- Info
Rights and Justice in International Relations-OPEN University
Course Description
This unit is about rights and rights claims, and
the idea of implementing justice in the international sphere based on
the concept of rights. It is agreed by most people that ‘rights are a
good thing’ and in many respects they are. However, this unit
deliberately takes a critical view. It seeks to examine closely why
rights are a good thing and highlights some of the problems associated
with rights. In this way, we hope that the sense in which rights are
still, ultimately, ‘a good thing’ can be clarified and sharpened, and
the valid reasons for rights thereby strengthened. The belief in rights
based on a moral assertion of a common humanity that we all share is not
self-justifying, and it needs to be located within the complex
political field of international relations.
In Section
2, we look briefly at some aspects of the development of
internationally recognised human rights as expressed in the UN Charter
and 1948 Declaration. Section
3 and Section
4, respectively, will consider rights and justice by elucidating
the meaning of the terms and some of the debates about how best to
conceptualise them. In Section
5 and Section
6, the working definitions previously outlined are used to think
about the impact that notions of rights and justice can have on
international relations. In the concluding section (Section
7), we shall consider the future of rights and justice in the
international realm.
By the end of this unit you
should be able to:
- understand the different
interpretations of internationally recognised notions of rights and
justice;
- give examples of implementing justice
in an international sphere;
- investigate
questions in international studies;
- analyse the
different agencies of change in the international system.
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Introduction
 Introduction
Resource- This unit is about rights and
rights claims, and the idea of implementing justice in the international
sphere based on the concept of rights. It is agreed by most people that
‘rights are a good thing’...
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1 International human rights: an introduction
- 1 International human rights: an
introduction Resource
- There are many examples of claims
for rights in the international sphere.
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2 The United Nations settlement
- 2.1 Background to the idea of
international rights Resource
- The UN Charter and the Declaration
form part of a post-Second World War international settlement which
established, on the one side, the formal legitimating ideology of the
international system, national...
- 2.2 The origins of a rights
discourse Resource
- In some form, the ideas of
‘rights’ and ‘justice’ could probably be found in all societies and
cultures. They are moral concepts because they are concerned with moral
ideals; with how things should be...
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3 Defining rights
- 3.1 Introduction Resource
- As this history might suggest,
defining and conceptualising rights is not straightforward. This section
aims to provide a working definition of ‘rights’ and introduce some
important debates about rights....
- 3.2 What are rights? Resource
- The modern discourse of universal
human rights has a number of features. The idea that everyone,
everywhere has rights refers to the concept that there are certain
entitlements justifiably owed to all...
- 3.3 Examples of rights Resource
- Many things have been claimed as
rights, as can be seen in the text of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in Table 1 . One set of rights is citizenship rights. Primarily
concerned with basic constitutional...
- 3.4 Debates about rights Resource
- There are at least four big
debates about modern individual rights. The aim in putting these before
you is to introduce these hotly contested issues to which there are no
conclusive answers, but which...
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4 Defining justice
- 4.1 Distributive and commutative
justice Resource
- Justice is commonly thought to
have two applications which Aristotle distinguished as ‘distributive’
and ‘commutative’ justice. The first, distributive justice, is concerned
with the distributions of things...
- 4.2 Social and political justice Resource
- A particularly important set of
debates arises in relation to different notions of distributive justice.
Do notions of distributive justice apply to the rights of individuals
and the acts that they commit,...
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5 Rights in the international arena
- 5.1 Rights, justice and
international politics Resource
- What happens to notions of rights
and justice when we move the discussion to the level of international
politics?
- 5.2 Human rights in the
international arena Resource
- The UN's 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights asserted that the ‘recognition of the
inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members
of the human family is the foundation of...
- 5.3 Problems with international
rights Resource
- The international human rights
discourse claims that the value of its conception of rights lies in it
being universal, empowering and human-centred. The idea of universality
asserts the relevance of human...
- 5.4 The influence of the Western
perspective Resource
- With regard to the first set of
problems – that the rights discourse is not universal but is deeply
informed by a Western perspective – it is striking that many actors and
commentators on the international...
- 5.5 Feminist critiques of
international rights Resource
- The second source of criticisms
that we would like to explore comes from feminist critiques. Some
feminists argue that the universal notion of rights makes invisible the
special problems faced by women...
- 5.6 Against whom are rights claims
made? Resource
- The third set of problems relates
to whom the rights claims are made against, and what kinds of claims can
be made. In the case of individual human rights, a rights claim is
usually addressed to or claimed...
- 5.7 Relating individual rights to
state sovereignty Resource
- The fourth set of problems is
really a specific example of the third set and relates to the ways in
which individual rights relate to state sovereignty. The Millennium
Conference of the UN in 2000 endorsed...
- 5.8 Review of criticisms of
international rights Resource
- Review the four criticisms of
rights at the international level discussed in the previous sections.
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6 International justice – communitarian and
cosmopolitan perspectives
- 6.1 Introduction Resource
- The international level can be
viewed as an arena of politics in its own right and not just as a
context for states and other actors. If we think of the international
world in this way, how should relations...
- 6.2 Some general features of
communitarianism and cosmopolitanism Resource
- There are two very different and
sharply contrasting views about how the international arena can be
theorised, should be organised and can be described. One side sees the
international sphere as made up...
- 6.3 International distributive
justice Resource
- While communitarians strongly
support an interpretation of the UN postwar settlement based on the
principle of national self-determination, many cosmopolitans seek to go
beyond that settlement. Those who...
- 6.4 International retributive
justice Resource
- A further difference between
communitarians and cosmopolitans arises over the question of retributive
justice. Communitarians think that it is the responsibility of each
state to uphold justice. Collectively,...
- 6.5 Military and humanitarian
interventionism Resource
- While the ICC may be the most
radical cosmopolitan effort at global justice institution-building so
far, it is not the only one. The move towards cosmopolitan global
institutions that extend beyond the...
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7 Conclusion
- 7 Conclusion
Resource
- One might think of the different
interpretations of internationally recognised notions of rights and
justice as running along a spectrum, from which we shall now identify
four different positions.
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8 Further reading
- 8 Further reading Resource
- For a wide-ranging, accessible and
powerful defence of the idea of universal human rights and their role
in the international system, see Chapters 1, 5, 6 and 7 of Beetham, D.
(1999) Democracy and Human...
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References and Acknowledgements
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Copyright 2007,
by the Contributing Authors.
Cite/attribute Resource.
administrator. (2010, January 31). Rights and Justice in International Relations-OPEN University. Retrieved July 31, 2010, from Free University Courses OCW Courses OpenCourseWare Freeversity Foundation Web site: http://www.freeversity.org/liberal-arts-1/peace-studies/rights-and-justice-in-international-relations-open-university.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License
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