Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization?
Abstract
This is an edited text of the fifth John Vincent Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of Keele on 9 May 1997 in which Jack Donnelly attacks the still common scepticism about international human rights - although from an unorthodox angle.
... 6 At the initial stage of entering an ICP, the benefits of acceptance may seem to outweigh the costs. Commitment to international human rights norms and their legal manifestations serves as a marker of legitimate statehood and status within the liberal international order (Donnelly, 1998;Geisinger & Stein, 2007;Reus-Smit, 2013). States may be able to gain legitimacy and esteem among domestic or international audiences by committing to a strong mechanism that ensures compliance with the norm(s) enshrined in the treaty (Comstock, 2021;Lohaus & Stapel, 2022) and allows for systematic monitoring and ranking of member states (Kelley & Simmons, 2015). ...
How do states react to adverse decisions resulting from human rights treaties’ individual complaint procedures? While recent scholarship has shown particular interest in states’ reactions to international court judgments, research on state behavior vis-à-vis an increasing treaty body output remains scarce. I argue that states generally want to avoid the costs implied by adverse decisions, or ‘views’. Rising numbers of rebukes lead them to update their beliefs about the costliness of complaint procedure acceptance in a Bayesian manner. As a result, states become less inclined to accept further petition mechanisms under different human rights treaties. I test these assumptions on an original dataset containing information on individual complaint procedure acceptance and the distribution of 1320 views for a total number of 169 countries ranging from the year 1965 to 2018. Results from Cox proportional hazards regressions suggest that both the number of views against neighboring states and against the examined state itself decrease the likelihood of acceptance of most of the six individual complaint procedures under observation. I also find evidence that this effect is exacerbated if states are more likely to actually bear the costs of implementation. Findings indicate that the omission of further commitment can be a negative spillover of the treaty bodies’ quasi-judicial output.
... While the international community had formed in Europe starting in the mid-17 th century, its format was mainly based on Hobbes' conceptualization of anarchy, rights, and freedom. The debates were the result USA President Wilson's search for normative order, which was conceptualized as idealism in international politics post-World War I. Human rights began being accepted after World War II and became one of the basic conditions for inclusion in the international community (Donnelly, 1998a). While the United Nations General Assembly was adopting these rights, eight countries remained opposed. ...
This study aims to address the debate on universalism versus relativism regarding human rights over the case of China. By the end of the Cold War and with the increasing effects of globalization dynamics, the idea of human rights had become a controversial issue, and interventions in states that violate human rights have come to the agenda of international society. United States of America and the European Union have frequently mentioned the issue of human rights violations with regard to China. However, China has emphasized that no one should intervene with it on this issue, claiming up until the 1990s in the face of these allegations that the issue was its own internal affair. Meanwhile, China has tried to open a discussion about the universality of human rights through cultural values. China focuses on Asian values, claiming that human rights are a product of the Eurocentric Western modern world. This situation can be considered a challenge of postmodern and post-colonial theories that highlight cultural relativism, regarding the mainstream theories represented by realism and liberalism within the discipline of International Relations. However, using these critical theories may reproduce existing power relations by reducing them into a cultural context. This study seeks to reexamine China’s human rights understanding beyond the universalism vs. relativism debate.
For decades, the field of scholarship that studies the law and practice of international organisations -also known as 'international institutional law'- has been marked by an intellectual quietism. Most of the scholarship tends to focus narrowly on providing 'legal' answers to 'legal' questions. For that reason, perspectives rarely engage with the insights of critical traditions of legal thought (for instance, feminist, postcolonial, or political economy-oriented perspectives) or with interdisciplinary contributions produced outside the field. Ways of Seeing International Organisations challenges the narrow gaze of the field by bringing together authors across multiple disciplines to reflect on the need for 'new' perspectives in international institutional law. Highlighting the limits of mainstream approaches, the authors instead interrogate international organisations as pivots in processes of world-making. To achieve this, the volume is organised around four fundamental themes: expertise; structure; performance; and capital. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
La influencia de los derechos humanos en la política exterior no debe entenderse exclusivamente como una cuestión de identidad nacional. El reconocimiento de los derechos humanos en la política exterior de un estado también deriva de ejercicios de socialización interna e internacional y, en ocasiones, es el producto de decisiones racionales estratégicas. Este artículo presenta un modelo de análisis para examinar el papel de los derechos humanos en la definición de la política exterior de la Unión Europea y de sus estados miembros. Este trabajo es una versión resumida de un proyecto de investigación realizado bajo la supervisión del Profesor Jack Donnelly en la Universidad de Denver, bajo el título Human Rights in Foreign Policy in and of the European Union: A Model of Analysis.
