1. 1
A Poison Apple?
Deconstructing the Westernliberal human rights framework, from its
normative, reason-giving core.
Daniel Leslie Mpho Duke
Student ID: 552715
Length of Thesis: 15,335
Supervised By: Kalissa Alexeyeff
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Development and Gender Studies
In the field of Gender and Development
School of Social and Political Science
Faculty of Arts
The University of Melbourne
October 2015

2. 2
School of Social and Political Sciences
THESIS DECLARATION
STUDENT
I hereby declare that this thesis comprises my own original work
and does not exceed 12,000 words (Master of Criminology, Master
of InternationalRelations, Master of Public Policy & Management,
Master of SocialPolicy) or 15,000 words (Honours & Postgraduate
Diploma in Criminology, Politics& InternationalStudies, Sociology,
Anthropology & Social Theory, Development Studies, Master of
Development Studies) exclusive of footnotes, bibliography and
appendices.
______________________________________________
(Student’ssignature)
SUPERVISOR
I hereby declarethat I have approved this thesisfor submission.
______________________________________________
(Supervisor’ssignature)

3. 3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS- 4
INTRODUCTION- 6
PART 1 – UNDERMINING LOCALISED
POLITICAL EFFECTIVENESS
NEW UNIVERSALISMS - 13
FUSING OPPOSING PRINCIPLES -19
IMPOSING THE LIBERAL PARADIGM - 26
PART 2 – POISONING THE APPLE
AMERICAN IMPERIAL POWER - 34
OBJECTIFYING HUMAN RIGHTS - 39
THE UN-POISONABLE CORE - 44
CONCLUSION - 49
BIBLIOGRAPHY - 52

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Acknowledgements
For her guidance, support and encouragement a very large thank you to my supervisor
Kalissa Alexeyeff. No doubt this wouldn’t be in the shape it is without her; and the many
conversations we’ve had and the assistance she has provided, have helped form and refine
my understandings. I have learnt a great deal through her.
My brother George Duke has also been integral to my completion of this thesis and has
provided critical insight and analysis at important junctures throughout the process,
especially in getting a handle on the philosophical aspects of my argument. I really appreciate
the time he has invested in supporting me.
I’d also like to thank my parents Alexa and John, from whom their constant love and
support has been immeasurable. I also really appreciate the final editing you have assisted
with.
Finally, thank you to all 9 seasons of Seinfeld, which have provided me with a show about
nothing, to relax to, while I’ve tried to write something of substance.

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Abstract
Human rights have become significantly globalised political values. As standards animated
from a normative core, they have been institutionalised and legalised to fit within a Western
liberal paradigm. This has distorted their underlying normativity as reason-giving standards
and rendered the Western liberal human rights framework vulnerable to serious questions
surrounding its legitimacy, especially in the non-Western world. Increasing alignment
between human rights, capital, and state power, has further distorted this underlying
normativity, which animates any human rights culture and this thesis contends that any
development practice predicated on this poisoned framework cannot adequately defend itself
from allegations of neocolonialism and imperialism. In pressing for a true animation of the
normative, reason-giving standards at their core, this thesis suggests that the global human
rights regime and development practice predicated on it, have lost sight of the normative,
reason-giving or indeed, right and wrong, in a self-perpetuating pursuit of Western utopian
ideals.

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INTRODUCTION
The apple is a rich symbol in Western thought. It has come to symbolise love, evil,
knowledge and desire across Western cultural, social and religious discourse. The most
preeminent, is its association with the Roman goddess of love, Venus (Littlewood
1968; Daly & Rengel 2009, 14) and as the forbidden fruit eaten by Eve in the book of
Genesis. The Latin word ‘malum’ can also refer to both apple and evil (Sill 2011, 54).
This dichotomous symbolism of the apple as both love and evil seems an apt analogy
to start a critical analysis of human rights. For in recent times, human rights have
become significantly globalised political values, which have come to symbolise a
Western utopia of political, legal and moral authority through which the abating of
unnecessary suffering may finally be realised (Wilson 1997; Moyn 2010). This is
however problematic, as we may find the apple tempting, but from the point of
departure with its un-poisonable core, this Western liberal utopia is ultimately rotten.
Certainly the promise of the global human rights regime for those with little or
no recourse in halting domination and oppression is more tangible than ever. However,
as more and more linkages between sites of domination and oppression and the global
human rights regime are realised, there also appears far less scope for rights claims that
do not fit with the global human rights regime and its projection of the Western liberal
paradigm. As such, local rights claims are being poisoned by the very framework and
infrastructure that purports to be their saviour. These human rights claims, animated in
such a way as to not immediately align with the Western liberal paradigm are as such,
then extracted from their “normative, reason-giving core”, to borrow a concept
developed by John Tasioulas (2010; 2011; 2012; 2013). Tasioulas’ phrase describes a
key concept, or indeed a basic normative idea in which we pre-reflexively identify as
the practice and discourse of human rights. This animation of the ‘normative core’ is
then, once extracted, poisoned by a global Western infrastructure intent on the
homogenisation of that which doesn’t align with the liberal paradigm of market driven
political democracies and hierarchies of power. While both local rights claims and
Western liberal rights claims embed and set out from this same normative core,
contemporary Western manifestations of human rights culture involves forms of
political and economic domination that distort this underlying core. As a basic

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principle and standard, the Western liberal rights discourse claims a legitimate
universality, however, it is not in fact universal; it is rather a distortion of an
underlying normativity at the core of any human rights culture.
As I contend in this thesis, the global human rights regime has become a poison
apple. This regime or culture is no longer a true animation or indeed representative of
what Tasioulas identifies as the “the nature, grounds and practical significance of
human rights that both jibes with that culture and presents human rights as a defensible
species of reason-giving standards, one that earns a place in our general repertoire of
normative considerations” (Tasioulas 2011, 17-18). If we position the contemporary
global human rights regime and culture as the flesh around this normative reason-
giving core, it is possible to ascertain how the apple is now poisoned with an alignment
with liberal power, capital and democracy, which holds that these values are universal.
Accordingly, this vast international legal, development and political superstructure that
is the global human rights regime, is no longer fit for purpose. As Stephen Hopgood
(2013, 2) articulates: “once one strips away its self-justification – that it is legitimated
by unmet needs, that is a product of natural justice codified in positive law – we see it
is and was always a partial, ideological answer to the question of how to handle the
crisis of authority brought on by modernity”. However, while the flesh may now be
poisoned, I will argue, through an appeal to Tasioulas’ claim of an underlying
normativity, that the core at the centre, or that, which animates any conceptual
framework or manifestation of human rights, is un-poisonable. This normative, reason-
giving core is encapsulated in the language of identity, entitlement and solidarity,
which can range from any conception or manifestations of ‘justice’, ‘fairness’, ‘civil
liberties’ and ‘peace’, to ‘decency’, ‘love’, ‘equality’, ‘dignity’ and ‘grace’. These
reason-giving standards have been around for millennia, in a myriad of different
manifestations that all stem from our inherently shared humanness and instinct to
determine between right and wrong. So understood, these normative, reason-giving
standards of a certain kind, “need be neither widely-credited nor actually embodied in
any social practice or legal institution”, but should be understood as that which
animates any ‘human rights culture’ (Tasioulas 2011, 17). Therefore, any
contemporary framework of human rights is dependent on both the conceptual
coherence of these standards as well as the normative force provided through their
impartial animation, rather than simply an institutionalisation of these standards as

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benchmarks for political legitimacy or indeed development practice (Tasioulas 2009;
2013).1
This poisoned framework of human rights has problematic consequences for
the development enterprise, which has since the early 1990s, legitimised much of its
practice on a utilisation of the standards set by the global human rights regime. From
this time there appeared a shift in the development enterprise towards incorporating ‘a
rights based approach to development’ (Uvin 2002; 2007). This shift in paradigm
coincided with what Stephen Hopgood (2013) argues, was the beginning of a peak in
the global saliency for human rights, understood as human rights underpinned by the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This global saliency was evidenced
by the human rights rhetoric and language in United Nation (UN) reports, in the
foreign policy of the United States (US) and its allies, as well as in the language of
government and non-government organisations (NGOs), and increasingly in a legal
infrastructure aimed at administering global justice. This shift in paradigm was not an
accident. By this time, human rights had become another mechanism through which
Western global institutions and powerful states could utilise to help shape the world
into a liberal, democratic and market oriented paradigm. Even more pragmatically, the
political appeal of human rights discourse in the development sector especially, came
with its own moral authority that has sheltered the development enterprise from
criticism surrounding its legitimacy; a moral authority that was so difficult to find in
the previous paradigm of structural adjustment. However, replacing structural
adjustment with human rights has done nothing to address issues of imperialism and
neo-colonialism assisted by the liberal paradigm dominant in the development sector
for some time now, other than firm up the moral high ground on which the discourse
so desperately depends. The development enterprise therefore seems unable to function
outside the confines of the self-perpetuating liberal paradigm (Escobar 2000; 2007;
2011; Shiva 2005). Deconstructing this reliance is one of the tasks of this thesis.
1 There have been numerous examples of attempts to universalise and institutionalise these normative
standards as benchmarks. For example, Martha Nussbaum’s (2000; 2011) ten capabilities can be
viewed as one animation of these normative reason-giving standards, which are aimed at setting
institutionalised benchmarks for development practice. Amartya Sen (2005) however, critiques this
institutionalisation arguing that there is a difficulty in adequately defining lists of capabilities and
giving them weight, without first considering their specific political and social context.

