The Dark Side of Human Rights: A Postcolonial Reflection

A John P. Humphrey Lecture in Human Rights by Ratna Kapur

Professor Ratna Kapur will examines those features of the human rights project that have propelled it into the current state of despair and disillusionment. She interrogates the foundational claims of human rights – as a progressive, forward-looking, universal project as well as the assumptions about the liberal subject on which it is based. Her talk reveals the dark side of the project and how it has been based on assumptions about difference, the cultural `Other’, produced partly in and through the colonial encounter, which continues to discursively inform the postcolonial present.