The Future of Human Rights-Beyond Nuremberg with Mahmood Mamdani

Savages, Victims & Saviours: The Metaphor of Human Rights

Savages, Victims & Saviours: The Metaphor of Human Rights by TigersEye99

Is a commitment to human rights sufficient for an emancipatory theoretical praxis?

by Kayla Hazell

“They didn’t ask us why we are washing cars. They didn’t ask us anything.”

This essay adopts the position that formal human rights, such as those encoded in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (hereafter, the Constitution), are potentially emancipatory in the sense that they embody our society’s commitments and aspirations with regard to the treatment of individuals and groups. That said, it will be argued that a formal commitment to human rights does not automatically translate into practice and that this has largely been the South African experience. Human rights are subject to constant balancing, particularly where interests conflict, and such balancing occurs according to a particular rationality. It will be contended that, if rights are to become a reality for all, the rationality governing our commitment to human rights in South Africa, currently largely economistic, will need to be renegotiated in light of the fact that our formal rights have stood watch while extreme inequality continues.

Is a commitment to human rights sufficient for an emancipatory praxis?

by Owona Madlingozi

Seyla Benhabib (Hoover, 2013: 3) “defends human rights as universal moral norms…which…define the equal concern and recognition due to every individual in that process of communicative reasoning”. This essay aims to analyse human rights, the purpose they serve and how they have been used in modern society. It aims to look at practical situations and see how effectively human rights have been used in society and to what extent they have complemented emancipation. It serves to show that human rights are not sufficient for an emancipatory theoretical praxis. In describing emancipation, we find that it needs to be a part of popular politics, an essentially human based experience. A commitment to human rights cannot be sufficient if it does not ensure that those very rights can completely be realised. Without the commitment to actual individual realisation, human rights can never be sufficient for an emancipatory praxis.

The truth about rights in South Africa

By Iqbal Suleman, Thought Leader

Rights ranging from access to land to access to justice are entrenched in our Constitution. These rights are presumed to be available and readily accessible to everyone. The Constitution tells us that we all have equal rights but the reality shows us otherwise. In a free market economy, nothing is really free. From access to housing, healthcare, education and justice. It all has a price. If you cannot afford it, you cannot access it. What do you mean justice is inaccessible and market driven, you hear neo-liberals cry. There are human-rights NGOs, legal aid, university law clinics and pro bono attorneys. It remains unsure, though, how many people are able access these mainly urban-centred, rights-based organisations and what capacity these organisations have.

From May 2008 to 2011: Xenophobic Violence and National Subjectivity in South Africa

by Judith Hayem, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2013

This article examines the recurrence of xenophobic attacks in 2011 in the light of the events of May 2008. Using archives and secondary data, examining slogans and discourses heard at the time and reflecting on the author’s own involvement as an activist alongside foreign residents displaced by the 2008 attacks, it is argued that the xenophobic attacks demonstrated a shift in the national subjectivity or conception of citizenship, from an inclusive notion implying participation in the future South African society to a dialectical representation of nationals against foreigners. It is further argued that, in its mismanagement of the 2008 crisis, the South African government contributed to the emergence of such attitudes and did nothing to stop the violence; hence its repetition. The notion of human rights that has emerged in South Africa is one of the keys to an understanding of the representations at stake: whereas human rights used to be a universal and founding notion in post-apartheid South Africa, they are now seen as a national privilege regarding access to basic needs. The article shows that the humanitarian management of the May 2008 crisis by the South African Government contributed considerably to obscuring the notion of ‘human rights’. In order to oppose such a dangerous policy, there is an urgent need to revive the political debate in South Africa.

Reflections on Human Rights Discourse and Emancipation in Africa in the Twenty-first Century

by Michael Neocosmos, Solidarity Peace Trust, Zimbabwe (undated)

At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the world (Aimé Césaire).

