economically, and/or spiritually pernicious orders, that in innumerable ways have forsaken people within them or aggressed those outside. Every society has had its descents into madness, and most display an abysmal record in facing up to those disasters with humility. Therefore, when this paper considers the human rights contributions of any given society, this should not at all be taken as an absolution of that society for whatever grievous treatment of human beings it once authored or still does now.

This is nowhere a pure academic question, but an emotively-charged core of political agendas and clashing superiority complexes. The academic community and its human rights commentators, as humans too, are not insulated from this, but are themselves affected by human rights politics and value preferences, and affect these in turn by their choices of how to regard them. We should note that disciplinary academia as we know it, now globalized across the world, is itself a constructed and politicized unit, itself of Western extraction, and itself a culturally loaded tool of legitimating – or refusing legitimation to – ideas and knowledge, according to rules not necessarily objective in direction.³ It is vital that in assessing global issues, we be actively conscious of the norms and assumptions influencing us, and look past their clout in academic politics so as not to unfairly exclude contributions.

I take the trouble to state this because in the politicized paradigm of international relations today, any human rights discussion runs the risk of having all meaning drained off into a competitive morass of ulterior agendas, where participants divert attention from their abuses by stating "no, you". As is really the overarching message in this paper, to territorialize human rights is to play straight into this contest, and turn a concept which was meant to help us escape that paradigm into a rhetorical instrument that sinks us deeper in it – and buries our efforts in shame.

Thus the argument I seek to make here is as normative as empirical. Human rights not only are universal, but should and must be. Only then can they represent not our determination to persist with self-interested conflict and mutual contempt, but a universal will to overturn that order, to get past divisions which should never have been dug, and to re-found our globalized world on a basis of sincere responsibility and mutual care: to show, indeed, that humanity can do better.

Climate Change Resilience in Guyana

Here's another United Nations University (UNU) piece: my paper on resilience and the indigenous communities of Guyana, written last autumn (2011) for the Global Change and Sustainability intensive course. I am posting it here in case it is of any help for those currently taking that course, but also for general interest, especially as concerns Guyana.

The text is as it was when given to the UNU, though I've added a few pictures here to make the columns of text less terrifying. And as before, for those writing in a similar capacity now, this is here to assist and encourage thinking, not to substitute for it. Plagiarizing my stuff is a very fast way to get put in hospital. Please attribute it properly if you use anything from here, okay?

Enchancing resilience against climate and ecosystem changes in Guyana's North Rupununi region

Ai Chaobang (a.k.a. John Ashton), UNU-ISP MSc Sustainability, Development and Peace

12 October 2011

1) Resilience, Change and Sustainability

2) Enhancing resilience against climate and ecosystem changes in the North Rupununi communities of Guyana

Reducing and coping with climate change, significantly influenced by human activity, presents one of the supreme challenges of our era.¹ It is a manefestation – perhaps the foremost – of the sustainability crisis humanity must urgently address.

A frequent concept in the sustainability discourse is that of resilience, and here I seek to explore what it means in that context, as well as how we might measure and enhance it. I then apply it to the specific case of the indigenous communities of Guyana's North Rupununi region, and consider what resilience means in their circumstances and how it might be improved.

Reflections on International Peace and Security

For everyone following the Hokkaido-Tohoku series, don't worry – it's still on course, and this is just a timely interlude. Specifically, my contribution to the UNU International Peace and Security course of 2012, in the form of extended reflections I did on its themes in the previous year. Please excuse the small font-size errors which I've yet to work out how to fix.

I am posting this mainly for any benefit it might give to those currently working their way through this course, either on clarifying some of the topics or offering (perhaps) some perspectives on them. Even better if it's of interest to other people too, as a taste of what's going on in this organization that – hypothetically, at least! - is meant to help stop us from all destroying each other.

HOWEVER!!!

