Human Rights: India and the West
Ashwani Peetush and Jay Drydyk
Abstract
The question of how to arrive at a consensus on human rights norm in a diverse, pluralistic, and interconnected global environment is critical. This volume is a contribution to an intercultural understanding of human rights in the context of India and its relationship to the West. The legitimacy of the global legal, economic, and political order is increasingly premised on the discourse of international human rights. Yet the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights developed with little or no consultation from non-Western nations such as India. In response, there has developed an extensive ... More
The question of how to arrive at a consensus on human rights norm in a diverse, pluralistic, and interconnected global environment is critical. This volume is a contribution to an intercultural understanding of human rights in the context of India and its relationship to the West. The legitimacy of the global legal, economic, and political order is increasingly premised on the discourse of international human rights. Yet the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights developed with little or no consultation from non-Western nations such as India. In response, there has developed an extensive literature and cross-cultural analysis of human rights in the areas of African, East-Asian, and Islamic studies, yet there is a comparative dearth of conceptual research relating to India. As problematically, there is an lacuna in the previous literature; it simply stops short at analyzing how Western understandings of human rights may be supported from within various non-Western cultural self-understandings; yet, surely, there is more to this issue. The chapters in this collection pioneer a distinct approach that takes such deliberation to a further level by examining what it is that the West itself may have to learn from various Indian articulations of human rights as well.
Keywords:
diversity,
pluralism,
interconnectedness,
intercultural understanding,
United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights,
cross-cultural analysis,
international human rights,
global human rights,
non-Western,
international consensus
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199453528 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199453528.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Ashwani Peetush, editor
Associate Professor, Philosophy, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario
Jay Drydyk, editor
Professor, Philosophy, Carleton University, Ottawa
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