Sovereign Nation-state Research Articles

A world away and close to home: The multi-scalar ‘making of’ Indonesia's energy landscape

Indonesia is the world's largest producer of palm oil, a feedstock for agrofuels and an important source of direct, nutritional energy for human consumption. The country is also an important global supplier of coal, petroleum and natural gas while per capita fossil energy consumption is relatively low. For biomass- and fossil fuel-based energy, Indonesia has been transforming its energy landscape in order to provide for foreign demand. The landscape - both in literal and in the figurative sense - simultaneously forms and is formed by the material resource flows required for society's biophysical reproduction, i.e. the social metabolism; in the context of the ongoing energy transition, both are subject to change. In our analysis of Indonesia's palm oil production, we find that the drivers shaping the country's resource use as well as its energy landscape are located at a spatial, temporal, and functional distance from where they take effect. The energy landscape and resource use patterns are formed across levels of scale, from the subnational to the global. Energy policy confined to the framework of the sovereign nation-state cannot effectively address the complex drivers of increasingly detrimental environmental change associated with energy transitions nor can it trigger a sustainability transition.

Governing the global commons: the ‘planetary boundaries’ approach

This article offers some ideas about a system of governance which reflects the reality of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). The goal of living safely within the boundaries of our planet cannot be achieved by relying on traditional forms of governance based on the concept of sovereign nation states. States, driven by national interest, have been resistant to accepting responsibility for areas beyond national jurisdiction known as the global commons (Ostrom, 1990). The focus for governing the global commons – the polar regions, oceans, atmosphere, outer space – needs to shift from states to Earth as a whole, evoking what might be called ‘Earth governance’.

In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France by Peggy McCracken

Reviewed by: In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France by Peggy McCracken Charlie Samuelson Peggy McCracken. In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 240. $45.00. Peggy McCracken's newest book is about how "literary texts use human–animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of authority and dominion over others" (1). Over the course of In the Skin of a Beast, McCracken convincingly argues that medieval literature stages encounters between humans and animals to think about power dynamics among people. Yet, while animals provide a forum for thinking about relations of sovereignty among humans, this book is nonetheless careful not to overlook the specificity of the animal; indeed, it is particularly concerned with animal bodies. Furthermore, because she is concerned both with the reciprocity of encounters and with the process of asserting authority, which is never straightforward or even complete, McCracken shows a unique and valuable concern for recovering how animals have responded to humans' attempts to exercise power over them. Thoroughly versed in poststructuralist theory, In the Skin of a Beast [End Page 359] thus explores how medieval literary texts look through, at, with, and "against" animals; and while critics have been looking at animals for some while, this book's invaluable insight is that animals will also help us think through the intricacy of medieval representations of sovereignty. As McCracken acknowledges, the term "sovereignty" does risk anachronism: "We know that the notion of a 'sovereign nation-state' does not apply to the territorial governments of the Middle Ages" (4). Yet, similarly to how much may be gained from embracing the figurative functions that animals serve in medieval literature, so too is there much to be gained from bringing this concept tinged with modernity into dialogue with the medieval period, in order to think about "contractual rule and the consent to be governed" as well as the "[l]ayers of obligation and authority" that "define medieval political structures" (6) in all their complexity. McCracken's corpus comprises a dazzling array of texts: vernacular Bibles and biblical commentaries, short didactic pieces, fables, lais, romances, and chansons de geste; this book also emphasizes manuscript illuminations. Its central exhibits date from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Its geographical and linguistic scope is similarly ambitious, embracing Old and Middle French material, as well as texts originally written in Latin, Old Norse, and Middle High German. Each chapter brings together several works, and the argument advances almost more like a lyric than a narrative. Going from one chapter to the next is not simply a matter of going from "a" to "b"; rather, each new analysis returns, spiral-like, to fundamental problems addressed previously, further scrutinizing and deepening insight into them. The effect is kaleidoscopic, with increasingly intricate elements and connections brought into the mix. The first chapter is about the flaying of animal skins, which, McCracken argues, functions as a complex "technology of human sovereignty" (12). This chapter moves from vernacular renderings of Genesis to the fifteenth-century Conte du papegau, which is, in turn, read alongside earlier romans antiques. As she proceeds through these sources, McCracken shows how flaying skins is both about survival and about relations of dominion; indeed, these skins, which were worn, exposed, written on, and so forth, are both the "material" and the "symbolic support for claims to sovereign power" (29). According to McCracken, in the Middle Ages, as in Foucault's concept of biopolitics, human sovereignty was "always already grounded on the capacity to regulate life" [End Page 360] (30). This chapter concludes by turning to the little-known twelfth-century Romans des romans in order to imagine how animals might respond to the ethics of parading their corpses. Animal responses are, though, perhaps more at stake in the following chapter, which focuses on human–animal encounters that are cast in more affective terms. This chapter traces the (rather surprising) trope of wolves that are domesticated in a variety of saints' lives, in Marie de France's Fables, and in her lai "Bisclavret." McCracken imagines submission both as the animal behavior par excellence and as...

