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Human rights and citizenship education: re-positioning the debate

Dina Kiwan
a a

Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Available online: 21 Feb 2012

To cite this article: Dina Kiwan (2012): Human rights and citizenship education: re-positioning the debate, Cambridge Journal of Education, 42:1, 1-7 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2011.652402

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Cambridge Journal of Education Vol. 42, No. 1, March 2012, 17

EDITORIAL Human rights and citizenship education: re-positioning the debate

I am delighted to act as Guest Editor and to introduce this special issue on Human Rights and Citizenship Education, which is based on a selection of papers drawn from the 2009 annual conference of the International Centre for Education for Democratic Citizenship (ICEDC), University of London.1 This highly successful conference hosted a range of eminent keynote speakers, including Professor Daniele Archibugi, Professor Bill Bowring, and Dr Hugh Starkey, whose articles appear in this special issue. In addition, a number of papers were selected from the conference, where papers were presented from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary elds including education, law and political philosophy, as well as papers from policymaker and practitioner perspectives. As a truly international conference, presenters came from over 15 countries, including Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Norway, Taiwan, USA, and South Africa, as well as from across the UK. In this introductory piece, three key themes are highlighted for debate in the often controversial relationship between human rights and citizenship/citizenship education. The papers in this special issue are positioned in relation to these three key themes. Special issue themes This special issue provides an important opportunity to revisit the debate about the relationship between human rights and citizenship education. From a variety of perspectives, this special issue considers the implications philosophically, sociologically, legally, and in educational terms of the distinction between the more universalistic human rights accorded to all because of their membership of the human species, and the more particularistic citizenship rights, accorded to those who are members of a political community that is, accorded to those that have formal citizenship status. I have conceptualised the papers as addressing the following three themes: (1) Human rights and citizenship: complementary or competing conceptions?; (2) Justications for human rights; and (3) Examining human rights and citizenship in different cultural contexts. Whilst these themes are not mutually exclusive, and whilst the papers do not exclusively fall into only one of the above three themes, I propose that this approach allows for highlighting key themes addressed across the special issue as a whole. Human rights and citizenship: complementary or competing conceptions? The rise of human rights can be situated in the context of post-World War II, with the adoption of the Charter of the United Nations in 1945, followed in 1948 by the
ISSN 0305-764X print/ISSN 1469-3577 online 2012 University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2011.652402 http://www.tandfonline.com

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passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document takes the form of a declaration of basic minimum standards that citizens can (or should) expect from the nation-state; it subsequently led to the development and adoption in 1966 of two legally binding treaties the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Douzinas, 2007). In philosophical terms, contemporary conceptions of human rights have their roots in eighteenth-century Western European theory framed legally in terms of the rights of the individual against the state (Leary, 1990). It has been argued that the source of human rights is the individuals moral nature (Freeman, 1994). While international human rights instruments clearly have been developed in response to, and indeed reect particular contemporary socio-political concerns and events, they nevertheless reect a particular philosophical understanding of what it means to be a human being (Kiwan, 2008). For example, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights refers to the human rights of all human beings, linking it to the idea of the dignity of the human person (United Nations., 1948). Hence human rights are conceptualised in terms of a particular understanding of what it means to be a human being that is, to be a human being is essentially a universal moral experience. Contemporary human rights discourses are increasingly being coupled to discourses on citizenship and citizenship education. It has been proposed, for example, that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is an ideal basis for citizenship education, arguing that rights are central to concepts of citizenship and democracy in clarifying the standards which the citizens agree to share (Alderson, 2000, p. 115). In philosophical terms, human rights are conceived as natural, rather than being derived from the state. Underpinning human rights is the notion of common humanity, based on ethical and legal conceptualisations of the individual. Yet in terms of practice, clearly the possession and exercise of human rights cannot occur outside of a political community. Whilst citizenship is also a contested concept (Kiwan, 2008) with competing discourses locating the community at local, national and global levels, as well as conceptions that are participative as opposed to more passive conceptions citizenship rights are underpinned in relation to a political community, based on political and legal understandings of the individual (Kiwan, 2005). Douzinas (2007) argues that the term human rights is problematic and paradoxical in that it combines law and morality, description and prescription (p. 9). The word rights indicates that it is a legal category, whilst the term human refers to a moral framing of the individual in relation to the law. As human rights can be claims that may not actually be recognised in law, this entails operating in the domain of aspiration as opposed to legal reality what Douzinas (2007) describes as the confounding of the real and the ideal characteristic of human rights discourse (p. 10). This argument can be juxtaposed with the approaches of Archibugi and Starkey, the rst two papers of this special issue, where Archibugi argues for cosmopolitan democracy promoted through, for example, a global rule of law, and Starkey proposes that a utopian and cosmopolitan vision of human rights has the potential to underpin citizenship education. In Archibugis paper on cosmopolitan democracy that opens the special issue, he highlights a crucial contradiction that whilst democracy is promoted as a universally superior system, globalisation and global systems themselves are not run

