Human Rights: Across the Pacific Both Ways?

Abstract

Human rights are a Western imperialist “democracy jihad” seeking to impose the values of Europe and North America on the rest of the world, argues the Burmese scholar Michael Aung-Thwin, channeling the various preachers of “Asian values” themes.1 He is reacting, here, against the triumphalists who see human rights and democracy rippling outwards from their birthplaces on the shores of the North Atlantic to transform other societies. Is the rhetoric of universal human rights a new imperialist discourse, rooted in the powerful West? The interplay of rights languages across the Pacific since the 19th century suggests that “rights talk” has not gone only one way, and that it may offer liberating possibilities to movements rooted in the global South.2