Feb 23, 2010

I just finished reading John Foran’s new book, Taking Power (2005) and I think is a must read for anyone interested in human rights, social justice and peace. Although Foran is a sociologist and brings a predominantly sociological approach to his analysis, he also offers a multidisciplinary perspective.

He seeks answers to a simple age-old question: Why do revolutions happen? Focusing on a diverse range of revolutionary episodes – China, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, Nicaragua, Angola etc – Foran argues that five inter-related causal factors must combine in a given conjecture to produce successful social revolutions – 1) dependent development; 2) repressive, exclusionary, personalist state; 3) elaboration of effective and powerful political culture; 4) crisis arising from economic downturn and 5) a world systemic opening (external factors).

While I do not agree with some of the more rigidly structuralist arguments that Foran makes, I think his overall attempts at systematizing our understanding of social revolutions is to be commended. I was particularly intrigued by his discussion on the “Future of revolutions." He questions whether Globalization represents the “Highest Stage of Capitalism?” (p.260)

Globalization the Highest Stage of Capitalism?
In his classic 1916 account of imperialism, Lenin conceived it as the highest stage of capitalism, and dated its rise in words that echo eerily almost a century later: “The beginning of the twentieth century marks the turning point from the old capitalism to the new, from domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.” Foran wonders if, as imperialism represented for Lenin a special state in capitalism, globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century represents a special stage in imperialism and neo-colonialism. This, I think, is an interesting proposition that draws attention to the structural inequities inherent in contemporary globalization.

Book of the Week: John Foran, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions

2/23/2010 04:16:00 PM , ,

Feb 21, 2010

A famous biblical verse states: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." I find this admonition by Jesus Christ relevant to the human rights movement in many ways. Not everyone who professes human rights does so with an objective commitment to human rights ideals. A look at the history of the human rights movement bears this out.

One of the legacies of the Cold War for human rights was the creation and intensification of the boundaries between civil and political rights on one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights on the other. These boundaries reflected the East West polarization in international relations which reduced human rights to a weapon of propaganda and political ideology in a bi-polar struggle. The West emphasized civil and political rights pointing the finger at socialist countries for denying these rights. The socialist (and many developing countries) emphasized economic and social rights criticizing the richest Western countries for failure to secure these rights for all its citizens.

In a post-Cold War era where the world is no longer that sharply divided between East and West, much of the propagandist human rights language of the Cold War era has lost its relevance. More countries across the former East West divide are now better disposed to affirming the interrelatedness, interdependence and indivisibility of human rights. However, the co-option of human rights by both state and non-state authority structures for parochial ideological and propagandist purposes did not cease with the end of the Cold War. International discourses on the right to development, for instance have continues to be underscored by similar manipulation of rights language to serve the political and economic agendas of states, ruling regimes and other non-governmental authority structures. The ideological fault lines may be less rigid than they were during the Cold War, but the language of human rights continues to be appropriated and invoked in ways that sell it short.

We must therefore continue to seriously consider the morally troubling outcomes that arise when human rights is co-opted by authority structures in ways that serve more to enhance their power than to alleviate human suffering. As we celebrate the many progressive developments that have been brought about by the post Second World War human rights movement, we must also pay attention to how the misuse of human rights can undermine its claims to universalism, inalienability and normative objectivity.

Whose “Human Rights” Agenda?

2/21/2010 04:40:00 PM ,

First published in Portuguese in 1968 Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains as relevant today as it was four decades ago. Written within the same Marxist intellectual traditions as Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the appeal of this book for me goes beyond its ideological message. In this classic which has now been translated into several languages, Freire, a Brazilian educator critiques what he called the “banking concept of education”, in which the student is viewed as an empty account to be field in by the teacher. He emphasizes the need for education that is self reflective and relevant to the intellectual and material empowerment of the disempowered and marginalized. In reading Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I am reminded of my high school teacher, Mr Onyema, who, when asked to define education stated: “Your education is what remains with you when all you learnt in school must have been forgotten.”

Book of the Week - Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed

2/21/2010 04:08:00 PM
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