Cultural Diversity and Human Rights: a propos of a minority educational reform

I would argue for the second approach. Human rights are organic,
evolving, processual social/political phenomena (Morris, 2006),
embedded in, and reflective of, social and political structures and
ideologies. As such, the right to education is best seen as a
transnational education policy, and is, thus, as replete with
tensions, contradictions and ambiguities as national education
policies. Education policy, as noted by Ball (1994, 2008), is
complex, a confluence of economic, political and cultural contexts
of influence, text production and practice. Thus policy is not
technique, it is a specific set of political technologies which are
enacted, practised, and resisted. Policy is a process embedded in
social, political and economic structures and relations. As process
of regulation and resistance, ambiguity of concepts and diversity of
perspectives is the stuff of policy.

Therefore the abstractions, tensions and inconsistencies in the
human right to education provide vital spaces for, in the words of
Klug (2000), political action, or in those of Douzinas (2007), moral
claims and ways of resisting power and oppression. All these
complexities in human rights discourse in general, and the right to
education specifically, open up spaces for political dialogue,
argument, action, resistance and progressive change. Knowing
where the tensions lie, and what their origins and specificities may
be, is one way of opening up these critical spaces.

The project we are celebrating here today, developing curriculum
and pedagogy for the Muslim minority in Thrace, is one example of
human rights discourse providing a complex policy ‘toolkit’ (Ball,

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