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according to democratic values. As a political theorist of international relations, as well as an advisor to the EU and various UN agencies, his core argument is that democracy need not be limited to the boundaries of the state, but that it can also inform international organisations and global politics. However, he warns against the misapprehension that there is a causal link between democracy and peace. Instead he asserts that peace can only be sustainably achieved through the internal constitution of the individual state in question, and moreover exporting democracy through war contradicts the democratic processes this supposedly builds on. He proposes that cosmopolitan democracy can be dened in terms of an international system based on cooperation and dialogue in order to foster authentic grassroots democratic processes. This can be conceptualised in terms of linked levels of governance local, state, regional and global. Archibugi proposes that cosmopolitan democracy may be promoted through the domains of developing a global rule of law, direct participation of stake-holders in trans-border political decisions, and the possibility to give voice to citizens through a World Parliamentary Assembly. Whilst Archibugi is not an educationalist, the inclusion of this paper in this special issue contains important ideas for an educationalist audience to contemplate with regard to its potential implications for citizenship education. Starkeys paper applies some of the themes of cosmopolitanism discussed in Archibugis paper, focussing on the nature of the democratic processes, and drawing out their educational implications. In particular, he proposes that education is critically important in the transmission of universal principles, in order to live together. According to Starkey, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seen as a cosmopolitan text in perspective with a utopian vision. He argues for a cosmopolitan citizenship education, suggesting that such an approach has the most potential to be inclusive in diverse multicultural societies, and proposes that human rights are the utopian and cosmopolitan vision that can inform such a citizenship education. Starkeys position is challenged by Hung, although a different theoretical argument is presented and developed. Hung warns against the theoretical conation of human rights and citizenship, which leads to forms of citizenship education that are premised or underpinned by a commitment to human rights principles. Drawing theoretical inspiration from Agamben, Merleau-Monty and Iris Marion Young, Hung argues that the notion of a global community instead of promoting the maximal inclusion that it intends can actually undermine inclusion through promoting homogeneity and thus acts in an exclusionary manner. Hung draws out the educational implications for human rights education, which she explicitly distinguishes from her recommendations for citizenship education. Justications for human rights It is often argued by human rights proponents that justications for human rights are linked to claims of universality. Yet Donnelly (2007) acknowledges that some accounts of the universality of human rights are problematic empirically, philosophically or politically (p. 281). As a way forward he attempts to delineate different forms of universality where he defends functional and legal accounts of universality, whilst conceding the probable indefensibility of anthropological and ontological universality. Functional universality refers to the idea that human rights arose within a particular socio-economic and political context of modernity;

