Human rights are often presented as the moral language of the international order, a set of principles that transcends borders, cultures, religions and political interests. Yet the contemporary politics of human rights raises a more fundamental question. Who gets to define what counts as universal?
The question is not abstract. In September 2026, Turkish authorities intensified a nationwide crackdown on LGBTQ+ organisations and activists, with dozens of people detained according to Reuters. The government presented the operation as a defence of children and family values, while European human rights officials and rights organisations criticised the measures as unjustified restrictions on fundamental freedoms.
The episode is routinely slotted into a familiar geopolitical script: a socially conservative state repressing a minority, while liberal European institutions deploy the idiom of universal rights to contest state action. That framing has immense rhetorical and political force within the contemporary international order. Yet accepting it at face value risks naturalising the framework in question.
Before debating competing claims of right and wrong, it makes sense for societies and political actors to make explicit their foundational ontological and epistemological standards, meaning the underlying assumptions about what a human being actually is, how knowledge is validated, and where authoritative truth resides. Without examining these starting points, moral debates inevitably talk past one another, assuming a shared reality that does not exist.
The contemporary politics of human rights avoids this deeper reckoning. Instead, it operates on the assumption that a particular set of answers to these questions can simply be taken for granted. But as the friction between different political orders demonstrates, the conflict is rarely just about specific policy clashes. It concerns the competing frameworks of existence and knowledge that give those disruptions their meaning.
The invisible paradigm
Liberal secularism is often treated as the neutral background against which political disagreements take place. The liberal individual is autonomous. Political authority derives from consent. Religion belongs primarily to the private sphere. Individuals possess rights prior to the state. Freedom means, among other things, the ability to determine one’s own conception of the good life.
None of these propositions is self-evidently illegitimate. Several have been enormously important in limiting sovereign power and protecting individuals against persecution. But they are not philosophically empty. They embody a particular conception of the human person. The modern liberal subject is imagined primarily as an autonomous individual, capable of choosing identity, beliefs and way of life. The legitimate political order is consequently expected to protect the individual’s capacity for self-determination.
This conception has become so deeply embedded in contemporary international institutions that it can appear not as one moral anthropology among others, but as the absence of anthropology altogether. That is where the problem begins. A political system that defines itself as neutral may nevertheless contain strong assumptions about what human beings are, what freedom means, which forms of authority are legitimate and what constitutes human flourishing. Liberal secularism therefore deserves to be examined not only as a political arrangement but as a historical philosophy.
The moral revolution: from God-centred obligation to autonomous humanity
One of the deepest transformations associated with modern liberalism was not merely political but philosophical: the relocation of moral authority. In a God-centred conception of morality, human beings do not create the ultimate standards by which human conduct is judged. Moral obligation derives from a transcendent source, and political authority is itself subject to that higher order. Human dignity is therefore not simply a consequence of individual autonomy. It can be understood as preceding autonomy because the human person possesses an objective status within a divinely ordered moral universe.
Within the Islamic philosophical tradition, for instance, rights are framed not as privileges granted by a sovereign state or discovered through secular reason, but as divinely mandated duties and obligations. Dating back nearly fifteen centuries, long before the emergence of Western Enlightenment thought, this framework systematically delineated the rights not only of human beings across diverse social strata, but extended moral consideration to animals, plants, and the ecological order as a trust (amanah) from the Creator. In such a paradigm, rights are co-extensive with universal obligations, offering an entirely different moral anthropology from the atomised, rights-bearing subject of modern liberalism.
This does not mean that historical religious societies always lived according to those principles. Religious institutions could themselves become coercive, hierarchical and violent. A theological claim about the source of morality does not guarantee humane political practice. But philosophically, the distinction matters.
Liberal modernity gradually offered a different foundation. The individual became the primary bearer of rights, while autonomy, consent and freedom increasingly became central tests of legitimate political authority. This transformation was celebrated within its own framework as a profound advance, characterised by the limitation of sovereign power, the protection of individual conscience, and the establishment of autonomous legal spheres, even as it restructured the mechanisms of social control. Yet it also involved a philosophical choice. The secular liberal order did not simply discover an entirely neutral conception of human dignity. It privileged a particular account of what a human being is and what constitutes a good political life.
This matters because the language of human rights can conceal the premises on which it rests. When autonomy, individual choice and freedom from religious or communal authority are treated as self-evident components of human emancipation, alternative conceptions of human flourishing can appear not merely different but irrational, oppressive or backward. A community that understands the person primarily through obligations to God, family and community may therefore be judged according to a moral anthropology it does not share.