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In this thesis I will argue that it is the liberal animations of human rights
utilised by the development enterprise, backed up by the global superstructures of the
UN, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which are poisoned
animations of an un-poisonable normative core. This liberal animation is largely
foreign to the places in which the vast majority of development practice is being
carried out. The poison had begun to set into the broader Western human rights
framework in the 1970s, and had by the 1990s, almost completely infiltrated the
discourse, and by extension, development practice predicated on this framework.
Where the conditionality of structural adjustment into the liberal paradigm through the
1980s had failed, human rights and rights based development, predicated on an
alignment with the liberal paradigm, was touted as the saviour. All of this was backed
up by UN documents such as the UDHR and the International Covenants on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR) and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
To illustrate this point, consider the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development’s (IBRD) 1998 report titled: Development and Human Rights: The Role
of the World Bank (p3), which states: “by helping to fight corruption, improve
transparency and accountability in governance, strengthen judicial systems, and
modernize financial sectors, the Bank contributes to building environments in which
people are better able to pursue a broader range of human rights”. In other words, this
report suggests that only through a liberal paradigm can development problems be
solved, and only then may these areas realise the rights they were supposedly lacking.
However, it seems that these ‘broader range’ of rights only really make sense in places
that are predominately non-Western and non-liberal, once a liberal paradigm is
imposed. This restriction of self-determination is problematic, especially for global
development practice now claiming to be working under the principles of effectively
engaging and understanding local structures and cultural systems (Brett 2000). The
necessitating of the alignment of these local structures and cultural systems with the
structures and systems of the liberal paradigm needs radical reassessment. Certainly,
the use of the global human rights regime to frame this institutionalisation of local
cultural systems and structures into the liberal paradigm, has about as limited life span
as structural adjustment. However, the power, saliency and moral complexity of the
‘ethical brand’ that is human rights, may prove to be a mirage that prevents us from
realising its failings for the development enterprise, as we have come to with structural

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adjustment. This is not to say that rights aren’t integral to the people whom are
experiencing any form of oppression, discrimination or domination – they are.
However, a development paradigm predicated on a Western, institutionalised and legal
framework of human rights will remain ineffectual, immoral and indeed neocolonial,
unless it sheds this poisoned framework and invests in truly localised animations of the
normative reason-giving standards, which animate any culture or manifestations of
human rights.
This may mean that development NGOs need to start to dismantle their alliance
and framework from the institutionalisation of the liberal paradigm and at least, in part,
focus on the global systematic power asymmetries, which lead to poverty, violence,
discrimination and indeed hierarchies of homogenisation, which debase peoples
identities (Ferguson 1998). Development practice may need to, at least in part, focus
on the broken world system, which has kept the majority of the people on the planet in
poverty since the end of the Second World War. As Thomas Pogge (2008, 3) asks:
“how can the severe poverty for half of humanity continue despite enormous economic
and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our
heavily dominant Western civilization”? Indeed, the development enterprise may need
to be somewhat turned on its head. Obviously there will always be a need for
humanitarian assistance, aimed at the easing of immense suffering, however, a
projection of development practice upward, with a focus on global power asymmetries,
would be a more true animation of the normative core, which presents human rights as
a truly defensible species of reason-giving standards.
In light of these issues, this thesis attempts a modest form of deconstruction of
the ‘masters tools’, by exploring the process in which the global human rights regime
has become a poisoned animation of the normative core, which is now in turn
poisoning development practice that is predicated on this framework. It will attempt to
show the ways in which this poison travels and is strengthened, by an unwavering
commitment to universalism, despite continued critical scholarship by feminists,
postmodern and postcolonial theorists, which deems this principle morally
indefensible. It will also explore the ways in which the development, political and legal
global superstructure continues to colonise the local, backed up by an increasingly
ineffectual UN system, which holds those states most in need to stringent

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conditionality. Arguing that this poison, coupled with a renewed focus on identifying
new universalisms, has, and will continue, to undermine the localised political
effectiveness of human rights claims. In part one I assess the key debate in human
rights discourse between universalism and relativism, drawing on key theorists from
either side of the debate. I contend that the binary that this dichotomy creates, has
cultivated a middle ground of arguments that look to fuse opposing principles from
either side of the debate. This however, I argue, really only aids the principle of
universalism and the search for so called ‘new universalisms’, that still fit within the
liberal paradigm. In part two, I assess which aspects of the liberal paradigm have
poisoned human rights, and in turn development practice, and trace their origins back
to the early 1970s. Before I then make a case for a true animation of the normative core
of any manifestations or conceptions of human rights, which I contend are un-
poisonable. Suggesting that the global human rights regime and development practice
predicated on it, have lost sight of the normative, reason-giving standards which
animate any culture of human rights, or indeed, right and wrong, in a self-perpetuating
pursuit of Western utopian ideals.

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PART 1 – UNDERMINING LOCALISED POLITICAL
EFFECTIVENESS
NEW UNIVERSALISMS
The debate between universalism and relativism within the discourse on human rights
continues to inform the way human rights are deployed and understood. However, with
the development of critiques of enlightenment thinking, which include postmodern,
poststructural and postcolonial arguments, it has been suggested that it is time to leave
behind this dichotomy for a more useful conceptual analysis (Rehbein 2015). In an age
where the ‘universal’ applicability and ownership of rights is often understood as a
basic principle and standard, these post-ism critiques have helped highlight the often
imperial and hegemonic political work the discourse, and indeed proponents of
universalism and its framework, can facilitate. Even a cursory glance at current
American foreign policy, which increasingly appeals to ‘universal’ values in the
pursuit of a global ideological war that openly continues to subvert international legal
norms, provides more than enough evidence of this imperial political work (Mutua
2002; Abu-Lughod 2013). However, despite attempting to traverse the
universal/relative polarity, some of these same critiques of enlightenment or
‘Eurocentric’ thinking, have also created unworkable impasses of their own. These
often-inevitable stalemates, which are as insurmountable as the original polarity,
believe the fundamental differences between proponents of relativism and universalism
can be bridged, at least partially. As my discussion of key theorists will attempt to
demonstrate, these arguments often resort to offering counterproductive, polarising and
antithetical dichotomies of their own, in order to bridge this gap. Even more
problematic, is that despite having emancipatory politics at their heart, these middle
ground arguments are actually in search of ‘new universalisms’, rather than moving the
human rights debate past this essentialised nomenclature.
In the first part of this thesis I argue, that arguments made to traverse the
original universal/relative dichotomy are still framed using an understanding of the

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world through a liberal, market driven paradigm, or the Eurocentric tradition, and as
such, are still open to the same criticisms levelled at more traditional proponents of
universalism. Rather than traversing the original binary, some of these middle ground
arguments are actually in search of what can be deemed a new universal. These
arguments are aimed at attributing rights claims to local communities in such a way
that they can then be easily aligned with the liberal, universal framework. By doing so,
they fail to properly distinguish between the animation of the normative standards in
which these claims have first been made, and those of the institutionalised universal
human rights framework. They also point to cross-cultural conversations and
understandings, which present these new universalisms as non-ethnocentric
positionings. However, this aligning of local rights claims with the liberal paradigm
through attribution rather than imposition, disguises the way in which the principle of
universalism inevitably homogenises these struggles into the more familiar language
and norms of global interstate relations (Anleu 1999; Charusheela 2009; Hopgood
2013). These new universalisms allow the poison to travel between the global and the
local more easily, opening up these sites of suffering and oppression to a global
development, political and legal infrastructure designed to allow the powerful more
control and more say in they way these rights claims are articulated and resolved
(Mutua 2002). As a result, they significantly undermine the localised political
effectiveness of the human rights discourse (Hopgood 2013).
Consequently, middle ground bridging arguments, which appear to promote
linkages between this Western culture and the non-Western world, have to an extent
(even if unintentional), obscured their underlying intent. Linda Zerilli (2009) terms
these middle ground arguments as ‘cases for a new universalism’, which she believes
are actually revived rationalism, in service of the old universalism (imperial
colonisation). Indeed, she argues, “if the old universalism simply identified the
universal with a form of progress that is Western, this new universalism denies its
origins in the West all the better to evade the criticisms that were made of its classic
form” (Zerilli 2009, 302). This critique of ‘new universalisms’ holds too, for middle
ground arguments, which often stipulate that local rights claims made using the
universal framework, are not simply neocolonial imposts, but are rather products of
their own imagining. However, “by attributing, rather than exporting these ideas or
norms to non-Western cultures.. (these middle ground arguments) seek to evade, be it

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intentionally or not, the established criticisms of ethnocentrism brought by feminists,
multicultural and, postcolonial theorists” (Zerilli 2009 302). What makes these new
universalisms possible in the first instance, however, is the conflation of the normative
reason-giving standards manifest in local contexts, with that of the Western human
rights culture of institutionalised legal and political norms and language. This
conflation is extremely problematic, both conceptually, and indeed, morally, and reeks
of the superiority complex that predicated colonialism in the first place. This conflation
also undermines localised attempts to realise their own animations of the normative
reason-giving standards at the core of human rights. In order to highlight the way in
which the normative reason-giving standards that animate any culture of human rights
are conflated with the institutionalised and legalised norms and language of the
universal framework, I will now turn my attention to one such middle ground
argument, in which Maila Stivens (2000) pursues these ‘new versions of
universalisms’.2
Stivens arguments in her article “Gender politics and the reimagining of human
rights in the Asia-Pacific” are a concerted effort to genuinely move the debate away
from the universal/relative polarity.3 She attempts to do so by highlighting both the
trajectory of the human rights debate, as well as looking at the ways in which claims to
rights are embedded in highly specific local contexts and struggles. Importantly, her
arguments are especially addressed within the context of continuing globalisation,
which highlights the shift away from addressing human rights simply through the
universal/relative dichotomy in the early 1990s, towards understanding processes of
globalisation as integral to their development. They are also based on an understanding
of this continuing globalisation as taking place through multiple and divergent
modernities, and on a determination that local human rights claims, within this context,
are not simply universalising imports from Western liberalism, nor are they simply
neo-colonial imposts. The importance of her work, as well as that of Anne-Marie
2 There are many examples of these arguments that are in pursuit of these ‘new universalisms’. See for
example: Pollis 1998; 2000; Hildson, Macintyre, Mackie & Stivens 2000; Nussbaum 2000; Benhabib
2002.
3 Stivens argument is an example of the type of arguments made in the volume Human Rights and
Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives by A-M Hildson, M. Macintyre, V. Mackie & M. Stivens
(2000). I look at her work in-depth as I find it to be both indicative of a broad field and also her
arguments are a sophisticated example of the use of transversal politics, which highlights feminist
engagements and reshapings of human rights and gender politics in all their different local versions.