Fringe Benefits

Fringe Benefits

Obraz zjednoczonej Europy w koncepcjach przedstawicieli opozycji antyfaszystowskiej we Włoszech w latach 1943-1945

Picture of united Europe in the concepts of Italian anti‑fascist opposition members in 1943‑1945
 The article presents concepts of united Europe created by representatives of different fractions of the anti‑fascist Italian opposition in the period of the so‑called Resistenza (1943‑1945), with particular focus on the stances of left‑wing groups. The fullest theoretical foundations of federalist concepts created during the Second World War come from the Ventotene Manifesto (the so‑called Manifesto for Free and United Europe), elaborated at the turn of June and July of 1941 by charismatic leaders of Movimento Federalista Europeo – Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi – in collaboration with Eugenio Colorni. Influenced by English federalists from Federal Union, Spinelli and Rossi were pointing to the crisis of a nation state and its results – nationalism, imperialism and fascism. The authors were convinced that the only way to ensure continued peace in Europe was to create a European federation, comprised entirely of democratic states. The idea of the United States of Europe was advocated also by a liberal lawyer and economist, later the Governor of the Bank of Italy and the President of Italy, Luigi Einaudi. In his articles and political writings regularly published from 1918 until the end of the WWII Einaudi criticised the League of Nations as a weak institution lacking in authority and unable to effectively challenge the imperialist tendencies of some of its members. He sought the reasons for this weakness in the very structure of the League of Nations, i.e. in the confederation model. In studies published between 1943 and 1945 the liberal politician emphasised interdependencies between economy and politics. Einaudi identified the idea of a sovereign national state and the doctrine of nationalism as main enemies of the European federalism. Another politician advocating limiting sovereignty of national states in the name of broad solidarity between free European nations was a leader of Christian Democracy and the Prime Minister of Italy between 1945 and 1953 – Alcide De Gasperi. He underlined the significance of cooperation with the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the process of peace‑rebuilding. Unlike Spinelli and Rossi, the leader of Christian Democracy did not support the federation model of integration – De Gasperi placed emphasis on the gradual character of this process and on the need for finding “transitional solutions”, similarly to Einaudi, pointing to the significance of the economic aspect.

Touring in heterotopia: Travel, sovereignty, and exceptional spaces in Taiwan and China

This article uses the case of Chinese tourism to Taiwan to theorize the mutual constitution of tourism mobilities and exceptional spaces of sovereignty. Human flows between China and Taiwan have proliferated despite incompatible sovereign claims. Since 2008, China has sent millions of tourists across the Taiwan Strait even as it points over a thousand missiles in the same direction. Taiwan, itself a “de facto state” and therefore an “exceptional space” in the normative world order of sovereign nation-states, is partly defined by its relations with China. This relationship is being refashioned through cross-Strait tourism. Based on analysis of border-crossing regulations and ethnographies of tourist spaces, particularly at airports and protest sites, conducted between 2012 and 2015, this article argues that tourism mobilities are not only the effect but also the cause of transformations in the performance of sovereignty and territoriality. In other words, such mobilities not only articulate within exceptional spaces, but they can produce and reconfigure such spaces as well.