The issue becomes particularly important when human rights discourse moves beyond protecting individuals from violence and state coercion into questions about the social conditions under which people are expected to exercise freedom. Questions concerning sexuality, family, gender, religious authority and the relationship between individual and community then become contests between competing conceptions of the human person. The point is not that a God-centred morality should simply replace liberalism, nor that religious societies are necessarily immune from coercion or abuse. The more fundamental question is whether one particular answer to the question of moral authority should be permitted to present itself as having no philosophical particularity at all.
This also complicates the conventional story of secularisation. The secular is often described as the withdrawal of religion from public authority. But Talal Asad’s work suggests that secularism is better understood as a historical formation that defines what counts as religion, where religion belongs and which forms of religious authority are considered legitimate (Asad, 2003). Saba Mahmood similarly demonstrates how secular governance can actively organise religious difference rather than simply removing religion from public life (Mahmood, 2015). The secular state therefore does not stand outside moral anthropology. It institutionalises one. The question, then, is not simply whether human rights are universal. It is whether the philosophical foundations of the modern human rights subject have themselves been universalised without being recognised as historically particular.
Universalism and universalisation
This distinction is essential. Universalism is the proposition that all human beings possess equal moral worth, whereas universalisation is the historical process through which particular philosophical assumptions, institutional practices and political norms acquire the status of universal truths. The two should not be conflated. A principle can be universal in aspiration while the process through which it is defined, institutionalised and enforced remains profoundly unequal. Human rights may therefore function simultaneously as a language of emancipation and as a language through which hierarchy is reproduced.
This is where the question of Western hegemony becomes more precise. The problem is not simply that Western governments sometimes violate principles they publicly defend, nor that everything described as a human right is merely a Western imposition. The deeper problem is that liberal secular categories became institutionalised during the same historical period in which European states acquired extraordinary economic, military, legal and intellectual power. Consequently, the distinction between universal norm and Western particularity has never been entirely straightforward.
The categories through which international society defines the rational individual, legitimate government, acceptable religion, development, civilisation and human freedom were shaped within an unequal historical encounter. That is why the politics of human rights cannot be understood solely as a contest between those who believe in rights and those who do not. It is also a contest over who has the authority to define the human subject to whom those rights belong.
Kant and the contradiction within universal reason
The tension can already be seen in the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy provided one of the most powerful foundations for modern universalism. His categorical imperative placed human beings beyond purely instrumental value, dictating that persons were to be treated as ends in themselves rather than merely as means (Kant, 1785). This was a significant foundation for the idea of equal human dignity.
Yet Kant also wrote about racial difference in ways that established hierarchical distinctions between peoples. Pauline Kleingeld’s analysis of Kant’s later writings demonstrates that his views underwent significant development, including important revisions of earlier positions (Kleingeld, 2007). The significance is not that Kant’s philosophy can simply be dismissed as racist, nor that universal human dignity therefore becomes meaningless. The significance lies in the contradiction itself: universal moral reason could coexist with historically particular classifications of humanity. That contradiction would become politically consequential as European states expanded their power across the globe. The history of modern universalism cannot therefore be separated entirely from the history of empire.
The civilising mission
The nineteenth-century international order provides perhaps the clearest illustration. International law is commonly narrated as a system that gradually expanded from Europe to encompass the entire world. But Antony Anghie has challenged precisely this account, arguing that the colonial encounter was central to the formation of international law and sovereignty itself (Anghie, 2004). The European colonial project required legal distinctions between those societies regarded as fully sovereign and those regarded as lacking the necessary characteristics of civilisation.
The so-called civilising mission was therefore not simply a propaganda slogan attached to colonialism. It formed part of the intellectual and legal architecture through which European domination was justified. European states could present their own political experience as universal while simultaneously defining non-European societies as insufficiently developed to enjoy the same status.
The contradiction was extraordinary: a system claiming universal law established different categories of humanity, a political order claiming universal sovereignty distinguished between those considered fully sovereign and those considered incapable of governing themselves, and a civilisation claiming universal reason classified other peoples as backward. Anghie’s argument is particularly important because it shifts the discussion away from individual hypocrisy. The problem becomes structural, meaning the universal itself was being produced within relations of power. The civilised and uncivilised distinction did not merely describe the world but helped organise it.
Secularism and empire
The relationship between liberal secularism and Western hegemony is equally complicated. It is tempting to imagine secularism as the opposite of imperialism, viewing religion as tradition while secularism represents modernity, rationality and emancipation. History, however, is less tidy. French colonialism in North Africa, for example, cannot be understood simply as the confrontation between secular republicans and religious societies. As John Daughton demonstrates, French colonialism involved complex relationships between republican political ideals, Catholic missionaries and imperial governance (Daughton, 2006).
