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2 books match the query 'Human rights and globalization'

cover of Humanity's Ruins: Ethics, Feminism, and Genocidal Humanitarianism

Humanity's Ruins

Ethics, Feminism, and Genocidal Humanitarianism

Danielle Bouchard

Duke University Press, 2025

In Humanity’s Ruins, Danielle Bouchard examines how genocidal aspirations animate contemporary Western humanitarian projects and discourses. Drawing on anticolonial and antiracist feminist critique, Bouchard argues that humanitarianism has functioned in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras to perpetuate longer-lived, fundamentally racist conceptualizations of humanity’s defining characteristics. She examines the aesthetics of humanitarian texts, which are filled with figures of the wounded, dead, and disappeared—the atomic bomb victim whose only remainder is a shadow imprinted on concrete, the grievously injured Muslim woman, the vanished members of Amazonian “uncontacted” tribes, the dying African—to elucidate how the appearance of these figures reaffirms a genocidal view of humanity that aligns with the continuation of Western imperial warfare. Humanitarian discourses conceive of humanity as a community which, by definition, is under existential threat from some humans who are explicitly or implicitly understood as needing to be eliminated. Bouchard invokes “humanity’s ruins” to expose the genocidal fantasy of a human world in which such threat has been eliminated in the interest of supposedly ensuring humanity’s survival.
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cover of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Challenge of Religion

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Challenge of Religion

Johannes Morsink

University of Missouri Press, 2017

Repulsed by evil Nazi practices and desiring to create a better world after the devastation of World War II, in 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Because of the secular imprint of this text, it has faced a series of challenges from the world’s religions, both when it was crafted and in subsequent political and legal struggles.

The book mixes philosophical, legal, and archival arguments to make the point that the language of human rights is a valid one to address the world’s disputes. It updates the rationale used by the early UN visionaries and makes it available to twenty-first-century believers and unbelievers alike. The book shows how the debates that informed the adoption of this pivotal normative international text can be used by scholars to make broad and important policy points.

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