Abstract

While recent scholarship has turned to the increasing fragmentation of global human rights discourses, the often-competing ideological projects in which different understandings of human rights are embedded have received comparatively scant attention. Instead, human rights are treated as isolated norms. Although treated as isolated, human rights norms are frequently simultaneously understood against the implicit backdrop of liberal assumptions about political order and human agency, thereby obscuring alternative human rights conceptions. This paper seeks to move our understanding of human rights beyond their liberal enunciation. Drawing on advances in the fields of intellectual history and political theory, it develops a morphological approach that treats norms not only as individual standards of appropriate behavior but as complex units of meanings. These meanings only emerge in larger ideational formations in which varying notions of human rights are temporarily fixed through their positioning toward other concepts. The paper then illustrates such morphological approach by turning to human rights’ contested histories. While historiographies of human rights have traditionally focused on actors from the North Atlantic, more recent advances across several disciplines have increasingly stressed the significance and agency of Southern actors in the making of the international human rights regime. The paper addresses this literature by analysing the ways in which China and India have historically shaped, and continue shaping, global human rights politics.

About the Speaker

Tobias Berger is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Freie Universität Berlin and, currently, a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. His work focusses on the global circulation and contestations of norms and ideas, with a regional focus on South and East Asia. His monograph on “Global Norms and Local Courts: Translating the Rule of Law in Bangladesh” was published in 2017 by Oxford University Press. His more recent work has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, Third World Quarterly, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and International Studies Quarterly, among others.