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Human Rights and Democracy: Discourse Theory and Global Rights Institutions
... That there is a tension between justice and democracy, and thus between global justice and global democracy, has long been acknowledged in political philosophy. 1 While democratic institutions do not necessarily generate substantively just outcomes, just institutions on most accounts need not be democratic (Gould 2004;Erman 2005). Even if most political theorists are devoted to theorizing either global justice or global democracy, or at least focus on one or the other, an underlying question constantly pokes, namely, what is the most appropriate way of understanding the relationship between global justice and global democracy? ...
How should we understand the relationship between global justice and global democracy? One popular view is captured by the aphorism “No global justice without global democracy.” According to Dryzek and Tanasoca's reading of this aphorism, a particular form of deliberative global democracy is seen as the way to specify and justify what global justice is and requires in various contexts. Taking its point of departure in a criticism of this proposal, this essay analyzes how to best understand the relationship between global justice and global democracy. The aim is not to offer a first-order substantial account of this relationship, but to theorize the normative boundary conditions for such an account; that is, the conditions that any plausible theory should respect. These conditions take the form of what is here called a “three-layered view,” which is specified through three claims. It is argued, first, that global democracy is best seen as a partial normative ideal; second, that global democracy must be grounded in fundamental principles of justice; and third, that global democracy is an ideal through which applied principles of distributive justice are formulated and justified in light of reasonable disagreement about what justice requires.
... After the cold war, the process of democracy and human rights has become universalised due to the globalisation. 2 Though the concepts of democracy and human rights and their relations originated in the global North, it has become gradually popular in the global South due to the universality of human rights and democracy. 3 Thus, liberal democracy and human rights have become widespread and important in Southeast Asian countries. ...
Liberal democracy and human rights are interlinked. However, the human rights of Rohingya are openly neglected in Myanmar's democratic process under Aung San Suu Kyi. This paper focuses on state-sponsored comprehensive human rights abuses of Rohingya in Myanmar when the country has returned to official democracy in 2015. Studies on state sponsored human rights violation of Rohingya in Myanmar remains limited to few topics. Existing studies does not focus adequately on the links between democracy and human rights violations of Rohingya in Myanmar. This paper argues that the human rights of Rohingya in Myanmar are regularly abused due to the ineffectiveness of the human rights institutions, absence of democratic culture and minority rights, and militarism in Myanmar's democracy. Therefore, concerned stakeholders should rethink making relations between Myanmar's style of democracy and human rights and find out alternative ways to ensure the human rights of Rohingya in Myanmar.
... In fact in many ways anthropologists are not the main characters in the narrative I develop. As only one among many examples, I am happy to yet again extol the illuminating virtues of the Swedish political theorist Eva Erman (2005), whose work guides my way for a large section of my examination of human rights, cosmopolitanism, and the ethnography of transnational normativity in Chapter Five. ...
This book review is part of an interdisciplinary special issue of PoLAR titled “At Disciplinary Edges.” We asked scholars to review books from disciplines other than the ones in which they were trained or taught.The author of this book review, Alison Brysk, teaches in the Political Science and International Studies Departments at the University of California, Irvine. She reviews Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights, written by Mark Goodale, who is an Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University.
... Another common route to theorize the democratic legitimacy of multilevel governance goes not primarily via civil society activity but via human rights. While democracy and human rights as two normative standards 30 often stand in a troubled relationship, even domestically, human rights are ascribed a central role on most accounts of democracy beyond the state, in part of course because one central set of human rights are rights to political participation (Erman 2005). It is generally (and reasonably) agreed that to the extent that we wish to apply democracy globally, we must apply some 35 basic political rights globally too. 3 At the same time, the conceptualization of human rights in these proposals is often unclear. ...
... by reference to inherent quality that is valuable for its own sake. 1 Indeed, the more political rights are acknowledged as part of the very package of basic human rights -rather than seen as nonbasic rights, secondary to basic civil and socio-economic rights -the more difficult it is to consider democracy and democratic institutions solely or primarily as a means to enforce human rights. This becomes particularly evident when considering some political rights, such as the right to participation in political decision-making (Erman 2005(Erman , 2010a. ...
While the philosophical discourse on human rights traditionally has been of concern mainly for moral philosophers, we have in the last decades witnessed a revitalized interest in human rights among political philosophers and political theorists. This political turn in the contemporary debate on human rights is also evident by the fact that philosophers have begun to frame other philosophical questions, such as the question of global justice, in terms of human rights (Pogge 2000). One of the challenges unceasingly facing theorists is how to transform moral will to political will and how to best conceive of the relationship between them. It is generally agreed that democracy plays a vital part for achieving human rights both nationally and internationally. By the same token, with democracy being approached beyond and across nation-state borders and theorized on regional and transnational levels, an increasingly complex picture has revealed itself. It has proven very difficult to make sense of how human rights actually relates to democracy in light of these changes of circumstances, both conceptually and normatively.