Secularism could therefore function as a mode of governance. It determined which religious practices were considered private, which were considered politically threatening, which religious authorities could be recognised and how communities should be reorganised. The colonial state did not merely encounter religious difference but classified and administered it.
This is why Asad’s critique of secularism matters. If secularism were simply the absence of religion, there would be little reason to analyse it politically. But if secularism actively constructs the boundaries between religion and politics, it becomes another form of authority. The important question is not whether secularism is good or bad, but rather who defines what counts as secular, religious, rational, emancipatory or backward.
Liberalism and the colonial contradiction
Liberalism presents another historical paradox. The language of liberty, equality and individual rights developed alongside European imperial expansion. This does not mean that liberalism logically requires colonialism. It does mean that liberal political orders historically coexisted with empire, racial hierarchy and colonial domination. This coexistence matters. A philosophy can contain principles that ultimately undermine the institutions in which it emerged. Liberal equality could be invoked by anti-colonial movements against liberal imperial powers, and human rights could be turned against their original gatekeepers.
But the fact that a political philosophy contains emancipatory possibilities does not erase the historical conditions under which its categories became globally dominant. The question is therefore not whether liberalism is oppressive in some absolute sense, but how a doctrine capable of constraining power could simultaneously become part of the institutional architecture through which power was exercised. This tension remains visible today.
Human rights did not emerge from a single Western moment
It would be historically inaccurate to claim that human rights were simply invented by the West and imposed upon everyone else. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was produced through an international process. Its drafting involved figures from different cultural, political and religious backgrounds, including Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, Charles Malik of Lebanon, Peng Chung Chang of China and John Humphrey of Canada. That history matters because a crude West-versus-the-rest narrative is inadequate. The stronger argument concerns institutional power rather than authorship. A principle can have genuinely plural origins and nevertheless become embedded within institutions disproportionately shaped by particular geopolitical powers.
Moreover, the post-war history of human rights was not simply a secular triumph over religion. Samuel Moyn has demonstrated the importance of Christian political thought to the emergence and development of post-war human rights discourse (Moyn, 2015). Human rights therefore possess a more complicated genealogy than the familiar story of Enlightenment reason progressing inevitably towards the Universal Declaration. They have religious genealogies, secular genealogies, anti-colonial genealogies and geopolitical genealogies. The universal has never had a single birthplace.
From civilisation to development
The formal language of the civilising mission has largely disappeared, but its underlying structure has not vanished with it. The vocabulary has changed: civilised and uncivilised became developed and developing, modern became traditional, democratic became authoritarian, liberal became illiberal, and progressive became reactionary. These categories are not necessarily meaningless, as governments genuinely differ in political institutions, civil liberties and economic structures. But categories that appear descriptive can also become hierarchical. A society can be represented as deficient because it does not resemble the institutional model of the societies doing the judging.
This is the central insight of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). Rather than treating colonialism as a completed historical episode, TWAIL scholarship examines how imperial structures and assumptions continue to shape international law, political economy and global governance (Chimni, 2023). The issue is not that every contemporary human rights criticism is a disguised colonial project, which would itself become an ideological simplification, but that the historical memory of the civilising mission should make observers suspicious whenever one political order claims an uncomplicated monopoly on defining civilisation.
Who is the human rights subject?
This brings the discussion back to the individual. The contemporary human rights system is built around a recognisable subject: the autonomous rights-bearing individual. That subject occupies a central place in modern moral grammar, but critical scholarship asks how this subject was historically constructed. Makau Mutua famously described the dominant human rights narrative through the metaphor of savages, victims and saviours, where the supposedly barbaric actor violates norms, the innocent victim suffers, and the Western or international actor arrives to rescue them (Mutua, 2001).
The metaphor is deliberately provocative, but its analytical value lies in exposing a recurring narrative structure. The danger is that people outside the dominant liberal framework are represented primarily as victims rather than political subjects. Their societies become problems to be solved, their traditions become obstacles to progress, their governments become objects of external discipline, and their salvation comes from elsewhere. This is precisely where human rights discourse can become paternalistic. The paradox is that a doctrine premised upon human equality can reproduce relationships in which some actors acquire greater authority to speak for humanity than others.