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however, this does not necessarily logically support Donnellys claim that human rights represent the most effective response to a wide range of standard threats to human dignity (p. 287) and the only effective means to assure human dignity in societies dominated by markets and states (p. 288). As such, functional universality cannot be presented as a justication for the universality of human rights. Donnelly (2007) also proposes the idea of overlapping consensus universality, where he argues that international legal universality is reected in moral and political theory, and as such he proposes that those coming from a range of different religious, moral or philosophical doctrines might ostensibly be able to achieve an overlapping consensus. He concludes by proposing a relative universality distinguishing between the universality at the level of concept and at the level of practice. However, the observation that there may be an overlapping consensus amongst different traditions at the level of concepts is not in itself the justication for universality of human rights. Goodhart (2008) argues that human rights are a resource for people in terms of aspiration rather than moral truth and as such the legitimacy of human rights does not come from proving universality. He is troubled by Donnellys concept of the relative universality of human rights, arguing instead that the legitimacy of human rights instead comes from their global appeal. Clearly, however, legitimacy does not stem from universality, rather than the reverse, as this reduces legitimacy to democratic popularity (Donnelly, 2008), confounding legal grounding with democratic grounding (Ferrara, 2003), and also potentially raising the accusation of imperial humanitarianism2 (Donnelly, 2007, p. 298). So how else might justications for human rights be framed? Simpson (1997) highlights Carol Gilligans (1982) distinction between a justice perspective which invokes rights where people are primarily viewed as independent and separate beings, from a care perspective an approach that emphasises connection, concern for relationships and responsibilities. From a justice perspective, self-interest and personal choice precede connection and action; in addition, obligations are always seen to stem from rights, rather than strictly obligation per se that is, being central to morality in the care perspective. Simpson goes on to argue that rights as theoretical entities do little useful work and warns us of the predominance of rights talk in the language of politics what Douzinas (2007) calls the ideology after the end of ideologies (p. 33), where often rights talk obliges no one in particular as they do not arise from specic relationships. In addition, such rights thinking which is ultimately dependent on its usefulness, might provide an explanatory function, but ultimately does not provide justication for such a way of thinking which is crucially important if we are interested in the validity of rights thinking (Simpson, 1997). Indeed, Douzinas (2007) argues that an overarching normative framework for human rights cannot be achieved, but rather human rights, although supposedly meant to operate above politics (p. 11), are operationalised in the context of the interests, negotiation and compromises of states (p. 11). This raises a structural problem with respect to the operationalising of human rights. Whilst human rights claims can challenge existing inequalities, they must appeal to those very structures to make their claims (Benhabib, 2005; Douzinas, 2007; Soysal, 1994). Human rights also act to depoliticise exclusion and conict by framing these issues in terms of individual claims with a corresponding legal remedy, which Douzinas eloquently describes as for the rights fanatics, history ends in the universal acceptance of human rights which turn political conict into technical litigation (Douzinas, 2000, p. 14).

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Bowrings paper, in contrast to the cosmopolitan and utopian vision of human rights championed by Starkey, argues that the presentation of human rights is always contested. He highlights a number of key features pertaining to the UK context that compromise its implementation of human rights and human rights education. This includes the UKs refusal to recognise economic and social rights, and the failure to come to terms with Empire and the slave trade that further compromises the recognition and implementation of human rights. By invoking a comparison with France, Bowring elucidates how the development of human rights is contextually dependent on a series of revolutionary struggles. In this way, human rights are not dependent on theoretical justications in terms of universality as advocated by Donnelly (2007; 2008), but are more in line with the approach to rights from a care perspective (Gilligan, 1982), where rights are contextualised in terms of relationships between people and groups of people, and dependent on struggles for rights. He concludes by making a number of pedagogical suggestions with regards to the teaching of human rights. The next paper, McCowans paper, provides a theoretical exploration of the diverse justications made for promoting human rights within education, where he draws the useful distinction between status-based and instrumental approaches. A further distinction is made between instrumental approaches that might undermine the nature of rights, and those that can be complementary. McCowan offers a cautionary note to approaches that he describes as partially instrumental. Whilst recognising that instrumental justications are provided to encourage governments to adopt such approaches, he warns against dressing up principled arguments in pragmatic terms as rights-based approaches may be abandoned if other approaches are found to be more efcacious. The educational implications of separating learning processes from outcomes are discussed. Examining human rights and citizenship in different cultural contexts Theoretical debates relating to the universality of human rights come to life when we consider what this means in practice, by examining the applications of human rights, citizenship, education for human rights and education for citizenship in different cultural contexts. It is argued by some that human rights are essentially a Western construct that do not translate well in non-Western contexts, whilst others argue that human rights are universal, and should therefore be legitimate within any cultural context. Different cultures clearly hold different conceptions of what it means to be a human being, as to be a citizen, as well as different constructions of individual and group identity, which all impact on how human rights and citizenship are represented in legal terms. In considering how identity is represented in law, Douzinas (2007) argues that it should be recognised that identity is a negotiation, mediated by legal, social and political institutions; moreover, legal recognition implies that to be a person you must be in the law, you must have rights (Douzinas, 2007, p. 39). Not only are human rights constructed differently in different nation-state contexts, they are constructed differentially within a given nation-state depending on the legal position of the individual, thus undermining the logic of the universality of human rights in law. This becomes clear when we consider the position of migrants. Soysal (1994) has shown the blurring of citizen and non-citizen status in the European context, where she illustrated that entitlement to many social and economic rights is not dependent on citizenship status. However, whilst legal

