The Politics of Human Rights in South Asia

Human rights have inspired domestic and transnational social movements that have toppled repressive regimes and won protection for oppressed and marginalized people these movements have emerged as powerful political actors in their own right. While the idea of human rights has provoked sometimes-sharp controversy, it has nonetheless become the dominant normative or moral discourse of global politics and a major standard of international legitimacy. Why? Although this text focuses on the post war era of human rights and on their study within the discipline of politics, understanding the contemporary state of human rights politics and practice requires some sense of their logical and appeal. It would be impossible to summarize the history of human rights here; instead, in the following sections I shall focus on several essential features of human rights that help to explain their emergence and their success, as well as some of the controversies surrounding them. The point of doing so is duties defined the social roles that constituted society they were in this sense conservative norm preserving and stabilizing order preserving features of society. Rights were often also anchored in cosmological conceptions or religious views that interpreted the existing social order as divinely orchestrated, or at least sanctioned.