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Hildson, Martha Macintyre and Vera Mackie (2000) in the same volume, in
highlighting the inherent masculinity within universalist notions of human rights, as
well as the pointed masculinism of the modernity/post-modernity and globalisation
debates, cannot be understated. Indeed, Stivens even asks: “why are we seeing a return
to an apparently universalising discourse of human rights, just when many feminist
intellectuals and activists alike had become acutely aware of the complexities of
women’s politics of difference” (Stivens 2000, p2). Her arguments focus on
highlighting the ways in which local struggles and movements have utilised the
universal human rights framework to bring about change and reconceptualisation
within their own communities. For example, she highlights the politicking over female
genital mutilation (FGM), itself a highly contested term, which has seen activists
around this issue resorting to a range of modernist notions of universal human rights as
an integral element in their arguments. She stipulates that these notions and arguments
represent modernity and progress as improvements on the regressive relics of feudal or
pre-capitalist traditional forces, and to collectivist, communitarian discourses, which
stress women’s place as equal members of society. These local movements, she argues,
have drawn upon the universal human rights framework in strengthening their claims
for justice, security and dignity (Stivens 2000, 3).
I have no issue with this understanding of the way in which rights claims in
local settings and contexts may have been strengthened and reconceptualised through
the utilisation of modernist notions of the universal human rights framework. Nor do I
dispute that there are indeed many examples of this taking place around the world,
enabling and facilitating real and positive outcomes for people in marginalised
communities, especially those of women and girls (Merry 2006; 2009; Goodale &
Merry 2007; Levitt & Merry 2011). However, Stivens’ argument neither properly
articulates the need to continually distinguish between the highly institutionalised
universalist framework and the local claims to the notions of the rights found in this
framework. By missing this distinction, her arguments fail to significantly address the
way that these claims, once they are inevitably streamlined into the global networks
and language of the international human rights framework, become institutionalised
and disciplined. This process begins, when local human rights claims and struggles are
colonised into hierarchies of influence and power, which are familiar to human rights
norms and language of the realm of global interstate relations and institutions, through

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the principle of universalism (Hopgood 2013, X). While Stivens’ argument may ignore
these issues, I suspect it is more to enable her to set out an alternative to the
universal/relative divide through what is termed ‘transversal politics’ (Yuval-Davis
1997; 1999), rather than a complete denial of the fact. However, in drawing on the
universal framework in strengthening their claims, these local rights are then more
easily aligned with the universal values mandated by the liberal framework and in the
process become the domain of this framework.
Arguments such as those of Stivens, are valiant attempts to divert the debate
away from the impasse generated by the top down principles of universalism or the
bottom up constraints of relativism. They are part of the middle ground bridging
arguments that this polarity generates. Indeed, the idea of ‘transversal politics’ and
dialogue that Stivens’ advocates for, is based on a renewed focus on identity and cause,
with the understanding that “all identity is constructed across difference” (Hall 1987,
65). This should be considered most important for the continued legitimacy of human
rights as a valuable localised political tool in affecting change; especially in relation to
maintaining awareness of the continuous historical changes around the world, and to
keep a perception of the boundaries between different groups and identities,
sufficiently flexible and open, so that exclusionary politics are not permitted. Of
course, issues of exclusion being one of the largest and most sustained arguments made
against the universality of human rights. Ultimately however, arguments like those of
Stivens’ still occupy the middle ground of the debate where attempts are made to fuse
opposing principles of either side of the universal/relative divide in pursuit of
transcending or bridging the impasse that this original polarity generates. Indeed, in
Stivens’ own words, her argument is an attempt to posit “new versions of
universalisms that transcend some of the old difficulties with difference” (Stivens
2000, 24). This, however, ignores the element of inevitable restructuring of these rights
claims into more familiar norms and language of the liberal paradigm, as the
unwavering commitment to the principle of universalism necessitates. Unfortunately,
in her pursuit to both posit new versions of universalisms and highlight the
transnational linkages between the universal framework and local conflicts and
struggles, this kind of argument is actually further facilitating the conflation of local
rights claims with those of the liberal paradigm as the same thing. In effect, further

17. 17
facilitating an imperial civilising mission started by the Europeans and now being
reformulated through the UN and American imperial power (Hopgood 2013).
Certainly the notion of human rights as understood by proponents of
universalism is one that is highly institutionalised and legalised. It is a framework of
protections mandated by the UN and backed up by Western, European and American
political power. When viewed this way, as part of the rights based approach to
development, it is a top down understanding and indeed, often an imposition of human
rights (Tsikata 2004; Reilly 2009). John Tasioulas (2011) points out, this
understanding of human rights is either a ‘belief system’ that is prevalent in certain
aspects of Western culture, or that human rights are to be understood in this way within
the context of a legal order, in which rights are prescribed to all under its jurisdiction.
But importantly, Tasioulas believes that human rights are conceptualised in another
way, which predates this belief system and legal order mandated and controlled by
Western culture. In this understanding of human rights, they are simply “normative, or
reason-giving, standards of a certain kind” (Tasioulas 2011, 17). The distinction, which
must be made here, is that this normative understanding of human rights, which
certainly predates any Western conceptualised culture of frameworks or
institutionalised rights, need not be specifically or even fundamentally embodied in
any legal institution, or indeed universalised social practice. Nor need it be widely
credited in international political and development practice. Furthermore, Tasioulas
acknowledges that even when human rights are construed normatively in this way,
there may still be a multiplicity of conceptual groundings that have a respectable
foothold in ordinary usage. However, he stipulates that this normative conception of
human rights should be understood as that which animates ‘human rights culture’ in all
its diverse conceptual manifestations, with many prominent conceptual understandings
of human rights “being profitably interpretable as modifications of it or otherwise
dependent upon it” (Tasioulas 2011, 17). Therefore, it is integral to understand human
rights as embodying a multiplicity of conceptual animations. There is not simply one
version, or animation of human rights, which can be attributed or prescribed as
universally applicable. In light of this, institutionalising and legalising human rights
through the language and norms of Western legal and political culture is tantamount to
ethnocentrism when imposing these standards on parts of the world that are distinctly
non-Western and non-liberal through the principle of universalism (Sajo 2013).

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FUSING OPPOSING PRINCIPLES
In order to traverse this original universal/relative binary and present so called ‘new
universalisms’, some of these post-ism critiques have developed a tendency to apply
similar methods that fuse opposing principles in order to escape the problems
associated with the original binary (for example Stivens 2000; Nussbaum 2000;
Benhabib 2002). The problems generated by the original universal/relative divide are
traversed in these critiques by conceding some relativism within the framework of
universalism or accepting some measure of universalism within a relativist perspective.
For example, this can either be through positing ‘new versions of universalisms’ that
traverse some of the problematic issues around cultural difference (Stivens 2000, 26),
or conversely; stipulating, “universal human rights, properly understood, leave
considerable space for national, regional, cultural particularity and other forms of
diversity and relativity” (Donnelly 2007, 281). While essentially both Stivens and
Donnelly mean the same thing, they are approaching the impasse generated, from
opposing sides of the original dichotomy, while still maintaining the language and
foundations of the liberal paradigm and indeed the original universal/relative divide. It
seems that in Stivens’ case there appears to be scope in the relativists framework for
some principles of universalism, while for Donnelly there appears to be some room for
relativist particularity within the universal framework. Thus, these resulting arguments
invariably allow certain concessions from the other side to stand, only so long as these
concessions can then be subsumed into the grounding principles of whichever side of
the argument one is positioned. On the relativist side, it is about finding certain
universal principles, which can be applied across cultural, religious and gendered
divides. For universalists like Donnelly, it is about conceding some, often second
order, relativism, in the principles on which the universal framework of human rights
stand, without significantly weakening the over arching principle of universalism.
While Stivens is situated within the debate through a feminist framework that
constantly works with the difficulties of difference and identity, on the other side of

