The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents

Introduction: Embracing Paradox: Human Rights in the Global Age

3 Human rights are paradoxical. On the one hand, human rights are transcendent. Human rights gain power and purchase because they are said to belong to all people no matter who they are or where they are. On the other hand, the idea of human rights conferred on us all by virtue of being human is a convenient fiction. Humans realize their rights only in particular places with particular instruments and with particular protections. Many scholars recognize elements of this paradox. One of the most consistent themes in the literature on human rights is the absence of international enforcement mechanisms. The human rights of people all over the world may be declared or even promised in law. But the mechanisms by which to enforce those declarations and promises are woefully weak. In the end, universal human rights are achieved in specific states with institutions that enjoy mechanisms to protect rights or through specific transnational networks of civil society actors who pressure governments to change (Hafner-Burton and Tsusui 2005; Hathaway 2002; Ignatieff 2001; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Simmons 2009). Introduction Embracing Paradox Human Rights in the Global Age Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus  In this book, we seek to deepen the human rights paradox beyond the problem of enforcement. Rather than creating an analytical framework where there are discrete spheres of the global, the national, and the local in which human rights operate, we argue that human rights are constituted ineluctably by a paradoxical intersection between the universal and the specific. When human rights exist, they are always simultaneously global and local. In other words, human rights are both always and never universal and global. Ditto for the local: human rights are only imaginable with appeal to the global and the universal, but they are only concrete when they are local. This paradox, we claim, structures human rights. In every human rights situation and in every human rights activist, there will necessarily be mutually constitutive global and local dimensions, and those dimensions will often be in tension. The power of globalization offers an imperfect but instructive parallel. Some argue that globalization “flattens” the world (Friedman 2005). Thomas Friedman employs the metaphor to describe how global communication, transportation, and technology create opportunities for new players to participate and profit in a global marketplace. But the metaphor is evocative for conceptualizing how globalization across many spheres—from international organizations whose transnational oversight of matters ranging from fiscal policy to criminal justice to internal rebellion—squeeze spheres of sovereign action and immunity by states. The metaphor continues—from corporations and investors able to operate in real-time and just-in-time rather than lag-time contexts across global markets to transnational advocacy groups and nongovernmental organizations for whom electronic posting and instant communication enhance reach and shift “on the ground” realities—all of which steamrolls the local. Globalized values, connectivity, networking, and integration across national state borders and continents have acquired such velocity, ubiquity, and visibility that it can appear as if the local is being eviscerated. Indeed, the apparent power of globalization is such that it can even eviscerate the distinction between the “universal,” understood as an imperative or value that transcends historical context and in a sense human agency, and the “global,” understood as transnational relationships so strong and dynamic that they flow across conventional borders of nation, locale, or culture. Yet appearances can also deceive and beg for critical analysis. World culture includes strong multidirectional influences and a robust heterogeneity of ideas and relationships. The world is not becoming a “world society” with a single system and culture (Lechner and Boli 2004, 1). Nor are world politics simply converging around a single coherent set of ideas around how to structure the state (Kupchan 2012). Rather, when observed empirically, places around the world exhibit striking and resilient variety and “mélange,” or dynamic mixing 4 S t e v e J . S t e r n a n d S c o t t S t r a u s between global and local cultural forces (Pieterse 2003). Politics are becoming divergent, even if political ideas in one place constantly influence and shape ideas in another place. In short, the universal and the global unfold in deep tension and indeed interdependence with the local. One is unimaginable without the other. Human rights are the same. For human rights, whose power and strength derive in part from international assertions...