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Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, Makau Mutua (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 252 pp., $49-95 cloth.
This book is a synthesis of Makau Mutua's long-standing critiques of the "universal" human rights corpus, or system, that have appeared in several learned journals in the past decade. He begins with the argument that the contemporary human rights discourse and practice, which came into being following the atrocities of World War II, has its theoretical underpinnings in Western colonial attitudes and that it continues to be driven by totalizing, Eurocentric impulses. Mutua takes his critique further by challenging the "mythical elevation of the human rights corpus beyond political ideology and its deployment to advance or protect norms that may be detrimental to Third World societies" (p. 3). He argues that the depoliticization of the contemporary human rights corpus obscures the patently liberal and Eurocentric political agenda it seeks to universalize.
Mutua draws parallels between the violent Christian colonial conquest of Africa and the "modern human rights crusade." The same methods, he claims, are at work and similar cultural dispossessions are taking place. Using the trope of savage-victim-- savior, he argues that the grand narrative of human rights constructs a dual image of Third World actors: they are either "savages"-despotic regimes or traditional authorities implementing patriarchal and repressive customs-or hapless "victims"-- minority or other oppressed groups such as women. Certain key players in the West thus act as gatekeepers of human rights destined to save Third World "victims" from Third World "savages." In this regard, the human rights corpus falls into the historical continuum of the Eurocentric colonial project in which actors are cast into superior and subordinate positions.
The book's insistent conclusion is that the human rights corpus, constructed primarily as the moral guardian...