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Political Theory
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Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy, and Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization

Jean L. Cohen

Columbia University, New York

The traditional conception construes human rights as moral rights all people have due to some basic feature or interests deemed intrinsically valuable. This comported well with the revival of the discourse of human rights in the wake of atrocities committed during WWII. It served as a useful referent for local struggles against foreign rule and domestic dictatorship in the 1980s. Since 1989, human rights discourse acquired a new function: the justification of sanctions, military invasions, and transformative occupation administrations by outsiders, framed as enforcement of international law against violators. The traditional conception doesn't fit this new function, hence the efforts to counter-pose a "political" to the "traditional" approach. This essay analyzes two recent versions of the political conception, and argues for a third. The thesis is that sovereign equality and human rights are normative principles of our dualist international system and both are needed to construct a more just version of that system.

Key Words: human rights • sovereignty • membership • dualism

This version was published on August 1, 2008

Political Theory, Vol. 36, No. 4, 578-606 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0090591708317901
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