In 1998, amid much fanfare and pageantry, many important personalities and institutions, including numerous governments, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That seminal document launched human rights internationally, an idea that has arguably given expression to one of the most important development of our times. But largely lost in those celebrations were the voices that problematize the idea of human rights and point to its difficulties from normative, institutional, and multicultural perspectives. Perhaps there should have been wrenching, soul-searching, and probing inquiries into the phenomenon known as the human rights movement. But it was not...

The human rights movement is marked by a damning metaphor.¹ The grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext which depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other.² The savages-victims-saviors (SVS)³ construction is a three-dimensional compound metaphor in which each dimension is a metaphor in itself.⁴ The main authors of the human rights discourse, including the United Nations, Western states, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs),⁵ and senior Western academics, constructed this three-dimensional prism. This rendering of the human rights corpus and its discourse is unidirectional and predictable, a black-and-white construction that pits...

Over the last fifty years the international law of human rights has steadily achieved a moral plateau rarely associated with the law of nations.¹ A diverse and eclectic assortment of individuals and entities now invoke human rights norms and the attendant phraseology with the intent of cloaking themselves and their causes in the paradigm’s perceived power and righteousness. What is interesting is the failure of this universal reliance on the language of human rights to create agreement on the scope, content, and philosophical bases of the human rights corpus. Intellectual and policy battles have focused on its cultural relevance, ideological...

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights,¹ the basis of Africa’s continental human rights system, entered into force on October 21, 1986, upon ratification by a simple majority of member states of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).² The African Charter has attracted criticism because it departs from the narrow formulations of other regional and international human rights instruments.³ In particular, it codifies the three generations of rights, including the controversial concept of peoples’ rights, and imposes duties on individual members of African societies.⁴ While a number of scholars have focused attention on apparent tensions between human and peoples’...

This chapter is not just about the limitations, if any, that should or could be placed on religious rights per se. But it further explores the complex project of universalism in the spiritual world and the torment that results from legal protection to particular cosmologies in their efforts to remake other traditions. At the heart of this crisis is the belief by some spiritual traditions in their own superiority and their view of the “other” as inferior. This chapter is an exploration of the historical experience of religious penetration and advocacy in a very specific context and a quest to...

Four decades after physical decolonization, the African state is today mired in crises of identity.¹ Multidimensional and complexly dynamic, these crises primarily feed from the traditional troughs of culture and religion, ethnicity and race, history and mythology, and politics and economics.² In the quicksand known as the modern African state, this potent and volatile alchemical mix has all too frequently either been cataclysmic or fostered political dysfunction.³ The realm of religion, together with its essential linkage to philosophy and culture, has been one of the pivotal variables in the construction of the identity of the modern African state.⁴ Religion has...

The post-World War II period has been characterized as the Age of Rights, an era during which the human rights movement has come of age.¹ Post-apartheid South Africa is the first state that is the virtual product of that age and the norms it represents. Indeed, the dramatic rebirth of the South African state, marked by the 1994 democratic elections, is arguably the most historic event in the human rights movement since its emergence some fifty years ago. Never has the recreation of a state been so singularly the product of such focused and relentless advocacy of human rights norms....

The adoption in 1948 by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the foundational document of the human rights movement—sought to give universal legitimacy to a doctrine that is fundamentally Eurocentric in its construction. Sanctimonious to a fault, the Universal Declaration underscored its arrogance by proclaiming itself the “common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations.” The fact that half a century later human rights have become a central norm of global civilization does not vindicate their universality. It is rather a telling testament to the conceptual, cultural, economic, military, and philosophical domination of the...