The Human Right To Dominate

At the turn of the new millennium, a new phenomenon has emerged: conservatives who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture began to embrace human rights in order to advance their own political goals. In this book Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights - generally conceived as a counterhegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices - are being deployed to subjugate the weak and legitimise domination.

"What if human rights were used to oppress or even harm the very populations they were intended to protect? In The HUman Right to Dominate, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon challenge readers to reconsider everything that they think they know about human rights, arguing against the popular assumption that increased human rights lead to a greater degree of freedom. The book explores the subjective and politicized nature of human rights in the context of the Israel/Palestine conflict, demonstrating instances in which human rights can be used as a tool for oppression and illustrating the ways that human rights can be interpreted to justify colonialism, warfare, and even lethal violence against civilians." --Back cover.

"What if human rights were used to oppress or even harm the very populations they were intended to protect? In The HUman Right to Dominate, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon challenge readers to reconsider everything that they think they know about human rights, arguing against the popular assumption that increased human rights lead to a greater degree of freedom. The book explores the subjective and politicized nature of human rights in the context of the Israel/Palestine conflict, demonstrating instances in which human rights can be used as a tool for oppression and illustrating the ways that human rights can be interpreted to justify colonialism, warfare, and even lethal violence against civilians." --Back cover.

This is a wholly new and compelling answer to one of the most persistent dilemmas in both law and moral philosophy: If rights are "natural"-if, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, it is "self-evident that all men are endowed . . . with certain inalienable rights"-where do these rights come from? Does natural law really exist outside the formal structure of humanly enacted law? On the other hand, if rights are nothing more than the product of human law, what argument is there for allowing the "rights" of a few people to outweigh the preferences of the majority? In this book, renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz offers a fresh resolution to this age-old dilemma: Rights, he argues, do not come from God, nature, logic, or law alone. They arise out of particular experiences with injustice. While justice is an elusive concept, hard to define and subject to conflicting interpretations, injustice is immediate, intuitive, widely agreed upon and very tangible. This is a timely book that will have an immediate impact on our political dialogue, from the intersection of religion and law to recent quandaries surrounding the right to privacy, voting rights, and the right to marry. More than that, it is a passionate case for the recognition of human rights in a rigorously secular framework. Rights from Wrongs will be the first book to propose a theory of rights that emerges not from some theory of perfect justice but from its opposite: from the bottom up, from trial and error, and from our collective experience of injustice.

In this 2006 book, Conor Gearty confronts the challenges that may destroy the language of human rights for future generations.

International efforts to construct a set of standardised human rights guidelines are based upon the identification of agreed key values regarding the relationships between individuals and the institutions governing them, which are viewed as critical to the well-being of humanity and the character of being human. This publication considers these issues of justice at the national, regional, and international levels by analysing civil, political, economic and social rights aspects.

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice. In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring wealth, resolved to fulfill their citizens’ most basic needs without forgetting to contain how much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse of empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scale. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead. Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.

The best country-by-country assessment of human rights. The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.