Rereading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: plurality and contestation, not consensus

In this paper I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterize the development of the UN human rights regime. The central argument is that within the founding text of the contemporary human rights movement there is an ambiguous account of rights, which exceeds easy categorization of international rights as universal moral principles or merely an ideological imposition by liberal powers. Acknowledging this ambiguous history, I argue, opens the way to an understanding of human rights as an ongoing politics, a contestation over the terms of legitimate political authority and the meaning of “humanity” as a political identity

Decay Of Correlations

. This paper offers a new unified approach for studying statistical properties of hyperbolic dynamical systems and their small random perturbations. The approach is based on a technique that permits an investigation of the convergence of a semigroup of operators by using an adapted Hilbert metric. An exponential rate of decay of correlations is proven in several classes of examples (including some hyperbolic billiards). CONTENT 0. Introduction : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : p. 2 1. Operators and Invariant Cones : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : p. 3 2. One Dimensional Maps (The uniformly hyperbolic case) : : : : : : : : : : : : : p. 6 3. One Dimensional Maps (Random perturbations) : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : p. 12 4. Two Dimensions (The smooth uniformly hyperbolic case) : : : : : : : : : : : : p. 15 5. Two Dimensions (The non-smooth uniformly hyperbol..

The power of human rights/the human rights of power: an introduction

The contributions to this volume eschew the long-held approach of either dismissing human rights as politically compromised or glorifying them as a priori progressive in enabling resistance. Drawing on plural social theoretic and philosophical literatures – and a multiplicity of empirical domains – they illuminate the multi-layered and intricate relationship of human rights and power. They highlight human rights’ incitement of new subjects and modes of political action, marked by an often unnoticed duality and indeterminacy. Epistemologically distancing themselves from purely deductive, theory-driven approaches, the contributors explore these linkages through historically specific rights struggles. This, in turn, substantiates the commitment to avoid reifying the ‘Third World’ as merely the terrain of ‘fieldwork’, proposing it, instead, as a legitimate and necessary site of theorising