W8

Instructions
 
Once you have read the Hajjar chapter and the UDHR, please complete this eResponse by writing concise but thorough answers to all of the following questions.
You must include page numbers in each question–your score will depend on it. I do not require any specific citation format. Just include (author last name, page number) at the end of the relevant sentences. Please note that you must cite when you draw any ideas from the text, whether or not you explicitly quote it. And you must draw your ideas from the text because that is the assignment.
Please be sure that if and when you use a direct quotation from the reading, you also explain what that quotation means in your own words.
 
Questions (number your answers)

1. What is the point Khoja-Moolji is making about “the human” and human rights? Does this connect to the Mutua reading?
2. Khoja-Moolji is looking at human rights in practice in a particular arena. What is the evidence she considers in making her argument?
3. What is pluriversality? What is the specific intervention or change a pluriversal approach to human rights would make if based on the case study the author presents?
4. Please define the following “types” of human rights workers that the authors discuss. What do Hoover and De Heredia mean by each of these terms?

• Philosophers
• Activists
• Radicals

 
Reply to a classmate
When you have finished posting your numbered answers, please read through and comment on someone else’s post, as well. Your comment should be substantive. If you agree or disagree with their post, explain why with reference to specifics. If you learned something from their post, identify what that is.
 

1. What is the point Khoja-Moolji is making about “the human” and human rights? Does this connect to the Mutua reading?
   • Khoja-Moolji makes the argument that oftentimes human rights tends to include language that still upholds ‘us’ and ‘them’ narratives. In the reading, the author points out that transnational feminists and postcolonial scholars are the ones who have taken the biggest steps in really addressing the discourse and discriminatory language that does the opposite of what human rights stands for. For example, these feminists and scholars “direct attention toward the kinds of subjects and objects that are produced in and through it, as well as its function in naming and consolidating distinctions between the human and the subhuman, the free and the oppressed, the secular and the religious, the developed and the undeveloped” (3). It is important to note that this is transnational feminists, as Western feminism and scholars often uphold oppressions of cultural Others. Khoja-Moolji uses Muslim culture as an example of how this plays out and the importance of good development which focuses on empowering women, working 1:1 with their communities, uplifting their voices, and helping them achieve the goals they desire rather than Us going in and doing what we think needs to happen. I would say yes, this reading does connect to Matua’s because it is along the same lines of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ or human vs subhuman. It is about avoiding looking at people, particularly women, as victims and needing to go in and save them.
2. Khoja-Moolji is looking at human rights in practice in a particular arena. What is the evidence she considers in making her argument?
   • Khoja-Moolji uses young girls in Pakistan to provide evidence of her argument. Here she discusses how we need to be wary about how we approach issues taking place in other states and cultures. Particularly in how we address what is happening in Third World countries with women. In such, the author proposes that ‘decolonization and plurversalizing human rights’ as a potential solution (2). Similar to what I was saying above, this looks like empowering women and girls, uplifting their voices, helping them achieve their needs and goals by providing them beneficial resources, working to bring awareness, not viewing them as victims, and pushing for autonomy. Human rights language needs to be careful how they discuss various cultures and how they plan to ‘attack’ certain issues because they can come off as “not intelligible as enactments of empowerment within present discursive frames of human rights” (15).
3. What is pluriversality? What is the specific intervention or change a pluriversal approach to human rights would make if based on the case study the author presents?
   • From what I understand, pluriversality is a theory that aligns with decolonization and it pushes against Western ideologies and universality within human rights discourse. One example of this, the author says, “it is critical to contest the hegemonic terms in and through which societies make sense of their present, to recognize their Eurocentric origins and, simultaneously, to attempt a retrieval of indigenous concepts to pluralize knowledge fields” (16). What they are saying is that in order to approach situations taking place in other cultures, this means we have to recognize our own eurocentrism and universalism, and push against it while raising the uniqueness of other cultures and uplifting them through engaging with their culture, not colonizing it.
4. Please define the following “types” of human rights workers that the authors discuss. What do Hoover and De Heredia mean by each of these terms?

1. 1. Philosophers
      • The philosopher, or the study of philosophy, as stated by the authors, “is as much a result of how human rights are understood as it is about their privileged status in world politics (7). What we can conclude from this is that the philosopher in terms of human rights, although highly educated and well-versed in the subject, “still struggle to legitimate human rights because the truth of rights remains uncertain, and to challenge the truth of universal rights–claims puts the political order it sustains into question” (7). Similar to a previous reading, the morality and legality of something can look a lot different on paper than it does in action, and human rights remains fairly vague.
   2. Activists
      • According to the author, activists believe “the cause of human rights is best served by working to ensure that rights are respected, without reflecting too much on abstract problems that might impair one’s ability to act” (5). The issue that the author raises is that activists can only do so much, and because of the varying levels of activism, there can be a disconnect in communication between the philosophers and the activists. Activists are quick in action and if not careful, can fall into eurocentric and universalist arguments that go against what they mean to be fighting for, especially when it comes to transnational activism.
   3. Radicals
      • The radicals, or “individuals and groups that reconstruct both the practice and idea of human rights in light of their own experience and pursue a surprising variety of ends,” critique and expose human rights issues (6). In such, this means taking different approaches to human rights issues that are much more extreme, sudden, and often done with little regard for the cultural relativism of transnational human rights than activists and philosophers.