FEARLESS SPEECH: SEEKING FREEDOM BEYOND THE (LIBERAL) FISHBOWL
In writing this review, we have accepted her invitation to join her search by reflecting on our own research and how it is challenged, changed, reimagined and/or encouraged by her journey in this book.2 I Dianne Otto Many readers will already be familiar with Kapur's powerful critique of the hu...
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| Published in: | Melbourne Journal of International Law 2019, Vol.20 (1), p.1-13 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Review |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | In writing this review, we have accepted her invitation to join her search by reflecting on our own research and how it is challenged, changed, reimagined and/or encouraged by her journey in this book.2 I Dianne Otto Many readers will already be familiar with Kapur's powerful critique of the human rights project and its devastating implications for freedom, especially that of sexual, gendered and raced, subaltern subjects.3 In this book, her critique reaches its zenith, catapulting readers into an entirely new paradigm by insisting, to begin with, that human rights be recognised for what they are and that we need to search for freedom elsewhere. Yet, just as Foucault was excoriated for his engagement with Islam at the time of the Iranian revolution, Kapur elicited hostility from many in the liberal legal academy in the process of writing this book, especially those working with human rights law. Kapur obliquely alludes to these reactions many times in the book, asking again and again why liberalism is such a closed system of knowledge; why non-liberal knowledges are so roundly dismissed as backward, dangerous, threatening, uncivilised; and how people living those knowledges are rendered illegible outsiders - subalterns - who need rescue by human rights from their barbaric traditions and circumstances. In this regard, I track the emergence of consensus as a technique of treaty interpretation by regional human rights courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights ('ECtHR').14 I also explore the use of consensus decisionmaking by international human rights organisations.15 Finally, I examine the general narrative of 'international consensus' in which international human rights law - in particular, instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights16 - are situated.17 Kapur's book has helped me to unpack the work that consensus does in these different contexts in four key ways: through her metaphors of the fishbowl and the rope-snake, discussion of alterity and call for reflexivity. |
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| ISSN: | 1444-8602 1444-8610 |