The globalization of human rights

The terms “globalization” and “human rights” encapsulate two of the most prominent areas of concern across a wide terrain of disciplines and perspectives in the social sciences and the humanities. The term“globalization”generally refers to the expansion of global capitalism, a process that began with the imperial expansion of Europe, accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, and developed in the twentieth century in a variety of new forms, such as the transnational corporation. At the most basic level, one might speak of globalization as the increasing diffusion of what MaxWeber called instrumental rationality, both in terms of degree and intensity, across time and space into virtually every geographical area on the planet.Yet the exact nature of this process and its effects are highly contested, with some seeing globalization as an expansion of freedom and opportunity (Bhagwati, 2004) and others seeing it as an intensification of the more negative aspects of capitalism first diagnosed by Marx and intensified in the process capitalist expansion (Falk, 1999; Harvey, 2006). In general, it would be safe to say that globalization is almost always considered in terms of its human outcomes, that it is to say, its effects on human agency, and, in particular, on the well-being of human beings as they experience globalization. Globalization cannot be seen purely in economic terms, though the ability to measure

concrete economic outcomes facilitates this (see, for instance, Joyce, 2009). Empirical measures of global inequality, for instance, allow us to look concretely at the effects of capitalist expansion in various locales and measure the effects of this expansion in terms of the relative economic status of nations to each other or a sociological approach sees the overall process of globalization as consisting of a variety of other processes. Globalization is characterized by the expansion of media and communication technologies that enhance the interconnectedness of human beings on a global scale, allowing people to communicate and interact instantaneously across time and space on a historically unprecedented scale (Albrow, 1997). Another central aspect of globalization is the accelerating and expansive migration of peoples across national boundaries and population transfers (including ones that are forced and involuntary). Transnational migration is, of course, driven by capitalist labor markets, but such flows of people, being also new cultural forms, as migrants fuse their cultures of origin with their host cultures, producing new, and hybrid forms of culture (Levitt, 2001). Another aspect of

globalization is the process of the global diffusion of culture across national boundaries. Globalization entails the “dislocation” of cultural meanings from particular locales with the effect that a new, virtually infinite, universe of cultural exchanges take place “outside” of traditional boundaries that contained and protected local cultures prior to the advent of modernity. In this essay, I would like to argue that human rights is also part of the process of globaliza-

tion. In another work, I have defined human rights as socially constructed ideals of freedom and human well-being (Cushman, 2006). On this definition, all societies have norms, values, and ideals which might be labeled as “human rights” that guide human action.Yet the term is generally used to describe ideals of freedom that are universal, which all humans have as a consequence of simply being human. Human rights are, by their very nature and in their very language, global rights. In what follows, I would like to outline the process of the globalization of human rights in a variety of ways. First, I will consider the successive development of different conceptions of rights from early modernity to the present. The focus here is in showing how competing definitions of human rights evolved historically so that when we look at the world today we find the major conceptions of human rights, conceptions that, however, are not necessarily commensurate with one another and exist in tension. The second part of this chapter examines the globalization of rights as a process that involves the movement of universal ideas of human rights into new cultural locales and spaces. This is a process fraught with tension and conflict, as universal ideas of human freedom and well-being clash with local conceptions of right and wrong. The third and final part of the chapter examines the emergence of new institutional and organizational forms that are based on the idea of human rights and that function to foster human rights in a global context. These new forms are often said to constitute something called “global civil society” or “transnational cosmopolitanism.” As with the other sections, I will critically examine this concept and raise the question: has globalization led to the emergence of global civil society, and if so, what is the nature of this new entity? There are, no doubt, many other processes that could be examined in an analysis of the

globalization of human rights, but the three I have outlined here are ones which constitute the main processes of the globalization of human rights. Generally, discussions of globalization and human rights focus on another set of questions. How do the structural processes of globalization – especially economic, political, and legal structures that constitute globalization as a process – affect human rights? Does globalization lead to an advance of human freedom and thriving and social justice? Does globalization advance human rights? Or, is globalization a “dark” force, a process of hypermodernity that has brought on new forms of domination and new patterns of social suffering? These questions are not of central concern in this essay, though they will be raised in conjunction with the discussion of the main questions about the globalization of human rights. Looking at the globalization of human rights is not the same as looking at how globalization has affected human rights. The latter question will be explored only insofar as we must take note of the fact that a large part of the literature on globalization and human rights attempts to assess the impact of the former on the latter. To foreshadow my argument a bit, I want to argue there can be no valid empirical or ontological measure of the effects of globalization of human rights. The conceptions of human rights are so varied that what constitutes the freedom or the protection afforded by rights for one individual might be seen as subjugation and domination for others.