I'm putting this out in the hope that it helps and encourages people to think, and think critically, thus to develop their own opinions and therefore characters. I am not putting this out for it to serve as a substitute to that thinking. Plagiarism is bad! If anyone wants to use ideas from here in their own reflections or other work, please make proper reference to this blog entry! Because if you take something I came up with and use it as your own, I will be most assuredly upset. And when I'm upset, I write scary, scary things that drive whoever sees them to insanity just by reading them and cast the world in flames. And I guess that would defeat the point of discussing peace and security – so let's be friends and all do what is right for peace and security, okay?

And yes, each "wall" is one week's reflections. Writing is fun.

INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY

Weekly Reflections: 12 September – 13 October 2011

Ai Chaobang (a.k.a. John Ashton)

WEEK ONE: Responsibility to Protect, Terrorism, and Proliferation of WMDs

WEEK TWO: International Law

WEEK THREE: Peacekeeping, the UN System and its Foundations

WEEK FOUR: Humanitarian Intervention, National Interests and Democracy

Conflict and Peacebuilding in East Timor

 For those interested in the kinds of things I have been doing at the UN University...

 

How well has the causality of the conflict in East Timor been reflected in its UN peacebuilding experience?

Ai Chaobang (a.k.a. John Ashton), 11 February 2012

Introduction

1 – 1975-1999: The Causes of Conflict in East Timor

2 – 1999-2012: Peacebuilding

a) Security

b) Governance

c) Justice

Conclusion

Introduction

In December 1975, the world turned its back on East Timor. Twenty-four-years of Indonesian occupation visited brutality of demonic proportions upon its people: one of the worst genocides of the late twentieth century, in which over two hundred thousand Timorese, a third of the population, were killed.¹ It was answered, extremely belatedly, with the largest, furthest reaching and most committed international response in the history of United Nations (UN) peacebuilding.

The UN is now thirteen years into its intervention in East Timor, or in what, to the intervention's credit, became in 2002 the independent state of Timor-Leste. However, despite considerable success against astonishing odds, peacebuilding in East Timor has not been an unmitigated success. Today the outlook for Timor-Leste remains uncertain, its stability and prospects still appearing to hinge on the continued UN presence.

This analysis has two parts. In the first I explore the background to the East Timor conflict, in search of the causes of its traumatic violence in both the original conflict and the persisting unrest which still brings strife to its pursuit of peace. In the second I consider the UN peacebuilding exercise in depth, and ask whether it has sufficiently taken those roots of conflict into account. Through this I advance that the experience in East Timor offers lessons by which the UN might improve its peacebuilding exercises in future; but that the obstacles have been less due to faults in the UN organization, and more the responsibility of its member states and the international paradigm they yet uphold. For indeed, it was this paradigm, of states which choose to act on the world only in terms of their own "national interest" calculations, and which struggle to see through value frameworks other than their own, that was ultimately responsible for East Timor's nightmares; and this choice of paradigm which, although the UN's foundational principles reject it, made East Timor all the more challenging to raise from the wreckage to which the very same choices reduced it.

(Click below for the rest of the paper.)

The UN University

Six weeks of it are not enough to reach conclusions, but so far, this has been a rewarding setting.

The UN University's approach is problem-focused and multidisciplinary: indeed, makes much of the inadequacy of our traditional approach (of segregating our knowledge into a million neatly-labeled but insular boxes) for solving the world's problems. This is good.

In this month and a half, we Masters students have completed two out of the four core courses that make up the foundations of the Sustainability, Development and Peace degree programme: Global Change and Sustainability (i.e. our screwups in our relationship with the Earth), and International Peace and Security (i.e. our screwups in our relationships with each other). Neither have sought to paper over the depressive scale and depth of the mistakes we have made, the horrors we have wrought. Yet concurrently, both have considered the many courageous and admirable steps which humans worldwide dare take to drag us out from the pit. Recognition of both is essential; so this, too, is good.

