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Human rights is a contentious discourse. Like any other articulated set of ideas, or ideology, human rights ideology is historically and politically determined. It embodies unequal relations of power and social and economic inequities present in our national societies and international orders. (See Shivji 1989, 1999).
Those who dominate and rule also produce ruling and dominating ideas. But wherever there is oppression there is bound to be resistance. Just as domination is articulated through ruling ideologies and mainstream discourses, so does resistance find expression, however truncated, in contending ideologies and discourses. Human rights discourse therefore is not an absolute truth, true for all times and all people in all places but a series of historically and politically constructed contentions (or truths, half-truths and untruths, if you like) articulating within it the wishes, desires and interests of the powerful as well as the voices and cries of the powerless. The powerful cloth their might in 'right and legality', while the powerless struggle to justify their resistance in 'righteousness and justice'. This is not a watertight binary as at times 'resistance' appropriates 'legality', while 'might' feigns 'justice and morality'.
In this brief presentation, I try to highlight the contentious discourse around one of the rights central to our modern societies, the right of peoples to self-determination. |
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