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this middle ground sits explicit universalists such as Jack Donnelly. Donnelly has been
one of the leading proponents of universalism since the end of the Cold War, but has
more recently softened his position to include some second order relativity into his
theory of human rights. Therefore, his arguments sit in this middle ground, but arrive
from the opposite side of the binary to arguments like Stivens’. Indeed, Donnelly
(2007) points out that this middle ground between himself and feminists, post-
modernist and post-colonialists, has been developing since the end of the Cold War,
along with the rise of growing hegemony around the idea of human rights. He
stipulates that arguments such as those put forward by Stivens’ should be seen as more
‘anti-universalist’, rather than as a traditional cultural relativist argument. While I
agree that these arguments are certainly not cultural relativist in characterisation, in a
traditional sense, I would disagree with the title ‘anti-universalist’ and rather, I would
argue that they are actually focused on the positing of new universalisms, which
transcend some of the old difficulties with difference, rather than anti-universalist. In
Donnelly’s sense I think this is more a pointed attempt to categorise these arguments as
opposed to his own framework and grounding as a universalist. However, he stipulates
that these ‘anti-universalist’ arguments have come to prominence through the
development of postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial perspectives in the last
three decades (for example: Mutua 1996, 2002; Stivens 2000; Woodiwiss 2002; Gott
2002; Kennedy 2004) and now occupy the middle ground of the human rights debate.
He argues that although similar in some respects to earlier cultural relativist arguments,
in both motivation and substance, they are typically “based on a very different sort of
anti-foundationalist ontology and epistemology and tend to be specially addressed to
the context of globalization” (Donnelly 2007, 297). Indeed, these arguments have
definitely sought to both highlight and challenge the neoimperial and culturally
arrogant arguments of universalists as well as seek to draw attention to “the
civilizationally asymmetrical power relations embedded in the international discourse
(Woodiwiss 2002, 139).
However, while arguments like those of Stivens’ are concerned with positing
new universalisms, Donnelly argues for an understanding of human rights, which are
already universal in the first instance, and from which he articulates that properly
understood they are ‘relatively universal’. This form of universalism, he believes offers
the scope for important second order claims of relativism (Donnelly 2007). His

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argument rests on the idea that human rights are universally held by all humans, but
should not be universally enforced. This is certainly a conceptual understanding of
human rights that fuses opposing principles, in so much as it presents a conceptual
framework, which firstly seems to deny the long held dichotomy within the human
rights debate, and secondly is blind to the antithetical nature of its own argument. His
argument, framed in this way certainly relies on the fusing of opposing principles in an
attempt to bridge the divide and escape some of the old problems of the original
universal/relative polarity. Fundamentally, Donnelly is coming from a position where
human rights are to be understood as universal only until the point where he deems this
universality to be indefensible. From here they are ‘relatively universal’ and it is
important to note that at no stage does Donnelly waver in his commitment to their
universality in at least some form. This fusing of opposing principles is as unhelpful as
it is confusing. It also says nothing other than there are aspects of the arguments from
opposing sides of the debate, which opposition to now is seen as intellectually
indefensible. However, Donnelly’s analysis of the debate does make one very
important distinction, in that he makes an attempt to understand the different
conceptual groundings or animations of human rights, all of which have a foothold in
ordinary usage.
In Donnelly’s search to prove the relative universal nature of human rights, his
argument makes one important and necessary distinction, which is often missed in the
debates around the universal/relative polarity and the middle ground created from it.
Indeed, he systematically distinguishes between different conceptual groundings and
animations in which human rights can be, and are, understood, which enables them to
be characterised and questioned more precisely as to what underpins their legitimacy
and constitutes their grounding. Or as Michael Goodhart (2008) puts it, Donnelly’s
arguments “systematically disaggregates analytically distinct questions that have been
lumped together and by doing so provides clearer and more precise understandings of
perennially disputed points” (Goodhart 2008, 184). This is a distinction Stivens, to
some degree, appears to miss in conflating local animations of the normative standards
expressed as human rights, with those mandated by the global human rights regime.
For Donnelly, it is the question of whether or not human rights are universal, which
should be viewed as, or is better understood as, a related set of inquires into how
different conceptions or animations of human rights may in fact be defensibly

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universal, rather than simply debating whether human rights are either, universally
prescribed to all, or relative to their particular culture or context. In order to do this,
Donnelly sets out a number of different conceptual contexts and groundings, in which
he believes human rights can be understood. He then individually investigates the
validity of the principle of universalism, as it applies to human rights within each of
these different contexts. Distinguishing what he calls conceptual, functional, legal
international, overlapping consensus, anthropological, and ontological universality,
Donnelly attempts to show that the question of whether human rights are universal or
not, should be understood as a related set of inquiries into how they might be universal.
In doing so, he recognises the need to distinguish the different animations of the
normative core of human rights as integral to moving the debate past its traditional
polarity.
Unfortunately however, what results from arguments such as Stivens’ and
Donnelly’s, are significantly weakened and convoluted arguments about the nature,
grounding and legitimacy of human rights in an increasingly global, yet multicentric
world (Rehbein 2015). In turn, this has generated an impasse of its own that is now the
middle ground of a debate, which on the one side is fundamentally rigid in its
conceptualisation of human rights (universalism), and on the other side fundamentally
opposed to this rigidity (relativism). The stalemate, unfortunately, understood in these
terms, is inevitable, and almost wholly unworkable. As I will demonstrate, the middle
ground stalemate actually occurs, due in large part to a failure to understand that there
are a multiplicity of conceptual animations of human rights that all have a foothold in
ordinary contemporary usage (Tasioulas 2011). Essentially, this impasse is generated
from conceptually conflating two distinctly different conceptual animations of what we
pre-reflexively conceive to be human rights. This is a reflexive understanding of
human rights, as only comprehendible through their animation in a Western liberal
paradigm. However, this reflexive trait fails to come to terms with the many senses and
animations attached to the words ‘human rights’. Paradoxically, this leaves proponents
of universalism framing their arguments through an understanding of human rights as
Western institutionalised and legalised global rules and norms of the liberal paradigm,
backed up by the UDHR as well as UN bodies and NGOs. While those arguing for a
more relative understanding of human rights tend to frame their arguments through an
understanding of human rights through the voices and struggles of local non-western

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communities. These conceptual understandings of human rights can hardly be viewed
as the same. Herein, lies a fundamental disconnect.
While Donnelly provides much insight into the varying conceptual
understandings and animations of human rights by properly attempting to distinguish
them, it is actually his language of ‘relative universalism’, which undermines these
attempts and the importance of his argument within the wider human rights debate.
Avoiding terms and constructions such as ‘relative universality’ as well as ‘contingent’
and ‘relative’ as Donnelly has used, is necessary, as all are confusing and unhelpful.
This is because analysing the distinct conceptual dimensions and animations of human
rights with precision, actually requires avoiding these terms as much as possible as
they can become potentially misleading (Goodhart 2008, 184). What is actually
required are precise distinctions between the animations of human rights in local
contexts and struggles, which are truly representative of the reason-giving standards
expected in that context, and the universal human rights framework itself, even if it is
found that these local animations do not fully align or fit with the Western liberal
paradigm and its institutionalised global human rights regime. Furthermore, it is
actually the principle and nomenclature of universalism that is obscuring this
distinction and subsuming local rights claims into categories, which are familiar to the
global human rights regime and that also align with the principles of Western liberal
democracy and capitalist market oriented societies. These ‘new universalisms’ are
bridging both the universal/relative polarity, as well as bridging the gap between the
global human rights regime and the normative reason-giving standards being expressed
in local non-Western societies around the world. As such, the principle of universalism
has become the mechanism or bridge upon which the poison relies, in order to infiltrate
new sites and contexts in order to shape them into the Western liberal paradigm.
Regardless of this problematic and unwavering commitment to the principle of
universalism undertaken by Donnelly, his understanding of the need to differentiate the
different conceptual groundings of human rights should be deemed important.
Certainly we now attach various different senses to the phrase ‘human rights’, with
some being solely descriptive and others which characterise human rights as features
of social, institutional or even psychological reality. However, even when human rights
are construed in a sense, normatively, they will still entail manifestations of a

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multiplicity of concepts that all have a foothold in ordinary usage (Tasioulas 2011;
2012; 2013). An understanding of this distinction is imperative if the normative
reason-giving standards are to animate cultures or concepts of human rights that do not
become tools for civilising the world through Western eyes and which do not facilitate
hegemonic, imperial conquest and intervention by the powerful and against the
powerless (Tasioulas 2009). This is indeed the reverse logic of the normative standards
at the core of the idea of human rights, and must be characterised as such. Through the
fusing of opposing principles, renewed claims on the supremacy of the universal
framework, and in particular, the principle of universalism have been articulated,
which conveniently sidestep the repeated and indeed indefensible claims that have
identified universalism with a form of progress that is distinctly Western and
hegemonic (Mutua 2002’ Abu-Lughod 2013). These sorts of middle ground bridging
arguments, traversing the dichotomy of universalism and relativism, have in part,
disguised themselves as an emancipatory form of scholarship. Although claiming to be
devoid of the old problems labelled at the old universalisms around homogeneity and
restricting difference, in fact they have proven themselves to be only in the service of
new universalisms that continue to maintain, strengthen and promote global systems of
asymmetrical power and domination, and which continue to reverse the very logic of
the normative reason-giving standards that animate any human rights culture.
Accordingly, “universalisms endeavour to perpetually establish itself as the universal
is much like a dog chasing its own tail” (Rehbein 2015, 2).
IMPOSING THE LIBERAL PARADIGM
As I have shown, the distinctions in the way human rights are understood and
conceptualised can be both complex and fluid. However, there is little doubting the
ubiquitous nature of the universal framework of human rights. Its language of global
rules and norms now pervades political, legal as well as development bodies the world
over, claiming to advocate for humanity as a whole. Unfortunately however, this
framework is often characterised by arguments using overly idealistic and rigid
accounts of the values and principles of freedom and justice. These accounts have

