Invention of Human Rights

• The conventional concept of "human" in the Universal Declaration of 1948 may not be universally accepted, potentially excluding a significant portion of the global population.

The Problem

• Equality at birth is undermined by unequal life experiences.
• Classification and ranking were created instead of representing an existing world.

Invention of Human Rights

• The concepts of "man" and "human," along with "rights," were created by European Renaissance humanists.
• These concepts emerged from Western Christians' internal conflicts with Islam and external interactions.
• Forced Renaissance humanists to reevaluate their epistEMIC premises when the New World emerged with new people.
• Indigenous intellecutals in Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu, and enslaved Africans in the New World were also required to make sense of a new history.

Concept

• The concepts of "man" and "human" were invented by 15th and 16th century European humanists.

Purposes

• Humanists could detach themselves from Church control.
• They could distinguish themselves from groups perceived as threats: like Saracens, Easterners, pagans, etc.
• Humanists who identified as Westerners defined the scope of universal meaning.
• Easterners were defined as those to whom universal meaning was denied
• Pagan definition relied on Christianity as the most sophisticated reference.
• Those labelled as pagan, heathen and Saracen did not identify as such

Western Christianity

• Western Christians and Renaissance humanists told a regional, provincial story, which then became naturalized as the designated entity.
• Inhabiting the Latin and Western vernacular cosmology shows its discontinuity due to the emergence of the New World
• Europeans repeated their practices with undesirable neighbors on populations in the New World.
• Columbus's belief guided by Marco Polo's narrative led him to name the people of Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu as "Indians"
• Enslaved Africans were baptized "Blacks", losing millenial identities to memories of Europeans tracing back to Greece and Rome.
• Being Western Christian meant having "dominium" over enunciation, believing whatever was named through Greco-Latin principles was the reality.
• 16th century historiography stated history is based on word and things, assumption analyzed by Michel Foucault
• Humanists felt authorized to speak for man and the human under the warrant of religious/epistemological thought
• Greek philosophy met Biblical narratives brought together by Thomas Aquinas (1224-1275).
• While Western Christians demonized differences, Muslims and others continued their lives similarly in different regions
• Communities in Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu since the 16th century were unable to keep on living as they did before
• Enslaved Africans rebuilt overcoming the differences of their original Kingdom in America.
• It was violence from Western Christians from Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and England who growing power was based on the claim to be the one God and its representatives.
• Western Christians were at the top with Saracens, Heathens, Pagans, Indians and Blacks below
• There belief relied on absolute possession and control of knowledge denying them from people classified outside and below.
• Man and the category of man came with the privilege of being under the framework of Western Christians.
• If being Christian was the ultimate point of reference of civility then being man was the ultimate point of reference of beauty, morality and knowledge for humanist
• Man and humanitas became the frame of reference allowing the enunciator inscribed in Greco-Latin thoughts to determine who belonged.
• The humanist spoke for the human during the European Renaissance.

European Renaissance

• During the European Renaissance the question of rights was not really addressed
• The issue was one of divine and natural law.
• The modern/colonial world deals with rights questions appropriately, and not of ancient Rome, and even less ancient Greece.
• Modern colonialism, imperial/colonial expansion of the Western world inaugurated the question of rights.
• The actor embodying the Western ideal of being Christian, man, and human speaks for the human from the 16th century to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• "Human" in human rights is an invention of Western imperial knowledge.
• The Western knowledge is based on Greek and Latin categories controlling the concept of human.
• To dispute one can either bend or accept Western knowledge, or engage in epistemic disobedience which involves denouncing the provincialism of the universal and adopting a collective, differential assumption.

Dispute

• It can dispute the imperial definition of humanity
• Secondly, building a society in which the human is not defined while rhetorically affirming equality.
• Prevent classification and ranking in society construction to avoid justifying domination.
• Avoid providing a new truth.
• The option to de-colonize: move away from imperial consequences of a standard of human, humanity, and the related ideal of civilization.
• Place yourself in the space that imperial discourse gave to lesser humans arguing for justice and equality from the perspective of those who lost their equality.
• Rights emerged in modern/colonial world building: a concept responding to imperial necessity.
• Shows that human rights today is an imperial tool that also creates a site to fight injustices.

