Rights, Relativism, & Truth

In the latter half of the twentieth century, scholarship critiquing human rights discourse argued, among other things, that human rights, foisted upon Third World nations, were a Western construct that denied cultural specificity in favor of a false universalism predicated upon a Western doctrine of individuality. More recently, scholarship has argued that human rights are a neo-imperial alibi used by the West for political or military intervention in the Third World. These important and accurate critiques were quickly accepted as normative truths in contemporary human rights discourse. Roland Burke’s accessible, thoroughly researched, and lucid historiography, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (2010), provides a counterpoint to this scholarship as it disrupts these and other now canonical narratives about the Western origins of human rights. Rather than suggesting that human rights discourse and legislation emerged out of, is grounded in, and promotes Western ideology, Burke instead seeks to expose the contributions of the Arab, Asian, and African states (what he calls the Third World) and their perspective on decolonization and anti-colonialism as central to the history and rise of the United Nations and its human rights legislation. Coming at a time when reevaluating the historiography of human rights seems particularly important in the wake of the backlash against the productivity and efficacy of contemporary human rights discourse, the book reinvigorates the discourse and scholarship surrounding human rights.

Decolonization is expansive in its use of UN documents and historical figures’ personal writings to provide this missing account of the “influence of decolonization on the UN human rights program” over “three decades in which the anticolonial movement radically altered the human rights agenda.” Although many scholars have detailed the effect of the Arab and Asian diplomats on the drafting and ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UHDR), Burke points out that much of this scholarship ends before the real effects of decolonization could be felt on human rights discourse. His book, therefore, seeks to “shed light on those vital years and forgotten voices that have been missing from human rights historiography.” This temporal scope, between 1950 and the mid-1970s, is crucial to Burke’s claim because it addresses those years before many of the Arab and Asian countries devolved into dictatorial and military regimes that often used cultural relativism as justification for perpetuating rights violations by privileging sovereignty over human rights in ways that ironically aligned with Western ideals.

The three major argument threads in Decolonization converge on the concept of reclaiming the role of the Third World in the development of universal human rights with the effect of revising the premises upon which the cultural relativist and the neo-imperialist critiques are built, but without discrediting those arguments as useful and appropriate to their time. Each chapter examines a landmark event in the development of the UN and human rights that gives rise to fundamental concepts now enshrined in the discourse of rights. In so doing, the book’s narrative moves from the Third World embrace and deployment of the language of rights as means to their own ends, to the wholehearted critique and rejection of the cultural relativist critique and the critique of human rights as a Western construct. First, the book reaches further back in the historiography of human rights to excavate and refute the narrative that arose in the 1970s that human rights are a product of the West and instead argues for the “primacy of decolonization as a political force in the evolution of the UN human rights agenda.” Second, the book suggests that individual rights have a complex and mutually enabling relationship with anti-colonialism and that self-determination, advocated by the Third World’s anti-colonial agenda, was a major driving force behind the emergence of human rights discourse in its legislative form. And third, by tracing the reversal of the third-world perspective on human rights as linked to the rise of authoritative governments during and after decolonization, the book complicates and reclaims...