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rightly been rejected and critiqued by those who wish to build cultural as well as
gendered difference into the framework and those who worry about the propensity of
Western conceptions of human rights to be overly rigid and to colonise and stifle
difference (see for example: Mutua 2002; Charlesworth 2005; Abu-Lughod 2006;
2013; Levitt & Merry 2011). Indeed, this rigid conceptualisation of global rules and
norms, regardless of how pervasive they are, should only be viewed as a distinct
outcome of the way in which Western conceptions of the normative core of human
rights have been institutionalised as a universal framework. Institutionalising a human
rights framework in this way, around a misguided sense of supposed ‘universal’
values, however, does nothing but further deny diverse global multicentric
communities the chance to articulate their own conceptual understandings and
manifestations of the normative reason-giving standards, which animate any human
rights culture. This is in light of the fact that, time and time again, it has been proven
that societies everywhere, debate justice and rights in the context of their own realities
and struggles, drawing on whatever language or conceptual framework available or
considered influential in that context (Abu-Lughod 2013). This is yet another reason, it
is essential to understand any human rights culture as being animated by the normative
reason-giving standards that give that context and reality its meaning. But more
importantly, by doing so, the ways in which the supposed ‘universal’ framework
colonises and stifles these other conceptual groundings and voices, and channels them
into the language and norms familiar to the Western liberal paradigm, should also
become sufficiently illuminated. Indeed, as Hopgood argues, the “universal, secular,
and categorical basis of global norms undermines their local political effectiveness”
(Hopgood 2013, 3).
Stephen Hopgood, a political scientist and former employee of Amnesty
International, argues for an approach that distinguishes between two different
conceptual animations or understandings of what constitutes human rights in
contemporary usage. These contrasting animations, I argue, pragmatically distinguish
something close to a true animation of the reason-giving standards at the core of any
culture of human rights, as well as the most globally salient of those cultures – the
poisoned global human rights regime. Hopgood’s overarching thesis is that we are
about to witness the imminent decay of one of these forms of human rights. This
version of human rights takes the form of the “Global Human Rights Regime”

25. 25
(Hopgood 2013, 3) in its current guise of Western institutionalised norms and legal
frameworks. In fact, he argues that we are actually witnessing the ‘endtimes’ for this
version of human rights. Hopgood articulates this version as Human Rights
(capitalised) and sees it as that of global organisations, norms, courts and laws.
Certainly, these global organisations or institutions are now all pervasive and as
Hopgood rightly points out, they expressly aim to raise money, run campaigns, write
reports, open local offices, as well as lobby governments as integral cogs in the
machine of the political project Human Rights has become. Importantly, this version of
Human Rights should be understood as global organisations, which claim to speak for
the whole of humanity, with a singular authority, that of universalism. These
organisations are informed and structured on an understanding of human rights, which
are Western in conception and draw almost entirely from Western understandings of
freedom and justice. Advocates within these organisations make their claims on these
understandings, which are derived from a singular, secular, moral authority, which of
course cannot be self-evident in a world, which is largely based around religious
societies. These norms, language and authority are often neither flexible nor negotiable
and highly legalised. Indeed, human rights understood in these terms are “a kind of
secular monotheism with aspirations to civilise the world” (Hopgood 2013: IX).
The other animation of human rights (lower case initials)4 Hopgood
distinguishes, is used to describe local and transnational networks of activists who
advocate for publicity and awareness of issues they and their communities face, by
pressuring governments, and indeed the UN for action. Conversely to Human Rights,
Hopgood argues there can be no ‘endtimes’ for this version of human rights, nor do
these networks and activists care for the intricacies of the universalist and relativist
divide, and nor should they. The issues these communities face are pertinent and often
involve immediate dangers and risks, and the ways in which these communities and
societies come together to demand their own freedom and justice should never be
discounted because they lack the globalised rules and norms of Western conceptions of
Human Rights. As long as these political and ethical claims to rights have foundations
in human beings’ shared interest in the equal and fair treatment of all, this form of
4 In what follows I will use Hopgood’s distinction of ‘Human Rights’ (capitalised and italicised)to refer
to the Western institutionalised and legalised framework of rights as distinct from ’human rights’
(lower case initials and italicised),which will infer more to the normative core or idea underlying
human rights culture.

26. 26
human rights, Hopgood argues, can never be torn down. In this way, human rights are
used tactically to prevent and halt state sanctioned violence. They are used to demand
social rights to healthcare, food and water, as well as economic rights within a
community. The language is, and should be, flexible and negotiable in this form of
human rights, and most importantly, this language does not defend human rights as an
institution, but rather defends the actual human or persons. Accordingly, this form of
human rights sees them as a means, rather than an end in itself. This is the normative
core of reason-giving standards demanded by human beings in the interest of the equal
and fair treatment of all. The un-poisonable core – that animates any culture of human
rights.
However, in establishing and realising the universal Human Rights framework,
with its international power structures and legal orders, the discourse of Human Rights
has claimed a moral authority over the world’s population and staked a claim to be the
supreme authority. Indeed, Human Rights understood as a global framework of
institutions and legal orders, should be viewed as having intentions to be a court of law
above all politics, both international and national. Because of this, Hopgood suggests
that this animation of Human Rights “inevitably structures, disciplines, channels,
institutionalises and eventually colonises the local reproducing hierarchies of power
and influence familiar from the worlds of domestic politics and interstate relations”
(Hopgood 2013: X). While there have been several influential accounts that attempt to
highlight the ‘transnational linkages’ between Human Rights and human rights5 and no
one could argue that there are absolutely no linkages between the two, ultimately, it is
through imperial political power aided by the principle of universalism that Human
Rights eventually colonises and channels human rights into globally recognised
language and norms. This is pertinent for the discourse of Human Rights, which has
claimed a moral authority over the world’s population through these institutional
structures and which derives its power from the global political economy with its
centers in Western European and American power and states. This connection between
these centres of global power and the global Human Rights regime needs highlighting,
as the supposed moral authority of universally applicable Human Rights has also
5 See for example: Stivens 2000; Merry 2009; Risse, Ropp & Sikkink 2013; Hafner-Burton 2013

27. 27
become a political tool for aligning non-Western societies with the liberal paradigm
(Mutua 2002; Hopgood 2013).
Hopgood believes that the inflexibility of the norms and language of Human
Rights often result in organisations stifling protest. He also views violent and non-
hierarchical forces and disruptions as a more effective strategy in bringing about
desired change, than the institutionalised, disciplined and hierarchical resistance, which
the global advocacy field is purported to be based on (Hopgood 2013). A good case in
point was the Arab Spring in 2011, which highlights the tension between the
spontaneous and diverse bottom up approach of human rights, as opposed to the rigid
authority of the top down imposition of Human Rights. It also highlights the way the
global Human Rights regime appropriates and aligns these struggles with the liberal
paradigm. Certainly, the democracy that the people of Arab States were calling for,
was definitely not that of a carbon copy of democracy found in Western Europe or the
US. However, while the democratic uprising that originated in Tunisia and which then
spread quickly through Libya, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bahrain
was a spontaneous and independent uprising, American and European responses to the
uprising began by funneling these movements into their familiar liberal paradigm of
Human Rights and its cornerstone of liberal democracy. Daniela Huber (2013) argues
that by persisting with a perception of these social movements in Western democratic
terms, American and European responses were “predisposed to continuing to impose a
liberal paradigm on societies that wish to realise their own understanding of
democracy” (Huber 2013, 107). Certainly it must be acknowledged that there are many
active linkages between what Hopgood sees as Human Rights and human rights and it
can be argued that the bottom up approach, whilst often spontaneous and diverse,
makes its claims for change using the language and institutions of the global Human
Rights regime. What the Arab Spring demonstrates is that it is inevitable that the
bottom up approach of human rights will be subsumed and ultimately channeled into
the top down approach of Human Rights, through structures and influences of global
political power. This is done by institutionalising and disciplining these structures,
before eventually colonising the human rights claims into hierarchies of influence and
power, which are familiar to Human Rights norms and language of the realm of
interstate relations and institutions. This, as Hopgood argues, is inevitable, partly
because the transnational space is largely controlled by Human Rights centers in the

