Foucault's Concept of Power and the Global Discourse of Human Rights

Abstract

This article carries out a Foucauldian analysis of the global discourse of human rights. In the spirit of Foucault's genealogy it identifies a historical discontinuity in the development of human rights between the Cold War period, when human rights were a heavily contested concept, and the late modern world in which human rights are becoming a form of global standard whose validity is less and less questioned. Using Foucault's understanding of the way power is exercised within discursive structures and knowledge/power configurations, the article argues that in the late modern world human rights constitute a global norm with reference to which agents are evaluated and increasingly evaluate themselves. Power may be exercised over those forms of agency that do not conform to this norm by other agents, and at the same time, we witness more and more situations in which there is no such coercion and yet agents find it necessary to alter their behaviour and declare their adherence to human rights. The article also seeks to extend Foucault's framework in order to explain the emergence of the global human rights discourse. It thereby complements a Foucauldian analysis with a political economy approach which, it is argued, helps us enhance the Foucauldian framework which suffers from the separation of discourses and politics from the economy.