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

1996) between citizens and state, in that it constructs all people as
fundamentally and essentially equal in our humanity, the
sameness we all share. Relativism is also a fundamental principle
of human rights, in that it is governments of nation states who have
the obligation to provide, protect and promote human rights.

These obligations are enacted in specific social/national contexts
which have different political cultures, traditions and histories, thus
making human rights a site of cultural relativism. This,
paradoxically, introduces communitarianism into human rights, in
that individual rights subjects are socially and relationally
constituted and thus not separable from the community values
embedded and expressed in social relations. Thus this analytical
separation of universalist, relativist and communitarian approaches
to human rights is an abstraction, and in real-life contexts all three
constitute the parameters of human rights.

To add to this complexity of analytically different perspectives and
approaches, in this paper I argue that the tensions and ambiguities
between universalism, relativism and communitarianism can be
found in the right to education itself, not just in how this right is
interpreted and enacted. In other words, universalism, relativism
and communitarianism should not be viewed as mutually exclusive
ways of seeing human rights. Instead, these three approaches are
co-constitutive of human rights discourse. The aim of this paper is,
thus, to deconstruct the right to education and to excavate the
tensions and ambiguities between universalism, relativism and
communitarianism within the right itself.

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