Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Introduction: human rights and the fifty years' crisis
- I Theories of human rights
- 1 Three tyrannies
- 2 The social construction of international human rights
- 3 Universal human rights: a critique
- 4 Non-ethnocentric universalism
- 5 Towards an ethic of global responsibility
- II The practices of human wrongs
- Index
1 - Three tyrannies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Introduction: human rights and the fifty years' crisis
- I Theories of human rights
- 1 Three tyrannies
- 2 The social construction of international human rights
- 3 Universal human rights: a critique
- 4 Non-ethnocentric universalism
- 5 Towards an ethic of global responsibility
- II The practices of human wrongs
- Index
Summary
Another race is only an other, strolling on the far side of our skin, badged with his weather
Carol RumensA few weeks after the conference which led to this book I was in Cracow, south-east Poland, unable to sleep. My insomnia had less to do with how I thought I would feel in the morning – as a day-tourist in Auschwitz – than with the noise being made by a succession of student revellers in the street below. By a strange coincidence, one of the books I picked up to pass the time contained the poem ‘Outside Oswiecim’ by Carol Rumens, two of whose lines are quoted above. In a few words she gives poetic legitimisation to the point of my paper at the conference from which this chapter is derived. In her rejection of the fashionable definite article and capitalisation (The Other) in favour of the lower case and indefinite article (an other), Rumens is rejecting the politics of the concentration camp in favour of a common humanity ontology, an other regarding politics. It is an inclusivist rather than an exclusivist view of being human, human being. The Other is an alien: an other is all of us. Words – even small words like definite and indefinite articles – can be tyrants; they can both kill and set free. Who we are and what we might become is in a word. Whether one was inside or outside Auschwitz at a certain period, permanently, was in a word.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Human Rights in Global Politics , pp. 31 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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