Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: reconsidering human rights from below
- 2 Sites of rights resistance
- 3 Freedom from want revisited from a local perspective: evolution and challenges ahead
- 4 Relevance of human rights in the glocal space of politics: how to enlarge democratic practice beyond state boundaries and build up a peaceful world order
- 5 The local relevance of human rights: a methodological approach
- 6 Ensuring compliance with decisions by international and regional human rights bodies: the case of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture
- 7 Building rights-based health movements: lessons from the Peruvian experience
- 8 Defining human rights when economic interests are high: the case of the western Shoshone
- 9 Struggling to localise human rights: the experience of indigenous peoples in Chile
- 10 Enforcing environmental rights under Nigeria's 1999 Constitution: the localisation of human rights in the Niger Delta region
- 11 Conflict resolution through cultural rights and cultural wrongs: the Kosovo example
- 12 Epilogue: widening the perspective on the local relevance of human rights
- Index
- References
11 - Conflict resolution through cultural rights and cultural wrongs: the Kosovo example
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: reconsidering human rights from below
- 2 Sites of rights resistance
- 3 Freedom from want revisited from a local perspective: evolution and challenges ahead
- 4 Relevance of human rights in the glocal space of politics: how to enlarge democratic practice beyond state boundaries and build up a peaceful world order
- 5 The local relevance of human rights: a methodological approach
- 6 Ensuring compliance with decisions by international and regional human rights bodies: the case of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture
- 7 Building rights-based health movements: lessons from the Peruvian experience
- 8 Defining human rights when economic interests are high: the case of the western Shoshone
- 9 Struggling to localise human rights: the experience of indigenous peoples in Chile
- 10 Enforcing environmental rights under Nigeria's 1999 Constitution: the localisation of human rights in the Niger Delta region
- 11 Conflict resolution through cultural rights and cultural wrongs: the Kosovo example
- 12 Epilogue: widening the perspective on the local relevance of human rights
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
Responses to linguistic, religious, cultural and ethnic group differences have traditionally been treated from a non-discrimination standpoint (i.e. treating individuals as equal bearers of rights regardless of group belonging). However, this solution has proved insufficient and the approach, necessarily and progressively, has shifted, as Kymlicka states, ‘to supplement traditional human rights with minority rights’. Yet due to the inherent relationship between culture and identity, the special status awarded to minorities still falls short of achieving group identity protection. Assertion and realisation of a group's cultural rights requires a further step, through access to power, decision making and participation in political life (i.e. the fulfilment of civil and political rights).
In this chapter we delve into the fact that international instruments are designed to protect cultural rights, yet in a certain way they detach culture from any type of political expectation in order to avoid, in part, any aspirations to self-determination. Moreover, these instruments confer ‘special’ rights upon individuals only as members of groups, so, in a way, they risk fostering a multiplicity of ‘minority cultures’, focusing more on the ‘minority’ element, than on the ‘culture’ one. We need to ask if the implementation of the existing international instruments on cultural rights builds upon the notion of cohesion and collectiveness, or if it emphasises a disconnection between culture and the identity of the group, even if both of them are social and political concepts defined by the groups themselves. On the other hand, how valid is the definition of each group? How and on what grounds are the cultural definitions accepted, if we deprive them of any political determination and standpoint? In this chapter we analyse the risks of implementing cultural rights as abstract concepts divorced from the realm of politics. We also approach the fact that, if cultural individual rights make no sense, and are thus not fully realised or protected outside the realm of group rights, the question of who defines ‘the group’ and how it is defined, determines the whole basis on which the enjoyment of these rights rests.
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- Information
- The Local Relevance of Human Rights , pp. 295 - 336Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011