F#ck Your Family!: The Visual Jurisprudence of Automobility

This paper considers the popular visual jurisprudence of bumper stickers. Drawing upon a sample sticker/driver/vehicle assemblages observed at the Gold Coast, Australia in 2014, we argue that the meanings and messages projected by the assemblages have a significant legal dimension. The argument is located at the intersection of past research into bumper stickers, increased scholarly interest in the relation of law to automobility and especially recent considerations of the popular visual jurisprudence of the motor vehicle, its cultures and semiotics. In particular we argue that the sticker/driver/vehicle assemblage represents an engagement with law and legality. We suggest this goes beyond immediate denotations of brands with intellectual property or flags and the sovereign nation state to more essential engagement with consumer capitalisms law of the image, the friend/enemy distinction, the ouroboros of rights and the essential legality of living in a polis.

Ireland Among the Nations of the Earth: Ireland’s Foreign Relations from 1923 to 1949

Irish foreign relations shaped the process of Ireland’s emergence as a sovereign nation state. The channels through which this independent status were achieved and recognized were membership in the League of Nations, in which Ireland took an increasingly prominent part by the 1930s; Commonwealth affairs, wherein Ireland worked persistently to expand the independent role of the Dominions; and bi-lateral relations, whereby Ireland expeditiously established diplomatic relations with the United States, France, Germany and the Vatican. By the late 1930s Ireland was sufficiently autonomous to pursue a policy of neutrality during the Second World War, despite the involvement of Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth, and by 1949, now as the Republic of Ireland, to unilaterally exit the Commonwealth. Ireland’s foreign policy consolidated its independence.

The Democratic Roots of Expatriations

Patti Tamara Lenard assesses the justifications given for the right to revoke citizenship in democratic states and concludes that this practice is inconsistent with a commitment to democratic equality. She provides three normative reasons for the mismatch between democratic principles and revocation laws: that the practice of revocation discriminates between different citizens within each state; that it provides differential penalties for the same crime; and that it does not provide transparent justification or due process for this harsh punishment. Although I too am repulsed by this practice, I do not think it is necessarily undemocratic. Moreover, such analysis overlooks one legitimate motivation behind expatriation: the aim to regulate national allegiance. The new revocation initiatives act as a powerful symbolic tool in reinforcing a world order based on sovereign nation-states.

Advancing Justice and Democracy ‘beyond’ the State: Feasibility through Flexibility

The literature on international political theory is replete with proposals to make world politics a more just and democratic place. This article explores how the cosmopolitan design project can be made more tractable in a world composed of sovereign nation states. Specifically, it argues that flexibility mechanisms – tools common in international cooperation – enhance the feasibility of design. The article draws upon the recent work on political feasibility and argues that economic, institutional and cultural constraints can be overcome by using flexibility mechanisms. In order to gain traction on the argument, prescriptions made in the field of intellectual property rights are analysed. Thomas Pogge and Allen Buchanan, Tony Cole and Robert Keohane have separately advanced institutional proposals to reform the global essential medicine system. The article details how feasibility can be enhanced through flexibility in light of these proposals, and makes a suggestion about their comparative feasibility and desirability.

