Human rights and Latin American southern voices

Guardiola-Rivera, Oscar (2015) Human rights and Latin American southern voices. In: Baxi, U. and Paliwala, A. and McCrudden, C. (eds.) Law's Ethical, Global and Theoretical Contexts: Essays in Honour of William Twining. Law In Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-38. ISBN 9781107116405.

Abstract

What does it mean to say that Western law tends towards Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism? A tendency is an inclination towards a particular type of behaviour; a proclivity or predisposition. Building upon Twining’s insight I am going to argue in this paper that what predisposes the canon and heritage of Western jurisprudence and socio-political theory towards the particular (i.e. ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism) is not its claim towards universality. Rather, it is the specific form of unity and uniqueness assumed by Western law that predisposes it towards a particular ethnocentric behaviour. Western law is seen not as one element among others in the set of humanity’s normative ways, but as the one that defines and measures what counts as part of the set, as the very standard of humanity: an understanding which it projects upon the other peoples it encounters around the world. The intersection opened up by the convergence between law and anthropology is a good place to search for instances of such an inclination, to criticize them, and in the process to try to recover the standpoint of a more universal view of nature and the human.

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