... There are of course numerous ways for authorities and agents to be accountable in politics, but increased accountability without any authorization would not be democratic accountability (Erman, 2005Erman, , 2006 see also Grant and Keohane, 2005; Buchanan and Keohane, 2006). This relationship of interdependence cannot be captured by the civil society view of democracy. ...
In an era of intensified globalisation the changing role of the nation state in the global political and economic order has become an ever more salient concern. The changing role of the state’s responsibilities and capabilities is often subsumed under the terms ‘multilevel’ or ‘multilayered’ governance, which alludes not only to the inclusion of public authorities at several territorial and institutional levels but also to the increased formal and informal influence and participation of non-state and private actors in public regulations. These developments have fuelled debates about the role of regional, international and global institutions, both as formal organisations that establish and enforce rules and as shared sets of norms and expectations that shape interaction between political and economic actors. They have has also fuelled debates about the subjects who are supposed to be the political actors in these institutional structures.
span>In this interview, Eva Erman clarifies basic concepts and distinctions in her research on democratic theory, discourse theory and global institutions, relating some of them to current issues.</span
Die Behauptung, dass die Menschenrechte ›universell‹ gelten, stellt für fast alle Befürworter der Menschenrechte eine Art unhintergehbares Axiom dar. Aber nicht zuletzt aus diesem Grund ist sie aufseiten vieler Kritiker auch heftig umstritten. Zunächst zielt die Behauptung auf eine allgemeine Formeigenschaft sämtlicher Menschenrechte. Sie besagt: Trotz aller biologischen, geschlechtsspezifischen, sozialen, kulturellen, religiösen oder anderweitigen individuellen Unterschiede haben alle Menschen weltweit, und zwar allein aufgrund ihres Menschseins, elementare Ansprüche auf gleiche menschenrechtliche Berücksichtigung.
International human rights are often considered as evidence of the existence or at least of the possibility of global democracy and citizenship (see, e.g., Simmons 2001, 179; Gould 2004; Erman 2005; Habermas 2011).1 This is sometimes explained by reference to the possible grounding of democracy and human rights in a common value: equality (see, e.g., Christiano 2008; Brettschneider 2007). This common egalitarian dimension rather than grounding in equality needs to be argued for, however. But something that is even more problematic is that it is readily assumed in those accounts that the relationship between democracy and human rights can be transposed to the global level and be activated anew horizontally and outside the boundaries of domestic or regional democratic polities.2 A lot hinges on this debate, however, on what equality and, more specifically in this context, political equality can and ought to mean when applied to global or transnational law and institutions. This is a very difficult question that democratic theorists have started addressing lately (see, e.g., Christiano 2010; Pettit 2010) and that is discussed by different contributions in this volume.
In this paper I focus on the discussion between Rawls and Habermas on procedural justice. I use Rawls’s distinction between pure, perfect, and imperfect procedural justice to distinguish three possible readings of discourse ethics. Then I argue, against Habermas’s own recent claims, that only an interpretation of discourse ethics as imperfect procedural justice can make compatible its professed cognitivism with its proceduralism. Thus discourse ethics cannot be understood as a purely procedural account of the notion of justice. Finally I draw the different consequences that follow from this reading.
The increasingly multicultural fabric of modern societies has given rise to many new issues and conflicts, as ethnic and national minorities demand recognition and support for their cultural identity. This book presents a new conception of the rights and status of minority cultures. It argues that certain sorts of rights for minority cultures are consistent with liberal democratic principles, and that standard liberal objections to recognizing such rights on the grounds of individual freedom, social justice, and national unity can be answered. However, no single formula can be applied to all groups, and the needs and aspirations of immigrants are very different from those of indigenous peoples and national minorities. The book analyses some of the issues, which, though central to an understanding of multicultural politics (such as language rights, group representation, land rights, federalism, and secession), have been surprisingly neglected in contemporary liberal theory.
Kampen för ömsesidigt erkännande i den demokratiska rättsstaten
- Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas, "Kampen för ömsesidigt erkännande i den demokratiska rättsstaten",
in Det mångkulturella samhället och erkännandets politik, ed. by A. Guthman (Göteborg:
Daidalos förlag, 1994), 108.
Beyond Fairness and Deliberation
- Estlund
Estlund, "Beyond Fairness and Deliberation", 195-196.