Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
Table 5.6 Regional human rights regimes
Regime Year began Membership Political impact
European Convention 1953 Most of Europe Commission and Court able to make
supranational verdicts. Individual
petition possible
Banjul Charter 1981 Most of Africa Commission promotes human rights
but there is no implementing body
Inter-American 1978 N. & S. America Commission and Court but has little
Convention
influence.
Arab Commission 1968 Arab states of No Convention developed. Speaks
Middle East out on Arab rights in Israel
The Commonwealth 1931 Former British Has suspended membership and
colonies
imposed political sanctions on
member states for human rights
abuses
rights riding roughshod over the minority cultures of the world prompted leading
anthropologists, including Melville Herskovits and Ruth Benedict, to petition the UN
Commission for Human Rights.
Standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that
any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes
of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any
Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole.
(American Anthropologist Association 1947: 542)
In Benedict’s view, and that of most traditional anthropologists, the notion of
what is morally right can only equate to what is customary within a given society
(Benedict 1934). Hence the notion of rights pertaining to all humankind is not ‘natural’.
Rights are the rules of mutual give and take which develop over time within a society
in order for it to function peacefully and survive. Rights are, in effect, implicit agreements
arrived at within societies. The American Anthropological Association (AAA),
as a counter to criticisms from human rights activists that they and their discipline
was immoral, issued a declaration in 1999 giving qualified support for UN human
rights legislation. The AAA now argue that human rights are ‘an evolving concept’
and that they have come to see global policy as a way of campaigning to preserve
human cultural difference (AAA 1999). Anthropology as a discipline, however,
continues to be very influenced by the positivist epistemological belief that value
judgements over cultures other than one’s own are an imposition of those values.
In contemporary philosophy perhaps the leading exponent of relativism is
Gilbert Harman, whose writings may have influenced Zemin since he argues the
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