Boaventura De Sousa Santos

If God Were a Human Rights Activist

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Human rights must be profoundly reconstructed, if not reinvented, if they are to confront successfully the challenges posed by the rise of political theologies and their rival conceptions of human dignity.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 152
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. April 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 151mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 244g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795005
• ISBN-10: 0804795002
• Artikelnr.: 41748742

Autorenporträt

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, and Chinese.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
2The globalization of political theologies
chapter abstract
Claiming religion as a constitutive element of public life is a phenomenon
that has been increasingly gaining worldwide relevance in the past few
decades. It challenges secularism, the paradigm of religion and state
relations which is at the core of western-centric modernity and has spread
across the globe through colonialism and globalization. According to this
paradigm, Christian values are recognized as "universal" but institutional
Christianity activism is relegated to the private sphere. This resolution
of the "religious question" is being challenged in many parts of the world,
the western world included, by political theologies for which the
distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere is not valid.
This chapter distinguishes different types of theology (pluralist and
fundamentalist; progressive and traditionalist) showing that the relations
among political theologies, forms of globalization, secularism and human
rights are not univocal or monolithic.
3The case of Islamic fundamentalism
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the globalization of some forms of Islamic political
theology commonly designated as Islamic fundamentalism. This is a minefield
in which claims of conceptual difficulty are often mixed with implicit or
even explicit assumptions about real or imagined political threats. It is
thus imperative to counter the monolithic conceptions of Islam prevalent in
the West today. Even when militantly anti-Western, the different Islamic
political theologies differ as to what it means to be anti-Western, as the
rejection of Western modernity as a cultural imperial project may or may
not involve the rejection of global capitalism. This chapter gives special
attention to the relations between Islam, and particularly fundamentalist
Islam, on the one hand, and women's rights and the struggle against sexual
discrimination, on the other.
4The case of Christian fundamentalism
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the globalization of some forms of Christian
political theology commonly designated as Christian fundamentalism,
especially in its Protestant strain. The expansion of Christian
fundamentalist movements throughout the world, whether by means of
proselytizing missions or through electronic resources, has significant
political impact. It tends to strengthen political conservatism, if not far
right politics. While liberation theologies tend to valorize grassroots,
popular culture, Christian fundamentalism is becoming a mass culture
phenomenon, mixing the alien and the familiar, the ancestral and the
hypermodern, as if they were homogeneous components of the same religious
artifact. Although a fierce defender of global capitalism, it rejects the
Western society for having "liberalized" the family, education, sexual and
reproductive rights, which they consider a betrayal of Christian values.
5Human rights in the contact zones with political theologies
chapter abstract
Political theologies promote conceptions of human dignity, social
regulation and social transformation that often contradict those
conventionally associated with human rights. New contact zones among rival
conceptions are thereby generated and, with them, new forms of political,
cultural, and ideological turbulence. This chapter analyzes the following
dimensions and manifestations of such turbulence: the turbulence among
rival principles; the turbulence between roots and options; and the
turbulence between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the
secular, the transcendent and the immanent. This analysis sheds new light
on the limits of conventional human rights politics on a global scale and
calls for a deep reconstruction, or even reinvention, of human rights, if
they are to provide credible answers to the strong questions raised by
global injustice.
6Toward a post-secularist conception of human rights: counter-hegemonic
human rights and progressive theologies
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the possibilities for mutually enriching
interactions between counter-hegemonic conceptions and practices of human
rights and liberation theologies. Since the 1960s, pluralist, progressive
theologies and community-based religious practices have emerged, for which
God seems to be revealed in unjust human suffering, in the life experiences
of all the victims of domination, oppression, and discrimination. As a
consequence, to bear witness to this God means to denounce such suffering
and to struggle against it. If both revelation and redemption take place in
this world, a contact zone is thereby generated with the ideals of social
and political liberation underlying the utopia that another more just and
free world is possible. One of the paths towards counter-hegemonic human
rights lies in the possibility of connecting the return of God to a
trans-modern, concrete insurgent humanism.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
This book identifies the major challenges that the rise of political
theologies pose to human rights with the objective of exploring the
possibility of transforming human rights into a much stronger instrument of
emancipatory politics in an unjust, globalized, but resiliently
intercultural world. In the background of the arguments developed in this
book is the concrete experience of the World Social Forum in which converge
activists in social struggles for socio-economic, historical, sexual,
racial, cultural, and postcolonial justice who base their activism and
their claims on Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous
religious beliefs and spiritualities. They represent a political
inter-subjectivity that seems to have deserted conventional secular
critical thinking and political action: the combination of creative
effervescence and intense and passionate energy, on one side, with a
pluralistic, open-ended, non-violent and yet radical conception of
struggle, on the other.
1Human Rights: a fragile hegemony
chapter abstract
This chapter briefly traces the genealogy of the western-centric human
rights conception. Nowadays, there seems to be no question about the global
hegemony of human rights as a discourse of human dignity. Yet, a large
majority of the world's inhabitants are not the subjects of human rights,
but rather objects of human rights discourses. Thus the question is: are
human rights helping the struggles of the excluded, the exploited, and the
discriminated against, or, on the contrary, making these struggles more
difficult? The hegemony enjoyed by human rights is commonly viewed as the
product of an historic linear trajectory towards their consecration as the
ruling principle of a just society. The chapter challenges this view by
identifying four illusions underlying it: teleology, triumphalism,
decontextualization, and monolithism. Being widely shared, such illusions
constitute the common sense of conventional human rights.