Is Democracy for Everyone?

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Charles Beitz is Professor of Politics at Princeton University specializing in international political theory, democratic theory, the theory of human rights and legal theory. His lecture questions the universality of democracy.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, streaming video, photo

Exploring Universal Rights: A Symposium

A review of: Which Rights Should Be Universal? by William J. Talbott. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. 232pp

Human rights, legitimacy, political judgement

This paper grapples with Bernard Williams’s prima vista enigmatic assertion that ‘[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions’. Though Williams’s approach to thinking about human rights has a number of affinities with other ‘political’ and ‘minimalist’ understandings, we highlight its distinctive features and argue that it has significant implications for our understanding of human rights along a number of key dimensions. We then proceed to explain how Williams’s way of thinking about human rights coheres with certain aspects of the reasoning of one of the most important international human rights courts, to wit, the European Court of Human Rights. This lends further plausibility to the view that a politically realistic understanding of human rights, of the kind urged by Williams, should be taken seriously, since it is a plausible candidate for the explanation of important aspects of human rights practices. We close by examining the suggestion that thinking in these terms is worryingly conservative

The question concerning human rights and human rightlessness: disposability and struggle in the Bhopal gas disaster

In the midst of concerns about diminishing political support for human rights, individuals and groups across the globe continue to invoke them in their diverse struggles against oppression and injustice. Yet both those concerned with the future of human rights and those who champion rights activism as essential to resistance, assume that human rights – as law, discourse and practices of rights claiming – can ameliorate rightlessness. In questioning this assumption, this article seeks also to reconceptualise rightlessness by engaging with contemporary discussions of disposability and social abandonment in an attempt to be attentive to forms of rightlessness co-emergent with the operations of global capital. Developing a heuristic analytics of rightlessness, it evaluates the relatively recent attempts to mobilise human rights as a frame for analysis and action in the campaigns for justice following the 3 December 1984 gas leak from Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Informed by the complex effects of human rights in the amelioration of rightlessness, the article calls for reconstituting human rights as an optics of rightlessness

The end of global constitutionalism and rise of antidemocratic politics

Drawing upon the idea of “constitutional antagonism” this article offers a critique of the liberal cosmopolitan framing global constitutionalism and its response to the rise of antidemocratic and “populist” authoritarian politics. Liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global constitutionalism generally pay inadequate attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideology and rationality have come to dominate the fragmented networks and structures of global constitutionalism and the connected emergence of an anti-cosmopolitan and authoritarian discourse of “nationalist neoliberalism”. Against the limits of liberal cosmopolitanism, and against the twin threats of neoliberal transnational governance and neoliberal nationalist, interstate conflict, it is argued that if an idea of transnational or global constitutionalism is to be held onto and retain any value then it must be based upon socially transformative ideas of egalitarian and ecological social justice and enacted through legal and political strategies and struggles that attempt to actively displace neoliberal ideology and rationality

Political Theory and International Relations

ix.248 hal.;21 c