Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique

Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

by Makau Mutua

In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with it a profusion of norms, processes, and institutions to define, promote, and protect human rights. Today virtually every cause seeks to cloak itself in the righteous language of rights. But even so, this universal reliance on the rights idiom has not succeeded in creating common ground and deep agreement as to the scope, content, and philosophical bases for human rights.

Makau Mutua argues that the human rights enterprise inappropriately presents itself as a guarantor of eternal truths without which human civilization is impossible. Mutua contends that in fact the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric construct for the reconstitution of non-Western societies and peoples with a set of culturally biased norms and practices.

Mutua maintains that if the human rights movement is to succeed, it must move away from Eurocentrism as a civilizing crusade and attack on non-European peoples. Only a genuine multicultural approach to human rights can make it truly universal. Indigenous, non-European traditions of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas must be deployed to deconstruct—and to reconstruct—a universal bundle of rights that all human societies can claim as theirs.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2002

Reviews

[Ishita · Rating 4 out of 5]

A super important read for those of us in the human rights field. Mutua critically examines the frameworks underpinning human rights to question their universality, ultimately proposing an international project be undertaken to create a genuinely multicultural corpus of rights. I found his critiques of international human rights organizations to be particularly valuable in questioning the role the NGO community has played in promoting solutions that often require "opening up" to free markets and neoliberal ideologies.

4 stars because I think Mutua's arguments were essentialist at moments, and could benefit from a feminist critique.

[Lien · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for a human rights course, and as a student, I found this piece to be very interesting because it brought attention to a perspective that I am not used to learning about. In this piece, Makau Mutua argues that the human rights corpus is Eurocentric and that the human rights movement is a new crusade or a new way to extend the history of colonialism. The chapters that I piqued my interest were Chapter 1 ("Human Rights as Metaphor"), in which the author presents the savages-victims-savior (SVS) metaphor as a narrative that Western states utilize to push its ideals onto non-Western states, and Chapter 4 ("Human Rights, Religion, and Proselytism"), in which the author argues that proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam are designed to push the capitalist agenda of the West and questions the real intention behind "freedom of religion" in human rights. The author supports his argument by showing how the human rights corpus/movement has affected Africa.

In general, my rating is based on the execution/way it was written more than the actual content. The book chapters are organized well, but I particularly found Chapter 2 ("Human Rights as an Ideology") to be somewhat irrelevant in context of the other chapters and the author's main argument, especially when he explains the different schools of human rights. There also seems to be a lot of repetitive ideas throughout. Additionally, for most of the chapters, there is at least one paragraph that is entirely made up of questions. Although the questions are important ones, a lot of them are left unanswered or unaddressed, and I find it purposeless to bring up something without further explanation. Lastly, about a third of this book is footnotes/citations, so it is safe to say that the author did his research, but I do question the originality of the work. Still, I think this book is worth reading because I found it to be interesting while reading it in an academic context (and I can't say this for a lot of school books).