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Chapter 1 A Force Profonde: The Power, Politics, and Promise of Human Rights Edward A. Kolodziej Whither Human Rights? Chou En-lai was allegedly asked what he thought were the results of the French Revolution. He supposedly replied: "It's too early to tell." Adam Hochschild's prize-winning study of King Leopold's plundering of the Belgian Congo's rubber and ivory at the cost ofcountless native lives makes the same point. In tracing the careers of the long-forgotten reformers who exposed Leopold's depredations, Hochschild (1999, 306) linked their moral lineage as revolutionaries to the tradition of "the French Revolution and beyond." They selflessly dedicated their lives and fortunes to the human rights of people they scarcely knew. Their example continues to be emulated today in more ways than can be told. Evidencing his own revolutionary credentials, Hochschild concludes: "At the time of the Congo controversy a hundred years ago, the idea of human rights, political, social, and economic, was a profound threat to the established order ofmost countries on earth. It still is today." Building on these insights, this volume takes stock ofthe vitalityand impact of the force of human rights today-a force profonde, working through time and space, shaping and shoving human societies. Given space constraints, this study provides a selective set ofup-to-date photographs ofhow well or ill this force is faring in key regions around the world. These snapshots reveal strategies pursued by key regional actors and the resources they dispose either to foster or to frustrate the realization of human rights. A regional, worm's eye view has been adopted to get clearer and sharper pictures of what is actually happening on the ground in the many ongoing struggles for human rights around the globe, to place into relief a bird's eye view-the photo album as a whole-which projects the global scale ofthisforce profonde. Human rights assume many forms, shaped by the historical, socioeconomic , political, and cultural conditions through which this revolutionary Z Edward A. Kolodziej force works its will. Like photos of any complex process, the pictures displayed in the chapters below will hardly capture the full impact of its protean power. Nor do they-nor can they-freeze the rapidly changing circumstances under which human rights are fostered or frustrated. The immediate aim of this exhibition of regional photos is more modest. It attempts to contribute to a better understanding and explanation than we have now of how and why human rights advance in one region of the globe and are resisted or in retreat elsewhere. By that token, it highlights policy paths that might be taken to circumvent the many roadblocks barring progress. This study is also down payment on a more long-term, ambitious goal. Regional descriptions of human rights struggles, like those in this volume, lay the groundwork for a theory of human rights-what we lack today, but need, to guide public policy. Much like the ancients who could recognize and even measure the impact of tides on their daily lives without being able to explain them, humans today are also quite capable of charting the force of human rights on their thinking, choices, and actions and those of their agents without being able to explain why this force arose, how it actually impels their responses to the socioeconomic and political imperatives they mutually confront, and the forms it assumes under these varying social conditions . It would be reassuring to be able to tell where rights are heading or at least to be able to identify the conditions for their protection and promotion . A theory of human rights, based on experience and observation and validated by systematic testing, would in principle be able to provide such guidance. Given the complexity of human rights and the deep and presendy intractable discord over their meaning, content, and exercise, a fully reliable theory of human rights is likely to exceed our grasp for some time to come. Given, too, the freedom of intelligent and creative humans to redefine the animating ideals of their societies and their own identities and worthcapacities consciously understood by enlarging numbers of people across cultures-there is little reason to believe that human rights represent some fixed point of convergence toward which its partisans are moving in lockstep . Yet no less evident is the crystallization of a moving consensus about what is permitted or not to be done to individuals and groups relative to those with power to abuse or...

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