Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Entre juridisme et constructivisme : les droits de l'homme dans la politique étrangère américaine

2008; Presses de Sciences Po; Volume: n° 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3917/crii.038.0113

1777-554X

Nicolas Guilhot,

Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics

Between Legalism and Constructivism: Human Rights in American Foreign Policy The sociology of international norms has often focused on human rights in order to illustrate the 'power of ideas' to inform policies: as the story goes, the successful institutionalization of human rights principles under the Carter administration forced the Reagan administration to adjust its policies to principles it could not uproot or use for purely legitimating purposes. The paper argues that these approaches ignore the disputed nature of political-legal concepts and the fact that their very definition is at stake in struggles between contending groups of actors seeking to use these concepts in order to legitimate different policy courses. Mapping out the field of producers of the human rights discourse in the late 1970s-early 1980s, both in their civil and governmental components, the paper shows that the concept of human rights can be construed in two different ways, each corresponding to specific social groups and policy interests: one that anchors human rights in the field of international law, promoted essentially by lawyers or activists connected with international organizations; the other turning it into an anti-juridical concept primarily concerned with political regimes and "democracy promotion," and elaborated by neoconservative policy makers.