{"title":"Meditating on rights and responsibility: remarks on ‘the limits and burdens of rights’","authors":"Kathryn Sikkink","doi":"10.1017/S1752971920000640","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Kratochwil's critique of rights as a dominant moral theory that cannot avoid ‘hegemonic’ politics appears to be too crude. This article suggests that more theoretical and practical attention to the responsibilities necessary to implement rights could address some of Kratochwil's concerns. The language of political and ethical responsibilities is often missing from the practical action discourse of human rights. The article emphasizes the multitude of potential ‘agents of justice’ and how they can discharge forward-looking responsibilities in open and discretionary ways.","PeriodicalId":46771,"journal":{"name":"International Theory","volume":"13 1","pages":"574 - 580"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2000,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1752971920000640","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Theory","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971920000640","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
Abstract Kratochwil's critique of rights as a dominant moral theory that cannot avoid ‘hegemonic’ politics appears to be too crude. This article suggests that more theoretical and practical attention to the responsibilities necessary to implement rights could address some of Kratochwil's concerns. The language of political and ethical responsibilities is often missing from the practical action discourse of human rights. The article emphasizes the multitude of potential ‘agents of justice’ and how they can discharge forward-looking responsibilities in open and discretionary ways.
期刊介绍:
Editorial board International Theory (IT) is a peer reviewed journal which promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normative aspects of world politics respectively. IT is open to theory of absolutely all varieties and from all disciplines, provided it addresses problems of politics, broadly defined and pertains to the international. IT welcomes scholarship that uses evidence from the real world to advance theoretical arguments. However, IT is intended as a forum where scholars can develop theoretical arguments in depth without an expectation of extensive empirical analysis. IT’s over-arching goal is to promote communication and engagement across theoretical and disciplinary traditions. IT puts a premium on contributors’ ability to reach as broad an audience as possible, both in the questions they engage and in their accessibility to other approaches. This might be done by addressing problems that can only be understood by combining multiple disciplinary discourses, like institutional design, or practical ethics; or by addressing phenomena that have broad ramifications, like civilizing processes in world politics, or the evolution of environmental norms. IT is also open to work that remains within one scholarly tradition, although in that case authors must make clear the horizon of their arguments in relation to other theoretical approaches.