Whoever is engaged in popular struggles for democratic emancipation in Africa today is confronted with an immediate problem concerning human rights.  While on the one hand a discourse of rights is seemingly necessary for thinking democratisation, given that the state regularly flouts these, on the other human rights seem to refer to a discourse mainly propounded by neo-liberal interests whether local or foreign.  Several repressive regimes in Africa and elsewhere (Zimbabwe, Sudan, maybe Cote D’Ivoire, Iran) oppose a discourse of nationalism to one on human rights.  As an activist, one finds oneself in a seemingly irresolvable discursive contradiction between human (predominantly individual) rights and national (or group or identity) rights.  At times this contradiction is central to government itself.  For exampling in Thabo Mbeki’s South African government, a central contradiction appeared in the form of a commitment to neo-liberal conceptions of rights on the one hand along with a sensitivity to national and racial oppression in Africa on the other. This was reflected in government reactions to a number of different issues including Zimbabwe. In fact this contradiction is arguably constitutive of the subjectivity of the new South African bourgeoisie itself.  On the one hand their private accumulation is premised on an adherence to neo-liberal precepts including human rights, on the other a sensitivity to racism and to a lesser extent to Western hegemony in African affairs is also evident.  The manner in which the vagaries of this contradiction were navigated explains much regarding Mbeki’s presidency (Neocosmos, 2002).

Transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

by Michael Neocosmos, Interface, 2011

Rather than seeing the prevalence of systemic political violence in Africa as resulting from a purportedly difficult “transition to democracy”, this article insists that accounts of such violence must be sought within the modes of rule of the democratic state itself. In particular, the manifestation of a contradiction between democracy and nationalism in a neo-colonial context, takes many different forms which cannot be resolved consensually given
existing modes of rule and the enrichment of the oligarchy at the expense of the nation. Xenophobic violence in South Africa is used to illustrate the argument. It is shown that a distinction between domains of politics (including modes of rule) must be drawn. In particular, this means distinguishing between a domain of “civil society” and one of “uncivil society”. It is within the latter that most people relate and respond to state power. Within that domain, the state does not rule people as citizens with legally enforceable rights, but simply as a population with various entitlements. In this domain, violent political practices by the state tend to be the norm rather than the exception, so that violence acquires a certain amount of legitimacy for resolving contradictions among people. The overcoming of systemic violence (itself a political choice) can only begin to be conceived via a different thought of politics as subjective practice.

Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?

by Jacques Rancière, 2004

What lies behind this strange shift from Man to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian? The actual subject of these Rights of Man became Human Rights. Is there not a bias in the statement of such rights? It was obviously impossible to revive the Marxist critique. But another form of suspicion could be revived: the suspicion that the ‘‘man’’ of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the only real rights were the rights of citizens, the rights attached to a national community as such.

Prisoners of Freedom Human Rights and the African Poor

In this vivid ethnography, Harri Englund investigates how ideas of freedom impede struggles against poverty and injustice in emerging democracies. Reaching beyond a narrow focus on the national elite, Prisoners of Freedom shows how foreign aid and human rights activism hamper the pursuit of democratic citizenship in Africa. The book explores how activists’ aspirations of self-improvement, pursued under harsh economic conditions, find in the human rights discourse a new means to distinguish oneself from the poor masses.

Among expatriates, the emphasis on abstract human rights avoids confrontations with the political and business elites. Drawing on long-term research among the Malawian poor, Englund brings to life the personal circumstances of Malawian human rights activists, their expatriate benefactors, and the urban and rural poor as he develops a fresh perspective on freedom—one that recognizes the significance of debt, obligation, and civil virtues.

Transition, Human Rights and Violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

by Michael Neocosmos, Critical Studies Seminar, Rhodes University, 31 August 2011

The courage, inventiveness and organisation of the people of North Africa in Tunisia and Egypt, as the new year of 2011 was turning, have evidently disproved (if refutation were needed) the thesis of „the end of history‟. In doing so they have provided renewed enthusiasm for 'people power' and a popularly driven process of mass mobilisation in which people can not only force the resignation of dictators and seemingly the (partial or full) collapse of authoritarian states, but crucially also demand a greater say in the running of their own lives. In standing up against oppression in this manner, people have asserted that they are no longer victims but full blown political subjects. Yet the appearance of the masses on such a broad scale on the political scene for the first time since independence cannot be assumed to mean that they will remain there, and not only because coercive military power has yet to be transformed.