Book Notes

Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique. By Makau Mutua. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. 256. $49.95, cloth.

As the title of the book suggests, Makau Mutua does not direct his critique at the surface expressions of the human rights movement but at the very core of its ideology. The director of the Human Rights Center at SUNY-Buffalo Law School, Mutua makes a strong case that the human rights corpus—and by extension the movement—is not as universal and multicultural as it claims to be. While Mutua repeatedly affirms his respect for the movement’s noble goals and ideals, he contends that its Eurocentric bias has led to the unwitting imposition of Western political, economic, and cultural norms on non-Western societies.

Mutua believes that the tension in the movement between the principles of universality and respect for diversity must be reconciled by a painstaking process of examining local cultures for those values that coincide with widespread principles of human dignity. He argues that the conception of human rights, far from being a fully realized concept, needs to be overhauled and transformed into a truly “multicultural, inclusive, and deeply political” initiative. Rather than propose what a restructured corpus would look like, he offers this book as part of his ongoing project to stimulate a more nuanced, critical dialogue that leads the movement towards this goal.

In the first chapter, “Human Rights as a Metaphor,” Mutua examines how the Eurocentric nature of the movement is embedded in the grand narrative of human rights as expressed through the triple metaphor of “savages-victims-saviors.” The savage, or human rights violator, is typically a non-Western state, but as states are merely the expression of their cultures, it is really the culture that becomes stigmatized. The metaphor of the victim is the driving force of the human rights ideology, but by focusing on victimization and powerlessness in the face of endless atrocities, the movement ends up dehumanizing the individuals in the oppressed society. Mutua reserves his harshest analysis for the metaphor of the savior, which is invoked by the actors—the UN, NGOs, Western governments, and charities—when they “rescue” victims from savages. But as human rights discourse is so often annexed to the advancement of liberal democracy, free markets, and Western culture, the human rights actor is really the latest in a lineage of European dominance that includes the colonial administrator and Christian missionary.

In the next chapter, “Human Rights as an Ideology,” Mutua presents his typology of the movement’s schools of thought, which agree in their belief in basic rights but differ with regards to priorities, political orientation, and strategies. The “conventional doctrinalists,” the foot soldiers of the movement, are primarily the international NGOs. While lauding their energy and commitment, Mutua criticizes the white, European slant of their leadership. The “constitutionalists” are the academics of the movement—including Louis Henkin, Henry Steiner, Philip Alston, and Thomas Franck—who

view the human rights corpus as a constitutional framework. The “cultural pluralists,” to which Mutua presumably belongs, are non-Western thinkers who accept the human rights ideology and its European genesis, but who criticize its political implications, and emphasis on the individual, and its prioritization of certain rights. “Political strategists” are governments, especially the United States, and institutions, including the IMF and World Bank, who champion human rights inconsistently, near-sightedly, and usually for political benefit.

Mutua then turns, in “Human Rights and the African Fingerprint,” to a more specific examination of how the Eurocentricism of the movement conflicts with and misunderstands the African conception of human rights as it is found in African human rights documents. Through an explication of the concepts of duty and peoples’ rights, as codified in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, he insists that the movement should appreciate—if not incorporate—their contributions to a universal notion of human rights. The Western mindset instead misinterprets these concepts as restrictions on individual autonomy and loopholes for oppressive regimes. Mutua makes a perceptive argument that a focus on individual rights is not a universal concept, but one that reflects the dynamics of an industrialized society. For developing and often illogically constructed African states, a focus on values such as solidarity, interdependence, and responsibility is more essential to the formation of vibrant societies.

In the two chapters that follow, Mutua examines the uneasy intersection of religion and human rights in Africa. First, he focuses on the tension in human rights discourse between the right to practice one’s religion and the right to proselytize to others. As the former is rooted in the more fundamental right of self-determination, it should not be trumped by the latter. He argues that the missionary, messianic religions of Christianity and Islam reinforced the subjugation of pre-colonial African society, and that Africans’ rejection of their indigenous religions—and thus their culture—has led to a debilitating self-hatred.

Mutua then stretches somewhat beyond a discussion of human rights to assert that embracing traditional African religions should be a key element in repairing this post-colonial identity crisis. Rather than reject or marginalize traditional religions—as most African states have done—they should follow the example of Benin, which established National Voodoo Day in 1996. He invokes the African Charter’s imperative that African traditions, civilization, and values be integrated into any human rights corpus for the continent.

In the final chapter, Mutua focuses on how the reborn state of South Africa embodies both the potential and the limitations of rights discourse. While human rights provided a medium for the new Constitution’s bold steps towards equal protection and societal reconstruction, rights language has tied the government’s hands in many areas. This is exemplified by white landowners’ invocation of the right to property to resist meaningful land

redistribution. Mutua also examines the treatment of women, the legal system, and the security apparatus to demonstrate that while progress has been made, the government must expand its rhetorical tools to adress the country’s intransigent social and economic disparities.

While one could extensively critique Mutua’s arguments in the context of the debate between the movement’s universalists and relativists, it suffices to say here that his book does suffer from a few internal flaws. For example, in discussing the tension between the state and human rights, Mutua could more directly address the distinction between government violations, like election tampering or police brutality, and controversial societal practices, like female genital mutilation. It is difficult to interpret the former as expressions of a national culture or the latter as state-imposed. Also, while he is quick to explain and qualify his most controversial arguments, he sometimes glosses over counterarguments and contradictory information, occasionally burying them in footnotes. Nonetheless, Mutua’s book presents an incisive and well-written argument for a more critical examination of the human rights corpus’s claim to universality, and as such is a valuable contribution to an important dialogue within the movement.

—Jesse Tampio

Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 16, Spring 2003