Human Rights – A Political and Cultural Critique Mutua Paperback 9780812220490

Human RightsA Political and Cultural Critique\nAuthor(s): Makau Mutua\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, United States\nImprint: University of Pennsylvania Press\nISBN-13: 9780812220490, 978-0812220490\nSynopsis\nIn 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with it a profusion of norms, processes, and institutions to define, promote, and protect human rights. Today virtually every cause seeks to cloak itself in the righteous language of rights. But even so, this universal reliance on the rights idiom has not succeeded in creating common ground and deep agreement as to the scope, content, and philosophical bases for human rights.\n Makau Mutua argues that the human rights enterprise inappropriately presents itself as a guarantor of eternal truths without which human civilization is impossible. Mutua contends that in fact the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric construct for the reconstitution of .