Abstract
This Chapter is a concluding one with three main points. The first one is a recapitulation of the work done up to this stage, tracing the elaboration of the theoretical challenge in the second chapter, where it is shown that imperialist ideology refers to the civilizing mission with its racist prejudices that was put forward to justify the formal colonial imperialism . The third chapter followed the idea of humanitarian intervention from the just war theory to the recent concept of Responsibility to Protect in order to see how founded is the claim that humanitarian intervention is a neocolonialism . The fourth and fifth chapters tried to respond to these criticisms from Rawls’s and Habermas’s accounts of human rights, but they were not satisfying. Hence Chap. 6 elaborated a multilevel conception of human rights that proved to offer a better way to approach these challenges. The other two points revisit old questions related to human rights, namely, the issue of relativism and the quest for human rights universality . On both subjects, the multilayer conception of human rights opens another path to address these issues, especially stressing that, although important, they are not prerequisite conditions for human rights effectiveness.
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Notes
- 1.
In other writings, Donnelly rather talks about relative universality, universality that integrates some relativity in its inception. (Donnelly 2013: chap. 6).
- 2.
Their extension “is of the order, not of the truth, but of the recourse” (The translation is mine).
- 3.
I thank one of the reviewers for raising this point.
- 4.
Talking about universality of human rights, Joseph Yacoub argues that it is embodied in the emancipatory potential of human rights. As he puts it “cette phrase est révolutionnaire, car elle permet à tout un chacun de se mettre debout. Il suffit de demander aux peuples opprimés, aux exclus et les Intouchables d’Inde ce qu’Ils en pensent.” (This sentence is revolutionary, because it allows everybody to stand up. Suffice to ask the oppressed peoples, the excluded and Untouchable of India what they think of it [translation is mine]). (Yacoub 2012: 153).
- 5.
In his own words, he says, «cette fonction négative de la notion… rejoint la fonction la plus générale qui fait, à mes yeux, la vocation de l’universel: celle de rouvrir une brèche dans toute totalité clôturante, satisfaite, et d’y relancer l’aspiration.»
- 6.
I thank the reviewer who suggested to include here a paragraph about the lady mentioned in the beginning.
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Ingiyimbere, F. (2017). Conclusion: Revisiting Old Questions. In: Domesticating Human Rights. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57621-3_7
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