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migrants are often entitled to many civil and social rights in European nation-states, as well as being protected by legislation and the transnational level and sub-nationally, the same cannot be said for refugees, asylum seekers and illegal (or irregular) migrants. In this regard, Soysals (1994) optimistic conclusion that the logic of personhood supercedes the logic of national citizenship (p. 164) clearly does not apply to those of irregular status. Douzinas (2007, p. 44) further argues that society is presented as a patchwork where differences are domesticated which suppresses the ability to develop political resistance. This is because the language and practice of rights present difference as natural, but are not able to contextualise the sociocultural and political conditions that can lead to the exploitation of those that come to be dened as other. It is important, in educational terms, that pupils become aware that human rights as a supposedly universal concept not only takes on different cultural forms across different societal contexts, but that within any given society, ones human rights are inextricably linked with ones citizenship status in law. The last two papers of the issue address the fundamental debate surrounding the universal nature of human rights, the role of culture in shaping human rights as a concept, and the inter-relationships between culture, religion, human rights, citizenship and education. Takedas paper examines human rights education in the Japanese context, following its implementation during the UN Decade for Human Rights Education in the mid-1990s. She illustrates how key characteristics of Japanese culture have impacted on the reception and implementation of human rights and human rights education, making a number of educational recommendations. The nal paper, by Al-Nakib, examines the inter-related themes of democracy, human rights education and international organisations through a case study of a newly developed human rights education curriculum in a secondary school in Kuwait. This paper also illustrates tensions between concepts that are presented as universally accepted and local cultures, and how educational systems, processes, teachers, students and parents negotiate these tensions. In conclusion, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr Hugh Starkey for his support as co-Director of ICEDC. I would also like to thank Anne Chippindale and Professor Terry Haydn of the Cambridge Journal of Education for their assistance and support throughout this process. In addition, I would like to thank the reviewers for their most helpful comments. Finally, it has been an honour and pleasure working with all the contributors of this special issue, who have made this an intellectually stimulating collaboration, and to the conference participants who have also contributed to a rich and lively dialogue. Notes
1. 2. ICEDC, a joint centre of Birkbeck College and the Institute of Education, both University of London, was launched in 2007 and is co-directed by Dr Dina Kiwan, Birkbeck College, and Dr Hugh Starkey, Institute of Education. Connelly (2007) cites Gott (2002).

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Donnelly, J. (2007). The relative universality of human rights. Human Rights Quarterly, 29, 281306. Donnelly, J. (2008). Human rights: Both universal and relative (a reply to Michael Goodhart). Human Rights Quarterly, 30, 194204. Douzinas, C. (2000). The end of human rights. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing. Douzinas, C. (2007). Human rights and empire: The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge Cavendish. Ferrara, A. (2003). Two notions of humanity and the judgement argument for human rights. Political Theory, 31, 392420. Freeman, M. (1994). The philosophical foundations of human rights. Human Rights Quarterly, 16, 491514. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodhart, M. (2008). Neither relative nor universal: A response to Donnelly. Human Rights Quarterly, 30, 183193. Gott, G. (2002). Imperial humanitarianism: History of an arrested dialectic. Moral Imperialism: A Critical Anthology, 19, 1938. Kiwan, D. (2005). Human rights and citizenship: An unjustiable conation? Journal of Philosophy of Education, 39(1), 3750. Kiwan, D. (2008). Education for inclusive citizenship. London: Routledge. Leary, V. (1990). The effect of Western perspectives on international human rights. In A. An-Naim & F. Deng (Eds.), Human rights in Africa: Cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 1530). Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Simpson, E. (1997). Rights thinking. Philosophy, 72, 2958. Soysal, Y. (1994). Limits of citizenship: Migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago. United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved September 10, 2004, from http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Dina Kiwan Birkbeck College, University of London, UK