Human Rights beyond the Liberal Script: A Morphological Approach

Abstract

While recent scholarship has turned to the increasing fragmentation of global human rights discourses, the often competing ideological projects in which different understandings of human rights are embedded have received comparatively scant attention. Instead, human rights are treated as isolated norms. Although treated as isolated, human rights norms are frequently simultaneously understood against the implicit backdrop of liberal assumptions about political order and human agency, thereby obscuring alternative human rights conceptions. This research note seeks to move our understanding of human rights beyond the liberal script. Drawing on advances in the fields of intellectual history and political theory, it develops a morphological approach that treats norms not only as individual standards of appropriate behavior but as complex units of meanings. These meanings only emerge in larger ideational formations in which varying notions of human rights are temporarily fixed through their positioning toward other concepts. This morphological understanding of human rights as part of larger conceptual arrangements allows for their analysis beyond the liberal script as the research note shows by way of two illustrative case studies, which focus on human rights beyond liberal notions of democracy and the rule of law as well as beyond the human as ontologically singular.