【如需聯絡老師，請寄信至cperezbustillo@gmail.com】
【助教：曾維翎 r08a21007@ntu.edu.tw】
Course will explore contested history of human rights from a global, critical, and intercultural perspective. In the U.S, Western Europe and Latin America international law and human rights are typically taught and conceived of as if they were of uniquely Western, and even more specifically European (or even Anglo-American) origin, within context of Modernity, Enlightenment, and their universalist pretensions. From this perspective, the task for non-Western societies is to Westernize themselves through processes of economic, political, social, and cultural “development” to a degree sufficient to enable the flourishing of the kinds of rights ostensibly enjoyed in Western contexts. Meanwhile global poverty and inequalities are intensifying sharply in the wake of the current COVID 19 pandemic.

This “hegemonic” version of human rights history and theory has been increasingly challenged from “counter-hegemonic” perspectives grounded in the Global South, and within the Global North (e.g immigrant communities and movements and those of other marginalized groups such as people of African descent, women, those identified as LGBTQ, etc.). Such alternative approaches instead emphasize extent to which hegemonic Western conceptualizations and practices of human rights in fact pose key obstacles to the full recognition of these rights, which reflect costs and impacts of historical and contemporary crimes of the West (such as conquest, African slavery, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism), which are understood as constitutive of the emergence and spread of the capitalist mode of production and thus of Modernity itself.

What would it look like if the history, conceptualization, and practice of human rights were taught and approached differently than it is typically in Western contexts? This task is especially urgent in settings such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia where colonial legacies continue to permeate contemporary societies, and in other contexts such as the U.S and Western Europe where the increasing presence of communities rooted in the Global South challenges long held assumptions as to equality, identity, diversity, and inclusion.

本課程將從全球、批判和跨文化的角度探討人權的爭議性歷史。在美國、西歐和拉丁美洲，國際法和人權通常被認為是獨特地西方的，甚至更具體地說，是在現代性、啟蒙運動及其普遍性的背景下起源於歐洲（甚至是英美）。 從這個角度看，非西方社會的任務是通過經濟、政治、社會和文化的「發展」進程使自己西方化，達到足以使西方背景下表面上享有的各種權利蓬勃发展的程度。同時，在目前的COVID-19大流行情況下，全球貧困和不平等現象正在急劇加劇。
這種人權歷史和理論的「霸權」觀點越來越多地受到立足於南半球和北半球（如移民社群和運動以及其他邊緣化群體，如非裔、婦女、LGBTQ族群等）的「反霸權」觀點的挑戰。 這種替代性的取徑相對地強調西方霸權的人權概念化和實踐，實際上對於這些權利受到充分承認構成了關鍵的障礙，並反映了西方歷史上和當代罪行（如征服、非洲奴隸制、種族滅絕、殖民主義、帝國主義和新殖民主義）的代價和影響，這些罪行被理解為資本主義生產模式的出現和傳播，因而也是現代性本身的構成因素。
如果人權的歷史、概念化和實踐的教學和取徑與西方國家通常的做法不同，那會是什麽樣子？在拉丁美洲、非洲和亞洲這樣的環境中，這項任務尤為緊迫，因為在這些地方中殖民主義遺產繼續滲透到當代社會，而在美國和西歐這樣的其他環境中，紮根於南半球的社區越來越多，對長期以來關於平等、身份、多樣性和包容性的假設提出了挑戰。