Safe Spaces Human Rights Education in Diverse Contexts

DISCOURSE, BETRAYAL, CRITIQUE
objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972:49), structures both the human and
the right. In constituting the object, human rights became the dominant socially
constructed system of rules conveyed through HRE as its primary conduit. These
patterns and regularities are made visible by human rights critiques that suggest a
multifaceted reconfiguration of HRE. A new HRE is required, one whose fidelity is
spawned by incessant betrayals by relentless human rights critiques. To do
otherwise is to be anti-educational and anti-human rights.
It is undemanding to point to the regularities and patterns of HRE as a social
practices and a semiological system. Their patterns and regularities are obvious
both in human rights standard generation processes and HRE practices. It is within
the generation of standards that human rights education (HRE) locates its
fountainhead. Suarez, Ramirez and Koo (2009:209) capture this point as follows:
National commitments to this human rights regime indicate probity and are
strongly influenced by the action of other nation-states, but for these national
commitments to take on a specifically educational tone, an educational logic
of appropriateness must be firmly in place. In such a world, policy makers
and educators take for granted that the key to the national good lies in
the socialized individual, and the school is chartered to accomplish this goal.
The “interaction” between the international human rights regime and the
worldwide legitimacy of education facilitates the movement from human
rights to human rights education A growing sense of a globalized
environment makes it easier to imagine that all sorts of problems are world
problems, including human rights problems. This factor also contributes to
the growth of an international human rights regime and its transformation
into human rights education.
Though the above passage uncritically overstates its case, it is indicative of the
grandiosity of HRE talk. This posture is directly linked to the mushrooming of
HRE over the past fifteen years (Andreapoulus & Claude, 1997; Campbell, 2001;
Claude, 1996; Tibbitts, 2002) that sources its currency from the perceived
consensus on human rights universals 15 . Ramirez, Suarez and Meyer (2006) refer
to the “Worldwide Rise of Human Rights Education” whilst Suarez and Ramirez
(2004:22) validate the “dramatic expansion” of HRE since the mid-1970s;
pronounce on the “strength and the success of human rights education at the global
level” (ibid:23), and at the same time observe that HRE is under-theorized (ibid:22).
Under-theorized strengths precisely signify the paradoxes and dilemmas associated
with HRE.
The self-referentiality that emerged between declarations, conventions,
covenants and HRE practices over the past six decades exhibit a variety of patterns
and regularities that are easily discernable from training manuals, textbooks and
the general United Nations narrative on HRE. Thus, HRE operates as a habituated
action guided by the values and ideologies of human rights itself. It is discursive
since it constructs objects (such as the bearers of rights or vulnerable groups) and
therefore one can empirically weave together a set of nodal points which partially
fix meaning as an articulatory practice. For HRE, these nodal points are obvious
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