Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The International Human Rights Movement Today

2009; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Balakrishnan Rajagopal,

Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics

I begin by asking: is there such a thing as an International Human Rights Movement? I would like to raise that as an issue that we need to address, whether there is one movement or multiple movements within the human tradition, and whether there are in fact movements that might be part of the human tradition but nevertheless do not use or rely on the discourse of human rights. In other words, diversity and contradiction within the Human Rights Movement is a theme that I think we need to focus on and problematize. And we should also start by recognizing that international human rights is a language, a language of both power and resistance. It is a language of hegemony and counter-hegemony, and we need to recognize the multiple uses to which it is put and the fact that it is a terrain of contestation, as I have argued before, for multiple deployments of both power and resistance.