Human rights in a wrong world

Reivew of Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018). 307pp., £90.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78811 252 9 hb., 978 1 83910 447 3 pb. Over the past few decades, various critical scholars have emphasised the limitations of human rights. Such scholars have, for […]

Between visible and undetectable violence

Reivew of Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Zone Books, New York, 2017. 368pp., £32.95 hb., 978 1 93540 886 4 Unequal access to visibility, along with the erasure of traces, determine the partial undetectability of various events of violence, crimes and human rights violations. Such thresholds of detectability consist, according to Eyal […]

Powerless companions or fellow travellers?: Human rights and the neoliberal assault on post-colonial economic justice

The aim must be to reduce inequality in every area where it is found. To do this therefore we must refashion, or ‘revolutionise’, the laws which lead to the reproduction of the relations of domination and exploitation. Mohammed Bedjaoui 1 Attempts to enforce the NIEO [New International Economic Order] would lead to a Hobbesian war […]

Noam Chomsky: Freedom and power

Interview noam chomsky Freedom and power Peter hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we […]

Justice and the Gulf War

Justice and the Gulf War Michael Rustin This article is concerned with the Gulf War in relation to the theory of just and unjust wars. The morality of the war was of course strongly contested, and it seems valuable now that its violence (although not its consequences in suffering) lie in the past to reflect […]

A Just War? The Left and the Moral Gulf

A Just War? The Left and the Moral Gulf Gregory Elliott A striking incidental feature of the Gulf War was the philosophical conflict attending the military hostilities. Norberto Bobbio or Jiirgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky or Ted Honderich, to name only a few of the participants, felt compelled, in their contrasting ways, to adopt and seek […]

Feminism and Pragmatism

Feminism and Pragmatism Richard Rorty When two women ascended to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, Catherine MacKinnon asked: ‘Will they use the tools of law as women, for all women?’ She continued as follows: I think that the real feminist issue is not whether biological males or biological females hold positions of power, although it […]

On minorities: Cultural rights

Commentary On minorities: cultural rights Homi K. Bhabha After the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we still need to ask: what is the human ʻthing itselfʼ? Who is ʻone of usʼ in the midst of the jurisdictional unsettlements of migration, minoriti-zation, the clamour of multiculturalism? To whom do we turn in […]

Susan Sontag, 1933–2004

Obituary Counter-traditionalist Susan Sontag, 1933–2004 In the prefatory note to her first collection of critical writings, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag reflected that ʻin the end, what I have been writing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibilityʼ. The statement holds true for […]