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US and Western Europe. However, more importantly, it is also because these Human
Rights centers resist any deviation from the singularity of the message of universalism,
which doesn’t enable any scope for local adaption of these messages, other than
tactical and transient ones.
The Arab Spring highlights two pertinent issues. Firstly, adherence to the
principle of universalism for the conceptual framework that is Human Rights is non
negotiable. Democracy itself is viewed as a universal human right within this
framework, however, only an animation of democracy that aligns with that of Western
global powers and institutions is acceptable. Secondly, it is therefore inevitable that the
local voices and struggles, conceptualised as human rights, which call for democracy
on their own terms, will be colonised and structured into hierarchies of influence and
power familiar to that of the universal Human Rights framework. This is done when
these local struggles and activists reach out to the universal framework as a way of
gaining political traction and a re-balance of power for their causes, from a human
rights framework already global in scope and highly effective in its coercive power.
Indeed, there is an inherent power and coercive authority to the universal framework of
Human Rights. Much of this power and authority accounts for both its global appeal as
a restorative political tool for the powerless seeking to end domination and repression,
as well as its propensity to necessitate the appropriation of these voices and struggles
of the powerless into the language and norms familiar to the global Human Rights
regime. However, as Hopgood (2013) argues, this supposed moral authority is
cracking. Indeed, Human Rights have become the metaphorical ‘poison apple’: on the
surface seemingly too good to refuse - life sustaining and enhancing. But hidden
beneath the outer layer of promise and grandeur is a brown stain, corrupted with
alternative agendas of imperialism, power, money and influence, which homogenise
and stifle difference of that which is not familiar to the Western liberal paradigm.
By insisting on imposing a liberal paradigm on states involved in the Arab
Spring, the subsequent channeling of rights claims into the language and norms of this
paradigm, must be considered a form of ethnocentrism. But more problematic, is the
expectation that the liberal paradigm will translate into societies, which at their very
foundations are vastly different from the religious, individual and philosophical
foundations found in Western states. That American foreign policy has, since the end

29. 29
of the Cold War, been increasingly concerned with this region of the world, and that
the rhetoric and moral authority that has predicated much of this action has been
increasingly aligned with Human Rights understood within the liberal paradigm of
freedom and democracy, is no surprise (Abu-Lughod 2013). The interests of America
and their global Western allies would be better served once this region conforms to the
liberal norms of interstate relations. It is in the interests of these global powers that the
human rights claims in this region, which are streamlined into those that match the
liberal paradigm, should be attributed to, rather than imposed upon the societies in
which they were first animated. As has been the case with the Arab Spring, colonising
these areas in this way, through Human Rights and development NGOs is viewed as a
far more effective strategy than traditional imperial colonisation.
Although, where necessary, America and its allies have proven willing to use
direct action and force through global bodies to affect this change, in which the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) led foreign military intervention in Libya in
2011 is a prime example. However, the failure and inaction in intervening in Syria,
renders the motives and indeed moral authority of America and the global Human
Rights regime, in these instances, as significantly undermined (Hopgood 2013). This
type of neocolonisation is predicated on the principle of universal Human Rights
underpinned by Western values; it is also backed up by an imperial, hegemonic
political agenda intent on homogenising the world into this Western liberal paradigm.
However, as I will demonstrate in the next chapter, this supposed moral authority to
implement this paradigm is cracking with aspects of the contemporary liberal
paradigm, which together help animate Human Rights as a poisoned version of the
normative, reason-giving standards found at their core. Understanding this system of
neocolonisation is pertinent if true animations of these normative standards are to be
projected in societies not underpinned by Western liberal norms. Doing so will enable
the core reason-giving standards to be imagined and re-imagined, autonomously in
local contexts and voices, free from outside hegemonic, imperial and neocolonial
forces which continually appropriate these struggles and voices through the universal
framework for their own ends.

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PART 2 – POISONING THE APPLE
AMERICAN IMPERIAL POWER
In recent times there has been a shift towards an alternate understanding and reading of
human rights history, especially from the 1970s onwards. This shift has challenged the
normative assumptions around the development of human rights, as well as the
importance placed on certain time periods and events in this development. Integral to
this reading of their development has been an assertion that American imperial power,
beginning sometime around the 1970s, was instrumental in developing human rights
into the framework of institutionalised norms, as well as the global legal bodies we
find today (Moyn 2010; Blackburn 2011; Neier 2012; Hopgood 2013). These so called
notions of genealogy are indeed handmaiden to both postmodernism and
postcolonialism, in the sense that they attempt to highlight processes of exclusion and
covering, in certain narratives of history, through the development of counter-histories
and by exposing power-knowledge relations. Genealogies enable a “focus on the
process by which we have constructed origins and given meaning to particular
representations of the past, representations that continuously guide our daily lives and
set clear limits to political and social options” (Bleiker 2000, 25).
Instead of the traditional reading of the history of human rights, which points to
the end of the Second World War in 1940s as being the high point of human rights
idealism, these genealogies place much more emphasis and importance on the 1970s as
the period in which the spread of an institutionalised and legalised framework of rights
took hold, strongly linked with the export of neoliberal democracy. Samuel Moyn
argues, “it was not in the middle of the 1940s but in the middle of the 1970s that
human rights came to define people’s hopes for the future as the foundation of an
international movement and a utopia of international law” (Moyn 2010, 7). While
Hopgood is skeptical about Moyn’s claim that “the drama of human rights is that they
emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere” (Moyn 2010, 3), he agrees that “from
the 1970s onwards, a new kind of advocacy that sought to pressure the American state
into using its vast resources to coerce, cajole, and induce improved human rights

31. 31
abroad” emerged (Hopgood 2013, 11). Importantly, these genealogies have enabled the
reasons behind the development and trajectory of human rights into the globalised,
legalised and institutionalised rules and norms of interstate relations that we find today,
to have their origins sufficiently pinpointed and illuminated. Indeed, by the 1970s, the
global Human Rights regime as the metaphorical apple had begun to be poisoned.
During this time, America, as the world’s dominant liberal democracy, began to
display and promote abroad a commitment to legitimate rule that was predicated on the
foundations of popular consent and national law. Indeed, the principles and groundings
of neoliberal democracy. As the dominant power, America and its advocates saw these
principles as more progressive than those that appeared in other states, and which
coupled with the Cold War dynamic, saw America claim a responsibility for exporting
these more ‘progressive’ values globally (Guilhot 2008). These progressive values
being of course the cornerstones of neoliberal democracy: the values of an open
society and those of Western conceptions of freedom and justice. What this shift
highlights, is that after American interest and involvement in human rights picked up
during this time, at least in a systematic way, human rights moved more towards an
openly pro-democratic, political form of advocacy. This is in stark contrast to the
“secular religiosity” (Durkheim 2000, 166) of the European model exported prior to
the 1970s (Hopgood 2013). This more political form of advocacy embraced capitalism
and power and started on a course, which would see it tied to foreign policy objectives
of Western powers, especially of the global superpower that is the US. Most troubling
of all, especially in light of the fact that traditionally human rights were a response to
the excesses of the state and market (among other things), was that “Human Rights and
liberal capitalism were allies, not enemies” (Hopgood 2013, 13). The ‘market for
suffering’ as Hopgood puts it, had now been created. NGOs, Human Rights
organisations and legal bodies now aimed to raise money to fund campaigns, which
were articulated through the language of progressive values of Western conceptions of
freedom and justice. These campaigns no longer solely focused attention on the
producers of human suffering, but also developed and maintained a consumer driven
market predicated on the objectification of human suffering, designed to raise money
through targeted human rights campaigns from the mainly the Western European and
American middle-classes.

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Throughout the 1970s, new Human Rights organisations emerged, of which, by
far the most successful has been Human Rights Watch. Hopgood argues that rather
than being a product or result of any sort of popular movement, these organisations
were the direct result of an elite and highly technocratic mobilisation in Western states.
As these new organisations emerged mainly in the US, and further enhanced the
market for suffering, they cemented human rights as a more political form of
advocacy, rather than the secular religiosity attributed to the European model before
this time. Consequently, the language and rhetoric of human rights as foundations in
the neoliberal paradigm took hold, generating an ever-increasing constituency of
supporters. Human rights were suddenly tied to influences of money and power and
were viewed as intimately tied to the export of neoliberal democracy using American
state power. This was a direct result of the way in which American imperial power had
exported and globalised human rights through elite networks of capital and power,
advocating for the implementation of a liberal paradigm. As for American advocates,
democracy was the foremost political value. The coinciding of the neoliberal
revolution in the 1970s in America with this globalisation of Human Rights, also
opened up a sphere for organisations in which to promote human rights in order raise
funds to “pay for professional global advocacy, rather than to stimulate transnational
collective action” (Hopgood 2013, 97).
Given that the normative reason-giving standards that global Human Rights
culture is purported to be based upon, is primarily interested in the fair and equal
treatment of all human beings, the lack of sustained activism and importance in the
West placed upon economic, social, cultural and women’s rights is worrying. This is
due in large part to the Cold Way dynamic, where economic, social, cultural and
women’s rights were often deemed to be less important than civil and political rights in
the West (Roth 2004). However, in the post-Cold War era, the more reliant NGOs and
humanitarian institutions become on the successful expansion and functioning of the
world economy as a means to fund the expansion of operations, the greater the chance
economic, social and cultural rights will continue to play second fiddle to hierarchical
power and money. Indeed, the further removed these institutions and legal orders
become from the sites and centers of domination and oppression, as well as further
removed from a culture that animates human rights that is characterised by normative,
reason-giving standards of a certain kind, the further social inequality will rise. On the

