FOCUS and RATIONALE

Every legitimate political authority and virtually every private citizen affirms the inherent virtue of human rights. Even more than in 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made human rights a feature of international obligation, human rights designate “the highest aspiration of the common people.” Human rights have further increased in social significance as this discourse has become more central to national and international disputes about the meaning of political ethics and the uses of political power. These debates now span the spectra of intellectual and political life, engaging the attention of myriad lawyers and judges, academics, journalists, public officials, international bodies, non-governmental organizations, political movements, and ordinary citizens. Yet it is not at all certain that humanity’s future, any more than its past, will witness a steady march toward “realizing human rights.” Since the end of World War II, millions continue to suffer from war, tyranny, and poverty. Human rights today function as sites of conflict as much or more than as sources of consensus, even as they continue to signify political affirmations of human well-being.

This proposed, five-week NEH Summer Institute will focus particularly on conflicts involving relationships between human rights and power, addressing how power and the diversity of human experience constitute conceptual and practical understandings of human rights as a contemporary discourse of freedom and equality. It will both consider the contestable character of human rights and address the sources of these contests from philosophical, historical, legal, cultural, and political perspectives. Drawing from the expertise of individual authorities on these aspects of human rights, channeling their perspectives towards a common subject, and involving the interests and projects of participants, the Institute will foster understanding of the strengths and limitations of human rights as an international language of political ethics, particularly in relation to democracy.

Insofar as it calls upon authorities from various academic and professional disciplines to teach and exchange with interested college and university teachers from different backgrounds, the Institute will be useful to the research and pedagogy of participants. First, the discourse of human rights provides a lightning rod for new initiatives in traditional academic disciplines–ones that grow from their own frameworks and respond to emerging global pressures. As a result, the Institute is positioned to benefit participants’ efforts to advance their own intellectual endeavors and curricular innovation at their home institutions. Secondly, the naturally interdisciplinary character of the discourse of human rights and the intentionally interdisciplinary character of the Institute offer catalytic seeds for professors’ new work. Thirdly, the Institute’s devotion to a topic of general concern can model how the academy may address a public educational need while advancing its own uniquely valuable qualities. Integrally connected to the cultural and ethical prosperity of their societies but removed from the pressures and prejudices of public politics, universities offer a particularly appropriate environment for enhancing our understanding of the volatile yet valuable notion of human rights.