Recent Work in Caribbean Literature

Recent Work in Caribbean Literature Amanda Perry Davies, Carole Boyce. Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013. Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014. Martinez-San Miguel, Yolanda. Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Orlando, Valerie, and Sandra Cypress (eds.). Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. Lexington Books, 2014. Fifteen years ago, scholarship that addressed Caribbean literature in light of the region’s linguistic diversity was relatively limited. The issue was not necessarily a preference for national genealogies, as the region’s major works have long been studied in transnational contexts—variously divided into postcolonial, francophone, and Latin American frames of reference. Rather, the institutional divisions of language departments and the competencies of individual scholars made linguistic barriers more tenacious, such that Derek Walcott would be placed in conversation with Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka more often than fellow poet Nicolas Guillén. That tendency has shifted, however, and the four works reviewed here are symptomatic of those changes. Each of them brings together texts from the English, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, stressing the broader interconnectedness of the region over and against what the editors of Reimagining the Caribbean call a “balkanizing” approach (xvii). Taken together, these works implicitly raise the question: what, precisely, [End Page 208] are the grounds for comparison? What are the mechanisms that make such comparison plausible, convincing, and effective? The historical processes that encourage treating the Caribbean as a coherent cultural space are by now well rehearsed. All territories have been subject to some form of radical external domination, at times by multiple colonial powers; most were deeply marked by slavery and plantation labour; intraregional migratory flows in the twentieth century continued the creolizing process; peoples from various parts of the Caribbean frequently live side by side in the diaspora. That said, there remain good reasons for treating literary traditions separately. While some writers like Jacques Stephen Alexis, Eric Walrond, Alejo Carpentier, and Maryse Condé demonstrate a robust sense of a pan-Caribbean literary and cultural formation, many others are monolingual and, given the comparative difficulties of regional travel, may not have first-hand experience of other parts of the region. In a context where translations are not always forthcoming, cross-linguistic intertextuality is frequently limited to a number of usual suspects, chief among them Aimé Césaire. It is thus telling that none of the studies here focus on documenting concrete intellectual exchanges between major authors, such as the Jacques Roumain, Nicolas Guillén, and Langston Hughes triad. Instead, they opt for thematic analyses that seek resonance between contexts that can be considered in some way parallel. In justifying this approach, Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo emerge as clear theoretical favourites, as both push against nation-based frameworks to reach for more evocative imaginings of the region: for Glissant, it is an “archipelago” that enables non-hierarchical cultural exchange, while Benítez-Rojo famously uses the metaphor of the repeating island to capture the tension between fragmentation and resemblance. Of the texts reviewed here, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s excellent Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context is the most explicitly concerned with disrupting nation-based interpretive models. She continually turns to moments when nationalism falters, whether they be in nineteenth century novels that are too ambivalent to serve as foundational fictions or twentieth century narratives of women forced into exile because of their transgressive sexual practices. Though she also deals with writers from the Anglophone Caribbean, her most important examples are from Puerto Rico and Martinique, islands whose continued attachment to imperial powers denaturalizes the ideal of the sovereign nation state. Martínez-San Miguel is furthermore interested in the formative role of “intra-colonial migration” in the region, or migration within the bounds of a former or actual empire, emphasizing that such movement reveals the contradictory status of many Caribbean subjects, who may be legal citizens and...

LIETUVOS DIDŽIOSIOS KUNIGAIKŠTYSTĖS ISTORIJA IR ŠIUOLAIKINĖS TARPTAUTINIŲ SANTYKIŲ TEORIJOS

The paper explores the epistemic fruitfulness of the contemporary theories of modern relations for historical research about the relations between premodern polities. The application of the neorealist theory in such research is blocked by its assumption that its subject is international system, consisting of sovereign national states. However, there were no such states (and nations) in medieval Europe and most other places in premodern times. The concept of international society of H. Bull is not applicable to premodern polities because of its assumption that Westphalian peace treaty of 1648 was the date of birth of the international law and international society as historical reality. A. Wendt’s thesis that in the premodern times international politics was dominated by the Hobbesian culture of anarchy disregards historical evidence about the “Lockean” realities of the dynastic politics in the medieval Europe and other places. In the first part of the article, the corrections to remove these modernist and europocentric deformations are suggested. They include the replacement of the concepts of “international system” and “international society” by the broader notions of “interpolity system” and that of “interpolity society”, and the distinction between “sovereign politikes system/society” and “suzerain (imperial) polity system/society”, borrowed (with modifications) from M. Wight. Second part and third parts together constitute a case study about the changing roles and challenges of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) as the subject of interpolity relations in XIII–XV centuries. The second part is about the rise of GDL from the polity playing the role of the barrier (but not that of buffer) polity, separating Central European and Eastern European interpolity systems and belonging to both of them, to the regional empire and suzerain polity of the Eastern European interpolity system by the early XVth century. However, Lithuanian hegemony in Eastern Europe lasted only very few years. After 1430, the Eastern European interpolity system was about to transform itself from the suzerain polity system into a multipolar sovereign interpolity system of the type that consolidated in the Central and Western Europe after 1648 and survived for 300 years. However, the political leadership of GDL failed to meet the challenge to maintain an emerging multipolar balance of power in this system. According to the unconventional account of the so-called “feudal war” (1431–1453) in the Great Duchy of Moscow by Alexander Zimin, there was real possibility to establish at least two Russian states in the lands ruled by the Muscovite princes. Great Novgorod was viable polity too, bearing promise of the protobourgeois and protodemocratic Russia. Another viable polity was created in Kazan by Tatars who have changed to sedentary life of agriculturalists, and were about to become the power, filling out the geopolitical space that in older times was held by Volga Bulgaria. However, mainly due to the pursuit by Jagiellonian rulers of GDL and Poland of the dynastic politics in the Central Europe, at least three windows of opportunity to preserve this interpolity system from its annihilation by rising Moscow empire were not used. Last of them was the opportunity to re-establish the independence of Great Novgorod in 1480. These failures of the Lithuanian statesmanship sealed the fate of the Eastern European interpolity system: its disappearance in the Moscow empire. So the history of Eastern European interpolity politics in the XIII–XVIII centuries is another case proving the finding of the recent research by Stuart J. Kaufman, William C. Wohlforth, Richard Little, David Kangi, Charles Jones, Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, Arthur Eckstein, Daniel Deudney, Williams Brenner that a long-lasting balance of power in a interpolity system is rather an exception than rule, the rule being the displacement of the multipolar or bipolar balance of power interpolity systems by empires.