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surface this would seem paradoxical to the aims and intentions of the global Human
Rights regime. However, the wedding of human rights to state power, neoliberal values
and market capitalism in the 1970s marked the beginning of the poisoning of the
particular animation of the normative, reason-giving standards manifested as the global
Human Rights regime. As well, the beginning of the development of grounds in which
the universal framework became able to more easily appropriate local struggles and
voices into the language of the Western liberal paradigm. Human Rights were now
openly embraced as a dynamic and integral part of the political ideology of modern
liberalism, which at its heart only functions through the rule of law, the working of
markets and of course democracy based on legitimate rule. In light of this, “the post-
Christian spiritual function of European human rights became increasingly redundant”
by the 1970s (Hopgood 2013, 97).
Eventually by the 1990s, Human Rights no longer represented a true animation
of the normative reason-giving standards found at their core. As early as the turn of
that decade, foreign policy makers in America and in other powerful Western states
had significantly begun to identify the usefulness of human rights rhetoric for the
legitimisation of foreign policy initiatives. Evidence of this rhetoric is best summed up
by what was now being termed - rather paradoxically - humanitarian war (Roberts
1993; Chomsky 1999). Tony Smith (2012) believes that under President Clinton the
promotion of modern neoliberalism, and in particular the promotion of democracy
abroad, became even more central to a grand strategy being articulated through
American foreign policy that had begun in the 1970s. Smith also argues that what
major international NGOs and indeed human rights lawyers demanded as necessary for
the global Human Rights regime, became increasingly aligned with the foreign policy
initiatives and objectives of major Western global political players. This alignment
continued into the new century and gained even more significance post 9/11 with the
invasion and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan, where unprecedented levels of
cooperation and strategic alliances were forged between both NATO as well as human
rights and humanitarian advocates (Dalacoura 2005). Even more recently, these same
strategic alliances and cooperation’s have continued to flourish under a banner of
Human Rights, democracy and the rule of law with the intervention in Libya in 2011.
By this time, Human Rights were now predicated on an unwavering attachment to
democracy and the rule of law and while now “trading on a legacy claim to

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impartiality, international humanists were in fact throwing in their lot with state
power” (Hopgood 2013, 101).
Hopgood’s argument is that the window of opportunity to build this
institutionalised and legal human rights infrastructure through a grand strategy in the
1990s was a direct result of a helpful combination of growing UN self-confidence,
human rights entrepreneurism, post-Cold War atrocities as well as the ‘peace dividend’
(p102). More importantly than this combination, however, was the uni-polar moment
at the end of the Cold War, which allowed the singular power that was the US to begin
to articulate a global project predicated on humanitarian intervention and international
justice that attempted to outlaw gross human rights violations. The political and legal
project, which Human Rights had become was now fully realised and articulated
through a retributive moral architecture, which had utilised the liberal hegemon to
enshrine global norms, despite corrupting and poisoning itself and the human rights
regime on a dependence and coziness with American power in the process. Indeed, it is
a “historical irony that the international human rights movement, which started among
other things as a challenge to the state’s penal excesses, should end up legitimizing a
huge system of criminal repression” (Mégret 2002, 1265). This huge system of
criminal repression has since the 1990s enabled an increasingly ambitious
interventionist infrastructure to be articulated with at its heart an emphasis firmly
placed on both global justice and protection principles. However, there has at the same
time been an increasing aversion to amnesties as well as a significant move away from
local forms of justice, as evidenced in the cases of Rwanda and Uganda. This global
system of criminal repression has also indicated an aversion to other forms of
restorative justice with a preference for universal norms rather than existing forms of
local authority (Snyder & Vinjamuri 2003; Clark 2010; Philpott 2012). Hopgood sees
this as unequivocal evidence that Human Rights advocates are intent on articulating
this global project with a final power and authority to decide what rules are valid, as
well as legitimate exceptions to those rules. With the emergence of the International
Criminal Court (ICC) and the Responsibility to Protect principle (R2P) since the end of
the Cold War “advocates believe they no longer need to take care of nurturing their
own moral authority; they have power enshrined in law and institutions” at their
disposal (Hopgood 2013, 120). Accordingly, the animation of human rights as a global
regime backed up by supposed universal Western liberal principles and values as well

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as American imperial power, had enabled itself to become a complete poisoned
projection of the normative, reason-giving standards at its core.
OBJECTIFYING HUMAN RIGHTS
This political and legal project, which Human Rights has now become, only accounts
for one half of its poisoning however. What truly allowed them to be fully corrupted
since the 1970s essentially relates to their transformation from normative reason-giving
standards into a marketable commodity. The ubiquity of the language of human rights,
or human rights talk, including all that goes with it; running campaigns, raising money
and advocating and promoting on behalf of suffering and abuse should not be
understood as being a result of the impact of human rights, but rather should be
explained by their marketing (Hopgood 2013, 103). This transformation of human
rights into a marketable commodity is unquestionably tied up in its marriage with
neoliberal principles beginning in the 1970s, which opened up the space for their social
transformation through a “humanitarian marketplace” (Hopgood 2013, 102). This saw
human rights from the late 1970s marketed as a new ‘ethical’ brand for sale, targeted
especially towards Western and American middle classes. This humanitarian
marketplace entrenched and developed its foundations in what Sidney Tarrow (2011,
131-132) identifies as the conditions for growth that were needed for the new social
movements in the 1960s. These social movements, which heralded in the beginnings of
the consumer generation, were enabled by the development of the mass media and in
particular the proliferation of the television. This was a new era of global rebuilding
after the disasters of the two World Wars and the economically stagnated period,
which intervened them. New ideas and possibilities manifested and developed
themselves in this fertile boom-time, which preceded the Second World War. There
was more money, and particularly for young people there was more free time that
enabled them to become the target for this new ethical brand, which they would not
only contribute to, but also advocate for. With more money available, an increase in
funding for new groups was possible and of special importance for the development of
new human rights organisations, the Ford Foundation was of particular significance at

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this time (Welch Jr 2001). It was of course the Ford Foundation that was instrumental
in the funding and nurturing of the early human rights organisations such as Human
Rights Watch. By the 1980s a fully-fledged humanitarian market place had emerged,
underpinned by the rapid socioeconomic changes that were in turn being intensified by
neoliberal policies in Western countries. Supporting Human Rights had become a
consumption good that was now sustaining institutional as well as organisational
growth.
The mass media thus enabled press coverage for both the ethical brand Human
Rights had become, as well as targeted coverage of human suffering in far away places
on television screens, fund-raising and membership also increased in this new
humanitarian marketplace, which further enabled the widespread development of this
‘market’ into the 1990s. Through this marketplace, people were now able to support
‘human rights’ rather than any specific cause, issue or people and herein lies a
fundamental problem with the marketable brand that is Human Rights. This process
had turned people’s attentions away from the actual sites and causes of human
suffering and concentrated it on a marketable commodity or a brand. It had
disenfranchised them with the actual reality of human suffering and had removed them
from these sites far enough away as to feel comfortable in knowing they were safe,
while enabling people to assume they were ethically doing right and helping by
contributing and promoting brand ‘Human Rights’. By the 1990s when Human Rights
were no longer an undistorted animation of the reason-giving standards at their core,
this logic had at least in some respects reversed itself. By this time organisations
dedicated to Human Rights had fully emerged, which had “consolidated a delineation
between service-driven humanitarians and advocacy-driven human rights activists”
(Hopgood 2013, 103). More targeted and precisely driven advocacy campaigns could
now be launched, coupled with neoliberalism’s opening up of disaster zones to non-
state humanitarian organisations (Potvin 2013). Large sums of money began to flow
from government agencies, regional and international bodies. As well a growing
private funding market, with this poisoned animation of Human Rights having now
reached a seemingly indispensable state of global saliency.
Once the humanitarian marketplace had been opened up to this extent by the
1990s and Human Rights organisations had tied in their lot irreparably with state

37. 37
power and neoliberal capitalism, the poisoning was complete. However, in the same
way that the triumph in the scale of growth of Human Rights is attributed to their
marketability rather than any practical commitment to humanity, which in turn renders
it so hollow; so too does the lack of any sustained and readily identifiable proof of its
impact, in any real sense. Human Rights organisations as well as development NGOs
have to show value for money, just as any corporation would to shareholders.6 In light
of this, increasing numbers of reports, court cases and indeed courts themselves have
appeared in an effort to prove that advocacy works (Hopgood 2013). Major NGOs and
humanitarian organisations have become, for all intents and purposes, increasingly run
like businesses with a metric in growth determined by size and scale rather than profit.
NGOs and humanitarian organisations have become more concerned with winning
donor contracts and managing brand identity in a humanitarian marketplace that has
come to be characterised in the same way corporate big business conducts itself.
Indeed, Linda Polman (2010) argues that rather than being primary concerned with the
easing of suffering and persecution “the most powerful link between humanitarian aid
agencies is that of commercial competition” (Polman 2010, 37).
As ‘making a difference’ becomes increasingly harder to prove, especially by
any one NGO or humanitarian organisation, increasingly they look to other indicators
to determine success. Making a difference is now indexed on things like the amount of
press coverage and advertisements on television, the number and scale of campaigns
and in how many countries and regions, as well as annual income and donations, which
includes the number of signed up members. But what these indicators don’t prove, is
any decreased instances of human rights violations or definitive evidence of positive
impacts on state behaviour that can be attributed to any one organisation or campaign.
In fact, this would be incredibly difficult for any NGO or humanitarian organisation to
prove conclusively and while there has been much written about the gap between
commitment to and compliance with human rights (see Risse & Sikkink 2013; Hafner-
Burton 2013), human rights violations inevitably appear at the first instance of unrest
or violence. Indeed, for all the courts, laws, campaigns and global bodies that have
developed since the 1970s, the global Human Rights regime still doesn’t appear to be
any sort of deterrent for the instigators of violence, domination and oppression. We
6 For an example of this process by Human Rights Watch see Gorvin 2009.

