Human Rights and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism

Bibliographic Data

ID18950488
AuthorsAnthony Woodiwiss (Department of Sociology at City University - London, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume19
Issue1-2
Pages139-155
Publication date2002-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheory Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-2764 • E-ISSN: 1460-3616
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/026327640201900107
OpenAlexW2121874154
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited15

The article outlines the diverse willed and unwilled developments which have attenuated international human rights discourse so that it still cannot be used to hold governments to account for their failures to respect the economic and social rights of their citizens. These developments range from geopolitical manoeuvres, through changed modes of enunciation (that is, the displacement of political theory by law as the source of human rights language), to the absence of appropriate governmentalist techniques for measuring economic and social compliance. It then questions and counters the doctrine of `justiciability' (i.e. the claim that only civil and political rights are legally enforceable) that is the discursive node of this structure of impotence. It concludes by proposing a strategy for the development of a more truly cosmopolitan international human rights discourse

Cosmopolitanism · Cultural rights · Doctrine · Fundamental rights · Geopolitics · Human rights · International human rights law · Justiciability · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Right to property · Social rights · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Human Rights and Development · International Law and Human Rights · Law