Promotionskolleg Human Rights and Social Justice

Vom 20. bis zum 22. November 2024 findet die internationale Konferenz "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Social Justice" in Fulda statt. Die Konferenzsprache ist Englisch. 

Zum Inhalt: 

Human Rights and Social Justice are distinct but intersecting areas of academic inquiry. Both can be considered as regulative ideas within politics, law, public debates, civic engagement and scientific research. They intersect both in the areas of social, economic, and cultural rights and in a normative claim in favor of an enlargement of entitlements decoupled from the national membership of the bearers of those entitlements.

On a discursive level, human rights and social justice show differences too: Since the 1970s the debate on human rights has been growing into a “last utopia” (Moyn 2010). According to Moyn’s argumentation, human rights, promoted by political scientists and international law scholars, have survived the demise of the regulative ideas of capitalism and socialism as means to improve the living conditions of the world population, thereby offering a vision of social justice at the global scale.

There is also a growing field of sociological research focusing on the human rights paradigm. The “human rights enterprise” (Frezzo 2015; William et al. 2015), for example, focusses on the terrain of power struggles between states, private interests, and social movements. This enterprise consists of ideas, actors, organizations and deliberational processes which constitute a counterforce to state actors and pushes them to uphold their obligations to different kinds of human rights treaties (so-called “paradox of empty promises”). At the same time, we can observe a shift in the debate from a liberal (“negative”) notion towards a protective (“positive”) understanding of human rights which centers on “vulnerability” and inclusion (Turner 2006).

The concept of social justice grew out of research on social inequality and thus expands its scope beyond existing regulation. Scientific inquiries about social justice are basically interested in ways to achieve a societal structure “in which all people have largely equal access to the necessary material and social resources necessary to lead a fulfilling life.” (Wright 2010). According to the social justice debate, the relationship between law and justice is sometimes convergent, sometimes contradictory. Another area of discussion concerns the claim to universality of human rights, which is frequently put into question (Mende 2021; Benhabib 2016; Barreto 2013; Maldonado-Torres 2017). Also the traditional difference between human and non-human actors has been put under scrutiny in the context of the climate crisis (Latour 2020; Haraway 2016; Chakrabarty 2021).