European Integration and Czech Sovereignty ‘Synchronized’

Abstract European integration entity ceased to be just a forum for negotiations between independent and sovereign nation states. To some extent it overlaps with the states and becomes their competitor. In this context, the classical concept of state sovereignty loses its original content and meaning. The participation in the integration project opens the question whether it takes away or weakens sovereignty of Member States? This paper puts on four arguments to proof the hypothesis that Czech Republic continues to be a sovereign country even aft er accession to the European Union.

The Global Leadership Project: A Comprehensive Database of Political Elites

Contributing to the recent revival in studies of the effects of the biographical characteristics of leaders, this paper presents an attempt at the most complete description to date of the world’s current leaders. The Global Leadership Project (GLP) provides the first dataset offering biographical information on leaders of most countries in the world, including members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. GLP encompasses 146 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 40,566 leaders, each of whom is coded along 33 parameters, producing approximately 1.2 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. This paper describes the coding process and the resulting data, and compares the characteristics of leaders across offices within countries, across countries, and across regions.

From International to Cosmopolitan: Taking The Venice Charter Beyond the “State-Party” Politics of Experts

Contemporary globalization renders the Venice Charter’s implicit technocratic internationalism dated and possibly obsolete. Transnational economic markets and social movements embedded in civil society stand in contrast to the foundational assumptions of the charter, the sovereign nation-state, and the authority of expertise in service to the state. As both capital and labor have become increasingly migratory, the power of national governments to resist cultural change—whether through homogenization or hybridization—is diminished. This paper attempts to be both historical and analytical, and while establishing a framework for understanding a need for a new normative direction, it is not prescriptive. The Venice Charter expresses a relatively uncritical trust in the rational collaborations of nation-states and their experts. In the context of this short article, I argue that financial considerations have transformed heritage site management, and specifically, that International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) increasingly direct public attention and private capital to specific heritage sites. These investments are sometimes in line with charter values; at other times, they are in response to emerging voices, either within donor groups or by communities of interest expressing distinct world views. This has the potential to undermine an approach to governmental (statist) and expert-led planning that is assumed in the Venice Charter and other twentieth-century heritage conventions and structures. This analysis benefits from, and references, scholarly analyses performed in other policy sectors.

State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order” and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–1981

Starting in the 1960s, Third World countries organized at the United Nations to achieve full economic independence. The “New International Economic Order” (NIEO) movement drafted charters and declarations, which placed the right to control natural resource industries and foreign direct investment squarely in the hands of newly decolonized nation-states. During the 1973 oil crisis, NIEO influence peaked. When debt and conditional loans followed in the wake of 1973, the NIEO’s leverage was removed. Instead of state-based right claims, the 1970s generally saw the triumph of the “last utopia” of individual human rights. It was mirrored by the rise of another anti-statist utopia, neoliberalism.