An ethical reading of the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention) indicates the feasibility and normative worth of solidarisation, a process that propagates solidarist values within pluralist, statist power frameworks. It demonstrates the benefit of retaining statist arrangements and infusing them with a cosmopolitan impulse of human empowerment, co-creation and “humankindness”. Under solidarisation, sovereignty is subjected to ethical agitation by incremental solidarist reform. But sovereignty is not usurped; in fact it serves to temper and regulate solidarist progress. Pluralism, solidarism and solidarisation are ideas related to the English School of IR. This chapter offers an English School framework, using its historical continuum of realist international system, revolutionist cosmopolis and rationalist international society. Realism and revolutionism occupy the continuum’s extremes; rationalism is roughly equidistant therebetween. Each part of the continuum offers an imaginary of IR against which to assess “real world” developments. International society, an English School signature, is a pragmatic, cautious middle way: mindful of anarchy, the absence of world government, but conscious of the feasibility of propagating lesser (pluralist) or greater (solidarist) degrees of ethical progress. The chapter finds value in the innovative concept of solidarisation, and gauges the latter’s indicators, in preparation for the substantive analyses to come.
Inspired by recent work in evolutionary, developmental, and systems biology, Systems, Relations, and the Structures of International Societies sketches a robust conception of systems that grounds a new conception of levels (of organization, not merely analysis). Understanding international systems as multi-level multi-actor complex adaptive systems allows explanations of important features of the world that are inaccessible to dominant causal and rationalist explanatory strategies. It also develops a comprehensive critique of IR's dominant conception of systems and structures (narrow, rigid, and unfruitful); presents a novel conception of the interrelationship of the social production of continuities and the social production of change; and sketches models of spatio-political structure that cast new light on the development of international systems, including a distinctive account of the nature of globalization.
It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership.
Metatheoretical debates, once the preserve of political and social theory, have entered the iron cage of International Relations. This article opens with a discussion of these debates, in particular the argument that the social sciences have inherited two radically different understandings of the nature of the social world: `objectivism' and `subjectivism'. The argument made in Section 2 of the article is that contemporary metatheorists like Onuf, Wendt and Hollis and Smith have consistently underestimated the `subjectivism' of theorists such as Charles Manning, Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson who were united in their belief that states, through their interaction, reflexively formed a society. And crucially, the very existence of that society shapes the identity of states. This leads to an examination of the `subjectivist' treatment of the institutions of international society and how this differs from the contemporary `objectivism' of neoliberalism and neorealism. Lastly, the article explores the question how far the classical constructivists such as Hedley Bull are more sceptical than neoconstructivists such as Alexander Wendt about the capacity for the practices of the society of states to be reconstituted.
Comparative quantitative assessment of human rights is hampered by the length of the list of internationally recognized rights. Not only is the list so long that it is hard to imagine gathering adequate data without an army of researchers (the International Human Rights Covenants contain more than thirty substantive articles, encompassing at least twice as many separate rights), but the results of such a comprehensive effort would almost certainly be overwhelming and bewildering in their complexity. In this article we try to narrow the list of rights concerning which it is necessary to gather data by establishing a theoretical framework for assessing a state’s human rights performance. We identify a relatively small set of ten essential rights that separately are intrinsically essential and together provide good proxies for almost all other rights. An assessment of national performance on these ten rights, we argue, will approximate a comprehensive assessment of a country’s overall human rights record.
KE sex in Victorian England, it has been said, race is a taboo subject in contemporary polite society. Conflicts or attitudes that to the simpleminded might appear to be self-evidently racial are explained away as class-based, or as difficulties attending immigration, or as responses to special local circumstances. Certainly, race relations are not an area in which political reputations are easily made, and outspokenness on the subject seems to be the preserve of those who have little to lose, their having either departed the scene or not yet arrived at it. Yet beneath this wish to talk about something else, and perhaps in part explaining it, lurk the largest of claims for the factor of race in politics, and the direst of forebodings about the future of race relations. As early as 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois was already expressing the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of 'the colour-line', and this has been a theme of pan-African congresses to the present day. A recent British prime minister, not noted for his proneness to exaggerate, is reported as having said 'I believe the greatest danger ahead of us is that the world might be divided on racial lines. I see no danger, not even the nuclear bomb, which could be so catastrophic as that." These instincts of politicians are fortified by academic analysis. John Rex, one of the most prominent writers in Britain on race relations, has gone so far as to predict that 'for the next few centuries the problems which will preoccupy men politically more than any other will be problems which they subjectively define as problems of race'.2 Hugh Tinker, in one of the very few works on race in international politics, concludes that 'Today, transcending everything (including even the nuclear threat) there is the confrontation between the races .3 No doubt the rioting that took place in Britain in the summer of 1981 is taken by writers of this persuasion to be bitter evidence in support of their view of the place of race in society. This paper is confined to an assessment of the place of race in international relations, in so far as it is possible to distinguish, in this regard, domestic from international politics. In any event, it may be argued that it is to the history of international relations, during the imperial
Victorian imperialism as religion-civil or otherwise
- Wallace G Mills
Wallace G. Mills, 'Victorian
imperialism as religion-civil or otherwise', in Robert D. Long, ed., The man on the spot: essays on British
Empire history (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, );
Black skins, white masks
- Franz Fanon
Franz Fanon, Black skins, white masks (New
York: Grove Press, ).