Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights

This article critically looks at the human rights project as a damning three-dimensional metaphor that exposes multiple complexes. It argues that the grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext which depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other. The savages-victims-saviors (SVS) construction lays bare some of the hypocrisies of the human rights project and asks human rights thinkers and advocates to become more self-reflective. The piece questions the universality and cultural neutrality of the human rights project. It calls for the construction of a truly universal human rights corpus, one that is multicultural, inclusive, and deeply political

Africa and the Rule of Law

The rule of law is often seen as a panacea for ensuring a successful, fair and modern democracy which enables sustainable development. However, as Makau Mutua highlights, this is not the case. Using the example of African states, he describes how no African country has truly thrown off the shackles of colonial rule and emerged as a truly just nation state – even though many have the rule of law at the heart of their constitutions. This, he argues, is because the Western concept of the rule of law cannot be simply transplanted to Africa. The concept must be adapted accordingly to take into account the cultural, geographic and economic peculiarities of each state. In order to achieve this, Mutua offers seven core values which the rule of law must reflect in order to achieve sustainable development across the continent

Human Rights International NGOs: A Critical Evaluation

Published as Chapter 7 in NGOs and Human Rights: Promise and Performance, Claude E. Welch, Jr., ed. The Human rights movement can be seen in a variety of guises. It can be seen as a movement for international justice or as a cultural project for “civilizing savage” cultures. In this chapter, I discuss a part of that movement as a crusade for a political project. International nongovernmental human rights organizations (INGOs), the small and elite collection of human rights groups based in the most powerful cultural and political capitals of the West, have arguably been the most influential component of the human rights movement. They have led the human rights movement, as they have sought to enforce the application of human rights norms internationally, particularly toward repressive states in the South in areas formerly colonized by the West. This chapter calls INGOs conventional doctrinalists because they are marked by a heavy and almost exclusive reliance on positive law in treaties and other sources of international law. Only after conceding that INGOs indeed have a specific political agenda can discussions be had about the wisdom, problems, and implications for the advocacy of such values. And only then can conversations about the post liberal society start in earnest.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1202/thumbnail.jp

Human Rights NGOS in East Africa: Defining the Challenges

Published as Chapter 1 in Human Rights NGOS in East Africa: Political and Normative Tensions, Makau Mutua, ed.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1324/thumbnail.jp

The Ideology of Human Rights

This piece argues that although human rights is an ideology although it presents itself as non-ideological, non-partisan, and universal. It contends that the human rights corpus, taken as a whole, as a document of ideals and values, particularly the positive law of human rights, requires the construction of states to reflect the structures and values of governance that derive from Western liberalism, especially the contemporary variations of liberal democracy practiced in Western democracies. Viewed from this perspective, the human rights regime has serious and dramatic implications for questions of cultural diversity, the sovereignty of states, and the universality of human rights

Never Again: Questioning the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals

Fifty years after Nuremberg, the international community has again decided to experiment with international war crimes tribunals. The stated purpose for the establishment of both the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals by the United Nations are to “put an end” to serious crimes such as genocide and to “take effective measures to bring to justice the persons who are responsible for them.” This piece argues that both assumptions are unrealistic and that such tribunals will have little or no effect on human rights violations of such enormous barbarity. In addition, this piece questions the motivations behind the formulation of the tribunals and posits that the tribunals served either to deflect responsibility or to assuage the consciences of states which were unwilling to take political and military measures to prevent or stop the Yugoslav and Rwandan genocides. The tribunals are disarticulated, if not entirely irrelevant, to the political, reconstructionist, and “peace” and “normalization” processes underway in Rwanda and the republics of the former Yugoslavia. The tribunals now orbit in space, suspended from political reality and removed from both the individual and national psyches of the victims as well as the victors in those conflicts. The failure of both tribunals will make the establishment of a permanent international criminal tribunal that much more difficult

Reparations for Slavery: A Productive Strategy?

Published as Chapter 1 in Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective, Jacqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache & Caroline Elkins, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1455/thumbnail.jp