Human Rights Constellations

• In Event: 590 - Regular Session. Transforming Institutional Practices of Human Rights

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the different meanings or understandings of human rights by suggesting three constellations of human rights exist: legal regimes of human rights, decolonial/feminist human rights, and the social life of rights. Reflective of the various constituencies engaged at the United Nations (UN) level, the concept of human rights constellations reveals changing engagements with human rights, which has contributed to important ontological shifts. Constellation represents a shared space that does not suggest one approach is superior to the others. Rather, it suggests that these different strands come together to provide us with an understanding of what human rights are and what it should, or could, become. The legal regimes of human rights rest on modernist ontologies, decolonial/feminist human rights hinge on relational ontologies, and the “social life of rights” signifies the struggle between the two ontologies waged at the level of politics and UN advocacy. By challenging “the dominant framework of human rights and its assumption of a universal human nature largely reflected in the specific experiences, needs and values of affluent white Western men,” alternative feminist and anti-racist epistemologies of human rights based on decoloniality and the “social life of rights” offer a richer portrait of the human rights landscape.

Author

• Sylvanna Martina Falcon, University of California-Santa Cruz