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need to look no further than what the World Health Organisation (WHO 2013) is
calling a ‘global epidemic of violence against women’ by men, as well as the myriad of
other sites and forms of violence and unrest around world, of which Palestine, Syria
and the Ukraine are some of the most recent and prominent examples.
The unfortunate and damning paradox of the global Human Rights regime since
the 1970s is that despite its increased significance both politically and socially in this
time, it has failed in a global sense to markedly stem the rate and level of violations,
wars and atrocities being committed. This is troubling, as in many respects, this has
been one of the express aims of the universal framework. From the Korean and
Vietnam Wars in the 1950s, to the genocides in Rwanda and Uganda in the 1990s,
violence predicated on ideology and ethnicity continues to erupt and escalate. From the
genocide in Cambodia during the 1970s, to the systematic ethnic and religious
cleansing and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, violence and hatred for
that which is different has developed and culminated in all its various appalling finales.
From the repeated incursions, invasions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1970s,
1990s and again in both decades this millennium, retribution and a need to strategically
secure and ensure resources have guaranteed that human rights abuses have been both,
committed as a result of these conflicts, as well as violated at their foundations. In
almost all these cases, ideological, hegemonic and colonial forces were either all in
combination or separately at play. Alarmingly, this so called ‘global epidemic’ of
violence sees a reality in which women all over the world live in fear of violence and
persecution for no other reason than being a woman, as the patriarchal systems and
power structures continue to be repeated and maintained despite the aligning of
women’s rights as human rights, as a strategy to combat these abuses in the early
1990s.
In light of this, human rights appear to be secondary to the political realities of
global powers and hegemons, as well as to the unheeded expansion of capitalist
markets, neoliberal democracy and ideology, which are at their heart patriarchal in
nature. Paradoxically, so too does it appear to be secondary to the strategic realities and
priorities of American foreign policy, despite its increased alignment with the global
Human Rights regime since the 1990s. Human Rights in this time, have unfortunately
become a tool as well as a brand, rather than simply reason-giving standards that

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characterise a commitment to the equal and fair treatment of all human beings. Indeed
this normative core is becoming increasingly harder to find. This is not to say that the
idea of human rights has failed, but rather points to the corrupting and poisoning of the
culture of normative justice and standards, which animates the desire to realise a better
community where respect for the life and dignity of all human beings is sacred and
upheld. It is important to understand this distinction in light of the failure of Human
Rights principles to stop the outbreak of these atrocities in the first place, as well as
their failure to avert the subsequent human rights violations, which have been
committed in the aftermath of these atrocities. In light of this, the fact that the
“political and social power of human rights is [now] failing, its use as a language of
justice will only increase” (Hopgood 2013, 102-103). The distorting of the animation
of the normative, reason-giving standards at the core of the global Human Rights
regime in 1970s has further undermined their true significance as both a deterrent for
abuse and a valuable political tool in ending domination and oppression. They have
become a commercialised brand and a band-aid solution to the realities of dominant
ideologies and global political theatre.
THE UN-POISONABLE NORMATIVE CORE
Out of the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War a desperate attempt at
creating more ambitious global institutions, particularly in international law, was
undertaken between 1945 and 1949. At the time this was an existential crisis, of which,
international lawyer Josef Kunz wrote, involved “the very survival of our Western
Christian civilization, if not mankind” (Kunz 1951, 37). These attempts were a direct
response to the damage and devastation predicated on European claims of being the
superior authority (Hopgood 2013). Through the founding principles of the UDHR,
there was an understanding that human rights provided protections against what Henry
Shue (1996, 13) terms ‘standard threats’. These standard threats were first conceived as
relating to threats from capitalist markets and bureaucratic states, rather than threats
from more communal and domestic spheres within states. Historically however, the
range of threats has been far broader and includes threats posed by social and religious

40. 40
authorities, officials and landowners, as well as parents and husbands through the use
or abuse of power (Ignatieff 2001). It is this arbitrary or unwarranted use or abuse of
power, to interfere or control people’s lives through oppression and domination that is
considered a protection mandated by the universal Human Rights framework.
Certainly, recognition of this expanded range of threats and the suitability of the
framework for protection was instrumental in driving the feminist expansion of the
human rights debate, which saw a call to end the separation between women’s rights
and human rights at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (Bunch
1995; Friedman 1995; Hernandez-Truyol 1995). In this context, human rights have
enabled and provided an avenue for women through which to challenge power, as well
as to combat domination and oppression in the myriad of different forms they
experience. For this reason alone, the idea of human rights has global appeal. While
certainly Human Rights are dominated by voices of the elite, privileged and the
powerful in world politics (Beetham 1999; Ife 2012), human rights remain salient, and
the normative reason-giving standards which underpin their understanding, remain
valuable to the powerless seeking an end to oppression and domination. Indeed that is
the power and appeal of human rights. The standards that animate the desire for human
dignity and respect are available to anyone and everyone should they wish, as
potentially anyone and everyone is subject to oppression and domination. In this
respect they are a useful and valuable resource upon which the powerless and
persecuted may call.
What makes human rights so appealing to those with few options and no other
recourse is that they are promised through an already articulated framework, with now
global reach and scope. What is less illuminated, is the conditioning of the ways in
which this same framework, which promotes itself as universal, streamlines, colonises
and excludes claims to rights from outside the context of Western conceptions of
principles such as freedom and justice. The authority to do so, universalists argue, is a
moral one. Backed up by laws in which the universal human rights framework aspires
to be moral court above all else. This in itself is exclusionary. In light of this, it should
be acknowledged that in order to ensure the continued power and appeal of human
rights as normative reason-giving standards, surely an account of them, which is
inclusive rather than exclusive, must be promoted. Accounts of human rights that are
especially damaging, such as those devised through arguments around autonomy,

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where some exclusions appear legitimately admissible, actually justify and pave the
way for the possibility of other exclusions. These exclusions then become grounds for
abuse, such as the historical exclusion of those from the natural rights arguments
through arguments about their limited ‘rationality’ (Barreto 2014, 28-29; Rorty 1999).
Human rights have historically been defined and developed by those with power,
however historically these definitions have been far too narrow and have excluded
more ‘private’ forms of oppression and domination and have certainly been used in
ways that have invoked and licensed the conquest and colonisation of non-Western
societies. Indeed, as critiques made by socialists, feminist minorities and advocates for
those suffering from domination by forces such as imperialism, slavery and
colonisation have articulated time and time again, there is a huge gap between the
reality of those enduring ongoing oppression and domination and seeking political
change and the supposed ‘universalism’ of the rights articulated by the powerful
through institutionalised social, legal and development practices globally.
Certainly it has been poststructural/modernists and postcolonial arguments,
which have further highlighted the global appeal in the context of a long history of
global ideas about human rights, justice, equality as well as democracy and freedom.
These arguments have also helped to reinforce the broader promise of human rights:
that a framework which doesn’t justify exclusions and reinterpretations of human
rights, actually promotes an inclusive and broad framework which communities
everywhere can use to determine a life of dignity and respect; free from hegemonic and
imperial influence. This un-poisonable core at the centre of any culture of human rights
is one that “both jibes with that culture and presents human rights as a defensible
species of reason-giving standards, one that earns a place in our general repertoire of
normative considerations” (Tasioulas 2011, 18). In fact, a true realisation of the
promise and appeal of human rights and a true projection of the normative reason-
giving standards, which animate any conceptual manifestation of human rights culture.
Certainly, these reason-giving standards at the core of any conception of human rights
are un-poisonable. They are standards, which animate any nature, grounds, and indeed,
practical significance that may constitute human rights in the various conceptual
manifestations evident in ordinary usage. The contemporary culture of the global
Human Rights regime is unfortunately a poisoned animation of these normative
reason-giving standards and considerations. The conceptual underlying principle of

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universalism has ensured its status as poisoned and has extracted an understanding of
human rights out of these normative standards that has turned human rights into an
ethical brand rather than simply normative reason-giving standards of a certain kind.
Normative standards that are available and useful to all to construct and articulate
through a framework, which is not only familiar to the community in which it
originated, but also a product derived from the normative standards expected in that
community for the fair and equal treatment of all.
John Tasioulas argues that there is no doubt that there are now various senses
attached to the phrase human rights. Indeed, they have become one of the most
globalised values of our times. Certainly in recent times, the globalisation and
insitutionalisation of their use has resulted in a “‘proliferation’ of human rights claims,
one that threatens to debase the currency of human rights” altogether (Tasioulas 2012,
5). However, while this proliferation has threatened to debase the currency of human
rights, their underlying normative core is that which cannot be undermined. So
understood, they need not be widely credited or actually significantly embodied in any
legal institution, social practice or indeed universalised framework. They are the
products and standards at the heart of any desire to realise a fair and equal society,
articulated without any imposition of outside influence or ideology and using whatever
conceptual grounding or framework considered useful or influential so as these
standards may be realised in their most true sense. This is a true articulation or
animation of the core underlying focal concept of human rights, which holds them as
reason-giving standards. An understanding of human rights as being identified as such,
is imperative for the continued legitimacy and effectiveness of any animation of their
core standards in the contemporary world. Universalism and American imperial power
may have poisoned the most widespread of these animations of this culture, but the
normative core, I contend, is un-poisonable. The sooner communities are allowed to
realise their own articulation and manifestation of this core, the sooner the true power
and legitimacy which should underline any culture of human rights can be significantly
realised.
As the universal framework cannot allow any deviation from the norms and
conceptual practice articulated through the global legal and political institutions of
Human Rights, a move away from their legitimisation as universal would also bring