I have a high impression thus far of the faculty. Most importantly of all, the professors are human: typically with perceptible ethical compasses, and easy approachability. The student-professor hierarchical barrier which often imposes itself in national universities, and in some cases becomes an obnoxious end in itself, has not been an issue here at all. (Though that is not to say there is a shortage of ethical, approachable professors of high integrity in national universities: you know who you are!) As yet, and bearing in mind my limited exposure thus far, I find it hard to envisage the UNU partaking in other dodgy categories of things either. That, too, is good.

And the courses are engaging. Their content is rigorous and topical; and where it might not be, it becomes made so by the incisive scrutiny of students each of diverse and eventful journeys from across the globe, who know what matters to them and have more than enough guts to assert it. This is refreshing: in too much of the world, including Britian, learning becomes about obeying the established and regurgitating their canons, rather than thinking and making original arguments for yourself (and think how much this has devastated fields like International Relations, with so few ready to challenge even the most preposterous of nonsenses!).

Occasionally one senses a bit of content imbalance; for example, not enough attention to climate change mitigation (i.e. rich countries bothering about reducing GHG emissions), relative to the large attention to adaptation (i.e. poor countries putting up with being hit hardest by climate disasters they did the least to create). But for courses in a continuous and active process of growth and improvement, such things are forgivable. The courses themselves are on a journey, and it will be interesting to watch their evolution in the coming years.

Where do our journeys lead?

What I have yet to learn, pending feedback on my main compositions thus far, is whether my perspective on the world's problems has a practical place, and if so, then in what direction that might lie. Here as everywhere I bear the dissonance produced in Britain, which led me at times to question my humanity. Still do the flames rage beneath about chasms which cannot be bridged, doors which once opened never close. Still gnaw that society's twisted judgements of why, conclusions of absolute certainty, and still do they echo, so insufferable as to take on sentience of their own and hunt for every slightest possible resonance.

Perhaps it must always be so. I recall my recent acquaintance with Systems Theory. Inputs go in, and the system transforms them into Outputs. Inputs may be controllable, or partially so. But what if that box in the middle, the System where they transform, runs not on logic but on things which cannot be defined in words? If madness is sanity and sanity madness, who would know? Outputs at times can bear little relation to what you're doing with the Inputs.

I become aware that my approach might seem unorthodox. Some say idealistic, for good or for ill, although I dispute the accuracy of that term, because issues of how we define ourselves as humanity have real, outright practical consequences for how and whether we solve our problems. Nor do I accept that nature or reality in this world are as straightforward as we like to think. How much traction will the wheels of this vehicle of pursuit find on the roads of the United Nations? We shall see.

Oh, and they gave us free UN University mugs. Isn't that nice?

In fact, the outings and thematic excursions have been a marvellous experience – especially in a country perhaps more challenging than most, financially and socially, to outsiders who seek to explore its secrets. For this great credit is due to the IC Secretariat, and partner organizations, for all their hard work in arranging these events.

Of course, this is not a path one treads lightly. It was with shock that I learnt on the opening day that we twelve students were the successful candidates from a international applicant pool of several hundred. I wish no advantage that comes to another person's detriment, so the thought oftentimes weighs heavy. This route is one of obligation: and as such, I am committed to make full use of whatever opportunities exist in this unfolding chapter to drive forth my exploration of what has gone so fundamentally wrong in our world, and to uproot its founts.

The question is not of idealism and reality. It is of how to repair a reality utterly fractured.

Tokyo Homestay

Today I write a post of gratitude. I would like to express my thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Achiwa of Kodaira city for their hospitality, generosity and tremendous kindness while accommodating me during the UN University's homestay programme this weekend.

So here is a break from the customary walls of text, and instead some interesting photographs from the Kunitachi community centre (Sat 24 Sept.) and the Imperial Palace Gardens and Zojoji Temple today (Sun 25 Sept.).

 

"Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I am here to present my plans to take over the world, so please pay close attention."

 

I cannot remember what these stilt-things are called, but they are very difficult to use correctly. Here we are treated to a masterful demonstration of the proper way.