If God were a human rights activist: human rights and the challenge of political theologies.

• Author: de Sousa Santos, Boaventura

Contents Abstract 1. Introduction: Strong Questions and Weak Answers 2. The Globalization of Political Theologies 2.1 The Hegemonic, the Counter-Hegemonic and the Non-Hegemonic 2.2 The Western Resolution of the Religious Question 2.3 A Typology of Political Theologies 2.4 The Case of Revelationist Islam 3. Human Rights in the Contact Zones with Political Theologies 3.1 The Turbulence among Rival Principles 3.2 The Turbulence between Roots and Options 3.3 The Turbulence between the Sacred and the Profane, the Religious and the Secular, the Transcendent and the Immanent 4. Are Other Human Rights Possible? 5. Toward a Post-secularist Conception of Human Rights: Counter-Hegemonic Human Rights and Progressive Theologies 5.1 The Human Subject both as a Concrete Individual and as a Collective Being 5.2 Multiple Dimensions of Unjust Human Suffering 5.3 Suffering of the Flesh 5.4 An Insurgent Radical Will and a Post-Capitalist Horizon 5.5 The Impulse for Inter-Culturality in the Struggles for Human Dignity 5.6 The Narratives of Suffering and Liberation 5.7 The Presence of the World Before or Beyond Interpretation 5.8 The Pneumatikos of Insurgency: the Spirituality of/in Material Struggles for Social Transformation 6 Conclusion Endnotes References 1. Introduction: Strong Questions and Weak Answers

In this time and age, it is not easy to theorise about human rights. Human rights are supposed to be a strong answer to the problems of the world, so strong as to be universally valid. Now, it seems more and more obvious that our time is not one of strong answers. It is rather a time of strong questions and weak answers. This is so because our time is witnessing the final crisis of the hegemony of the socio-cultural paradigm of western modernity and, therefore, it is a time of paradigmatic transition. (1) It is characteristic of a transitional time to be a time of strong questions and weak answers. Given the global reach of this paradigm, brought about by colonialism and imperialism, this transition is present, under different forms, everywhere, even though the questions and answers vary from culture to culture, from world region to world region. But the discrepancy between the strength of the questions and the weakness of the answers seems to be the same everywhere. It is the consequence of the multiplication, in recent times, of contact zones among different cultures, economies, social and political systems, and ways of life, resulting from what is usually called globalization, the most recent version of global capitalism and western modernity. The power asymmetries in these contact zones are today as large, if not larger, as they were in the colonial period. But they are now broader and far more numerous. The contact experience is always an experience of limits and borders. In the current conditions, this experience facilitates the discrepancy between strong questions and weak answers.

Strong questions address not only our specific options for individual and collective life but also the societal and epistemological paradigm that has shaped the current horizon of possibilities within which we make our options. They are paradigmatic in nature and, therefore, they arouse a particular kind of perplexity. Weak answers are those that don't challenge the horizon of possibilities, the still dominant paradigm. They assume that the current paradigm provides answers for all the relevant questions. They, therefore, fail to abate the perplexity caused by the strong questions and may, in fact, increase it. But not all weak answers are the same; there are both weak-strong answers and weak-weak answers. Weak-strong answers represent the maximum possible consciousness of a given epoch. (2) They are strong enough to see the coming collapse of the dominant paradigm and call for the need to go beyond it, even if they have no clear picture of what will come after it. They transform the perplexity caused by the strong question into positive energy. They do this not by pretending that the perplexity is pointless or that it can be eliminated by a simple answer. Rather, they show the limits and the historical nature of the current horizon of possibilities, thereby opening space for social and political innovation. They transform the perplexity into an open field of contradictions in which a relatively unregulated competition among different paradigms or horizons of possibilities may unfold. They help people and movements to travel without tested maps in relatively uncharted territories where strong answers emerge in the form of an historical, cultural and political Not Yet. In other words, they emerge both as possibility and as risk.

Weak-weak answers, in contrast, take the current paradigm or horizon of possibilities as a given and refuse to admit its historical, political and cultural limits. Those unconvinced by the weak answers are invited to surrender.

My argument in this text is that the answers given by conventional human rights thinking and practice to the strong questions of our time are weak-weak answers and that only through a profound theoretical and political reconstruction could they become weak-strong answers. (3) I consider conventional understanding of human rights as having some of the following characteristics: they are universally valid irrespective of the social, political and cultural context in which they operate and of the different human rights regimes existing in different regions of the world; they are premised upon a conception of human nature as individual, self-sustaining and qualitatively different from the non-human nature; what counts as violation of human rights is defined by universal declarations, multilateral institutions (courts and commissions) and established, global (mostly North-based) non-governmental organisations; the recurrent phenomenon of double standards in evaluating compliance with human rights in no way compromises the universal validity of human rights; the respect for human rights is much more problematic in the global South than in the global North.

As a way of illustration I mention two strong questions. The first question can be formulated in this way: if humanity is one alone, why are there so many different principles concerning human dignity and a just society, all of them presumably unique, yet often contradictory among themselves? At the root of the perplexity underlying this question is a recognition that much has been left out of the modern and western understanding of the world.

The conventional answer to this question is that such diversity is only to be recognised to the extent that it does not contradict universal human rights. It is a weak-weak answer because, by postulating the abstract universality of the conception of human dignity that underlies human rights, it dismisses the perplexity underlying the question. The fact that such a conception is western based is considered irrelevant, as the historicity of human rights discourse does not interfere with its ontological status. However fully embraced by hegemonic political thinking, particularly in the global North, this is a weak-weak answer because it reduces the understanding of the world to the western understanding of the world, thus ignoring or trivialising decisive cultural and political experiences and initiatives in the countries of the global South. This is the case of movements of resistance that have been emerging against oppression, marginalisation, and exclusion, whose ideological bases have often very little to do with the dominant western cultural and political references prevalent throughout the twentieth century. These movements do not formulate their struggles in terms of human rights, and, on the contrary, rather formulate them, often enough, according to principles that contradict the dominant principles of human rights. These movements are often grounded in multi-secular cultural and historical identities, often including religious militancy. Without trying to be exhaustive, I mention three such movements, of very distinct political meanings: the indigenous movements, particularly in Latin America; the "new" rise of traditionalism in Africa; and the Islamic insurgency. In spite of the huge differences among them, these movements all start out from cultural and political references that are non-western, even if constituted by the resistance to western domination.

Conventional human rights thinking lacks the theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements, and even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative ideologies or symbolic universes will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights.

The second strong question confronting our time is the following. What degree of coherence is to be required between the principles, whatever they may be, and the practices that take place in their name? This question gains a particular urgency in contact zones, because it is there that the discrepancy between principles and practices tends to be highest. The ideological investments to conceal such discrepancy are as massive as the brutality of practices. In this case, too, the answer of conventional human rights is a weak-weak one. It limits itself to accepting as natural or inevitable the fact that the affirmation of human rights principles does not lose credibility in spite of their increasingly more systematic and glaring violation in practice, both by state and non-state actors alike. We keep visiting the fairs of the industry of human rights with ever new products (Global Compact, Millenium Goals, War on Poverty, etc.), but, on the way, we have to go by an increasingly more ungraspable graveyard of betrayed promises.

My aim in this text is to start from a specific instance of conventional human rights as a...