Greenland: A post-Danish sovereign nation state in the making

The relationship between Greenland and the European Union (EU) can best be understood by exploring the development from Danish colonialism to a future independent Greenlandic state. In 1985, Greenland became the first territory ever to leave the European Economic Community (EEC) when it opted for status as an ‘overseas country or territory’. The manner in which Greenland had to follow Denmark into the EEC in 1973 – whereby Greenlanders saw control over their fisheries move from distant Copenhagen to even-more-distant Brussels – was pivotal for the Greenlandic demands for home rule that succeeded in 1979 and made the 1985 withdrawal possible. On 25 November 2008, a majority of the people of Greenland voted in favour of enhanced home rule – ‘self-government’ – still within formal Danish sovereignty. Denmark and Greenland alike are preparing for a future envisioned as involving climate change, intensive raw material extraction, new transportation corridors and new claims to sovereignty over the Arctic. Greenland uses this imagined future as a way of enhancing its subjectivity, not the least when dealing with the EU. This article analyses how the Greenlandic self-understanding as being on the way to sovereignty – and the tensions involved – structures the triangular relationship between the EU, Greenland and Denmark. The article concludes that the visions of sovereign equality might, on the one hand, create greater expectations than Greenland will immediately be able to live up to – at home and in the EU. On the other hand, the representation of the Greenland–EU relationship as one of sovereign equality – present and future – might just be able to provoke the resources necessary to make the dream come true.

Democratic Themes in Religious Zionism

Religious Zionists who wanted to preserve their commitments to tradition and the Jewish state had to address the difficulties of applying tradition to new realities. The main challenge for them arose from the democratic nature of the new State of Israel. Between 1948 and the mid-1950s, Zionist leaders and thinkers contributed to the evolving dialectical relationship between a secular, modern democracy and traditional Jewish culture based on halakah. Religious Zionists were very much aware of the challenge that democratic principles posed to the Jewish tradition and were often reluctant to compromise their halakic commitments for the sake of the demands of a democratic state. Thus, scholarship has focused on the confrontation, compatibility, or compromise between religion and modernity in the Zionist context as if they are two distinct and opposing spheres. In these sketches of halakic argumentation among religious Zionists in the early years of Israel, I try to complicate this picture.

Strategies of police cooperation: comparing the Southern Chinese seaboard with the European Union

A number of police cooperation strategies have developed around the Southern Chinese seaboard, which encompasses the coastal provinces of Mainland China, Taiwan, and the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Cooperation mechanisms in the region encompass intelligence sharing strategies and establishment of the Electronic Communal Information Sharing Platform (ECISP), common investigations, regular meetings, practitioner exchanges, and training. Although conducted on a regular basis, these cooperation strategies mostly lack a formally binding legal basis, relying purely on informal practitioner efforts at best supported by Memoranda of Understanding. Due to their historical independence all police forces involved in cooperation at the Southern Chinese seaboard have had to establish strategies to overcome legal, organisational and cultural differences. This region could therefore be compared to cooperation networks between sovereign nation-states in other regions. The historical development of Greater China’s highly informal, practitioner driven approach to cooperation is reminiscent of early forms of cooperation between the police agencies of states that are now members of the European Union (EU). This paper explores the development of both informal and formal strategies established among police agencies around the Southern Chinese seaboard and compares them with the EU to enhance the historical, political and legal understanding of the two regions.

Direitos humanos: utopia num mundo distópico?

Este artigo indaga se os direitos humanos seriam parte de uma utopia da modernidade, que se desvanecem ante distopias e desafios da sociedade contemporânea. Analisando a trajetória histórica dos direitos humanos, verifica-se que se compõe de períodos de emergência e latência. Uma visão da situação atual evidencia significativos avanços no que se refere às normas, monitoramento, denúncia e consciência dos mesmos, apesar das contradições, especialmente entre as normas e sua aplicação pelos Estados nacionais soberanos. A literatura sugere que tais avanços se devem menos às sanções que à consciência em face da legitimidade moral dos direitos humanos, o que ressalta a importância da educação, tanto escolar como extraescolar. No que tange à escola, requer transformações profundas: conhecer melhor os educandos e construir clima baseado no exemplo da prática e respeito dos direitos humanos. Os currículos precisam abranger a interdisciplinaridade e métodos que incentivem a atuação dos alunos como protagonistas. Palavras-chaveDireitos humanos; Educação para os direitos humanos; Currículos; Modernidade