Call for Papers: Human Rights in an Age of Populist Authoritarianism

In this special issue on Human Rights in an Age of Populist Authoritarianism, to be published in 2025, Feminist Dissent looks forward to intervening in the debate on human rights to make a feminist case for universal human rights.

With the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights by the UN in 1948, it appeared that liberal conceptions of human rights were fundamentally embedded in mainstream politics amongst social democrats as well as conservatives. Today, however, the formerly assumed consensus has frayed. What has brought about this shift has been the re-emergence of radically anti-democratic forms of racist nationalism and misogyny, sometimes religiously inspired, as epitomised by figures such as Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Marine Le Pen, among others. In fact, we are now witnessing a blatant contempt for the whole idea of rights on the part of new authoritarian political programmes of the Right. Among both state as well as non-state actors, this authoritarianism promotes what the sociologist Chetan Bhatt has referred to as ‘cosmic nationalism…[which] seeks to extinguish the entire ground of universal humanism, equality and liberal modernity’ (Bhatt, 2020:3). In such a context one might have thought that feminist, Left and anti-racist forces would seek to defend the idea of human rights as vital foundations of a democratic polity. Instead, the concept of human rights has also come under attack from various sections of the Left and of academia as being Eurocentric and part of the West’s neo-colonial agenda to impose its values as universal.

Audre Lorde’s famous book title The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House offered a powerful critique of white male supremacy and the limitations of reformist thought in building a feminist world. Seeking inspiration from Lorde’s formulation, we ask: is it therefore possible and necessary to reconstruct the political argument for human rights on a new basis? We take as our starting point Lorde’s premise (and a wealth of critical writing on human rights from other perspectives) to ask whether the “house of human rights”, officially inaugurated in 1948, was indeed solely the master’s house.

In this special issue on Human Rights in an Age of Populist Authoritarianism, to be published in 2025, Feminist Dissent looks forward to intervening in the debate on human rights to make a feminist case for universal human rights. We hope to draw on a growing body of research (Merry, Waltz, Bhagavan, Choate, et al) which reconstructs the history of the development of human rights, showing the ways in which international laws on human rights were not only translated to make them locally relevant but that they grew out of the struggles of anti-colonial movements against fascism and for women’s rights. Women in many freedom movements, from Latin America to India (as well as African Americans), have used these concepts to imagine and fight for a world order in opposition to colonialism, slavery and segregation. In this issue we will argue that the “house of human rights”, for all its deficiencies, is created in part by the movements that grew out of a radical challenge to empire.

We are looking for contributions from a range of feminists working in the spheres of law, policy making, academia and activism to offer transformative perspectives on issues such as:

Please tell us when submitting your abstract whether your contribution will be article-length or a shorter piece for Voices of Dissent.

Feminist Dissent is a peer-reviewed online journal that focuses on gender and religious fundamentalism. It is based at the University of Warwick and is run by an editorial collective of academics, activists and writers.

For more information: feministdissent.org

Email: feministdissent@gmail.com