Humanitarian Interventions

• Enters the vocabulary, and shows the forgotten history of the human and rights.
• The question of rights in the first stage was linked to peoples or nations.
• Theological and legal theorists at the University of Salamanca began to address questions prompted by the "apparition"
• Solve the issue of ius gentium, or rights of peoples or of nations with traditional issues of natural, divine, and human law.
• The novelty within the same classical European tradition, is the discontinuity, the moment when the Western genealogy were attempting, dislocated by new people
• Vitoria had to dea with papal and monarch authority, questioning the Pope and asking to split the New World between the Spaniards, Portuguese and Emperor
• Vitoria believes unbelief does not cancel natural law-property ownership and dominion being based on it
• The Indians do not believe, but based on natural law they should be able to have property rights like the Spaniards however the idea missed the Indians viewpoint

Indians

• Vitoria assumed Aztecs and Incas had the same "avarice" toward property was not in the Indians interest
• Vitoria did not think about how New World was being organized
• Therefore Spaniard property that they didn't concieve can be dispossessed
• Indians having property rights required a way to legitimize the appropriation of Indian properties.
• Two positions among Spanish men of letters about Indians: irrational barbarians vs. for Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria who were rational in their own way
• Vitoria managed to ariticlate the legal colonial difference with his control over knowledge, his assumptiosn and belief that whatever questins the Spaniards had reflected the Indians
• Racial justification is just another way of asking "Who speaks for the humans?".
• Classified races exist only in Western theology, philosophy, and science
• As existing racial classification presupposes a ranking based on their approximation to principles of knowledge, rationality, form of life, socioeconomic organization, body, posture, walking, dance, etc.
• Theology overarched knowledge in Europe and the New World during the 16th and 17th centuries but never in China, Ottoman, Mughal or Safavid empires.
• Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui explored some issues on international law and colonialism
• The paradoxes of decolonization is the rights sanctioned were accorded to the colonized
• Second paradox are the rules and procedures were controlled by the former colonial power to effect a specific outcome
• One line starts from the colonial revolution of 16th ceuntry-the decolonial revolution of 20th century with India
• Hugo Grotius shows paradox with the two cases relating to complementary modernity/coloniality.
• Paradox between the salvation, happiness, modernity and the appropriation of natural resouces

Second Moment

• The Glorious Revolution in England and the American/French Revolutions
• The difference between in Spain and Grotius in Holland, international law meant inter-Europe.
• Man and human became more identified with being secular bourgeois than with being Christian by the Seventeen century
• Nations replaced the idea of gentium when "citizen" created the need of "foreigner" as “exterior humans,”
• Enlightenment was adapted in colonies because the Indians, Europe didnt have the "foreigner" problem to face.
• In South America-colonies independence was in the hands of white men
• The vision of man and humanity with France, Germany, and England in the 18th century was adopted across America.
• And it was constitutive of the model of man and humanity when England and France started expanding to Asia and Africa.
• This view reappeared with the Declaration of Human Rights which immigrants are sub human since colonial categories are being recast
• ""Human" in the Universal Declaration was redefined with the changing world order and imperial leadership.
• It returns to Vitoria and Grotius as the problem was twofold: mainly between the the Thirty Years Religious War
• Vitoria didnt label his discussing "universal declaration of rights and international law" instead defined the human by profiling the colonial difference, epistEMIC and ontological.
• "Human" idea in declaration given; had been profiled in the Renaissance and rehearsed
• Parralel to the Declaration, reclassification of the planet was categorized as First, Second and Third World.
• the 70s where all made themselves heard with a new category invented "Fourth World"
• The First World appears as an objective category
• Political scientists and economists still repeat the logic during the Renaissance

Rest of Chapter

• The First World was humanity excellence where Christianity and Liberalism set the ideological stage.
• Since the Declaration of Human Rights was universal, the entire population had right to have rights.
• But it was a stating point for equality
• It was expected human rights could be violated only in anthropos land.
• "indigenous rights" and difference are on the assumption from universal or White Euro-American rights.
• When Cold War ended, human rights associated to 2nd development wave with project
• As growing neoliberal doctrine, the since Reagan/Thatcher, NGOs proliferated at economic level
• Washington believed conquering the soul of the Indians by conversion is the same as underdeveloped countiries and people
• NGOs exist under the Western created United Nations, to take care of wrongs by Washington Consensus.
• As NGOs operate civil society repairing damage by the Washington Consensus, the political society is the athropos in arms and thoughts.
• The essay is located in the athropos as knowledge and being entrapped by the imperial ideas
• A call and a process to decolonization

De-colonial

• The concept and Western succes, to control and manage all the world allows today to march next too and combat the civil society-the Western control.
• A de-colonial project that can be done against the definition of THE point
• Such a project offers 3: ideas, concepts of rights, and a polycentric world.
• Political projects are emerging all countries.