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Academic

: Legal Theory Blog

Mutua on Rights Discourse & Africa

By Lawrence Solum

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Makau W. Mutua (University at Buffalo Law School, SUNY) has posted The Transformation of Africa - A Critique of the Rights Discourse (HUMAN RIGHTS AND DIVERSITY: INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT, Eduardo J. Ruiz Vieytez, Koen de Feyter, eds., p. 899, University of Deusto , Bilbao, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article explores the complexity of the African post-colonial state and interrogates the wisdom of deploying the human rights idiom as the panacea of the conceptual and structural challenges that haunt Africa. Although the piece does not jettison the utility of rights as a medium for social change, it is deeply skeptical about one-dimensional approaches to creating productive societies. The article questions the historical and ideological bases for the human rights project and wonders how an enterprise so steeped in one cultural milieu can be universalized without cross-fertilization and multi-culturalization. Besides, it expresses misgivings about the conceptual incompleteness of the human rights project. It asks how a distorted human rights enterprise can in turn recover distorted societies without acknowledging, understanding, and addressing those distortions.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 24, 2009 (boomark / email).