Sexuality and the changing boundaries of the universal
The politics of sexuality makes the problem particularly visible. Liberal democracies today frequently present LGBTQ+ equality as an established human rights principle. That position has substantial legal and moral force. But Western societies themselves did not always understand homosexuality in those terms. Homosexual conduct was criminalised in many Western jurisdictions, and homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in major Western psychiatric systems until the twentieth century. The contemporary Western consensus therefore represents a historical transformation rather than a timeless expression of an unchanged moral order.
That historical fact does not establish that contemporary LGBTQ+ rights are wrong. It establishes something different: moral consensus changes, and institutions once regarded as rational and scientific can later be recognised as discriminatory. That should encourage humility. If Western societies were historically capable of treating homosexuality as criminal, pathological or socially dangerous, they should be cautious about presenting their current moral vocabulary as the inevitable endpoint of human progress. At the same time, historical contingency cannot become an excuse for repression. The fact that a norm has a particular history does not demonstrate that the norm is illegitimate. The real question is whether its justification can survive open, genuinely plural argument.
Türkiye and the problem of competing moral universalisms
This brings the analysis back to Türkiye. The Turkish government invokes family values, social order, and religiously informed collective identity to justify its crackdown on LGBTQ+ organisations and public protests. Liberal human rights institutions counter with their own universalising vocabulary: individual autonomy, non-discrimination, and freedom from state-imposed moral conformity.
To reduce this conflict to a simple binary between an “enlightened” liberal order and a “repressive” state misses the core critique. Both vocabularies make universal claims. The fundamental asymmetry lies in institutional power, specifically concerning which actors possess the global authority to define what counts as a legitimate public order and what counts as a violation of norms.
Challenging Western hegemony does not mean endorsing Ankara’s domestic policies or substituting Turkish state authority for Western authority. The more revealing test of the international order’s underlying logic is how Western states themselves respond to dissent.
This hypocrisy is exposed most clearly when Western governments criticise Türkiye or other Global South nations for placing restrictions on protests and freedom of expression, while routinely suppressing domestic dissent regarding their own foreign policies. While Western capitals issue stern reprimands over crackdowns abroad, Western states have systematically detained and arrested individuals protesting against Israel’s actions in Gaza. Academics have lost their employment for voicing criticism of Israel, and students across Western universities, such as Columbia University, have faced severe institutional punishments for participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. In countries like Germany, police have been caught on camera brutally beating peaceful citizens simply for protesting in support of Palestinians. Yet, these structural actions by Western states are rarely framed by mainstream Western institutions as systemic curbs on freedom of expression.
The double standard reveals that the boundaries of acceptable speech are policed according to geopolitical alignment rather than universal principle.
From human rights to foreign policy
The philosophical problem becomes a geopolitical problem when human rights enter foreign policy. States rarely possess unlimited power to enforce their principles, choosing where to apply diplomatic pressure, sanctions, military force, legal mechanisms and political isolation. This is where selectivity becomes unavoidable. No government can respond equally to every infraction everywhere, but selectivity becomes politically significant when enforcement consistently tracks geopolitical alignment.
The issue is not simply that states have interests, as they naturally do, but whether moral language conceals those interests. Human rights can become a vocabulary through which foreign-policy objectives acquire moral legitimacy. Military action can be framed as liberation, sanctions can be framed as accountability, and political pressure can be framed as defending universal values. Sometimes those descriptions may be justified, but they require scrutiny precisely because humanitarian language can transform political choices into apparently apolitical obligations.
Humanitarian intervention and the return of the civilising mission
The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was developed in response to the failures surrounding Rwanda and other mass atrocities. In 2005, UN member states affirmed a responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, including through collective action when states manifestly fail in their responsibilities. The principle represented an important attempt to prevent sovereignty from becoming a shield for mass atrocity.
But humanitarian intervention contains a permanent danger: who decides when intervention is necessary? Who decides what constitutes sufficient evidence? Who possesses the military capacity to intervene? Who bears the consequences? And what happens when the same states that define the rules are themselves parties to a conflict? The civilising mission once justified intervention by claiming that certain societies were insufficiently civilised. The humanitarian mission can, under different circumstances, justify intervention by claiming that certain governments are insufficiently protective of their populations.
The moral vocabulary is remarkably different, but the structural question remains similar: who possesses the authority to rescue whom? That does not make humanitarian intervention equivalent to colonialism, an equivalence that would erase enormous historical differences, but it does mean that humanitarianism requires political self-scrutiny.
The geography of moral attention
Noam Chomsky has long argued that Western foreign policy displays a selective concern for victims, particularly when the victims are associated with adversarial states rather than allied governments (Chomsky, 1991). The broader point is not that Western governments are indifferent to human suffering. The issue concerns the geography of attention: some atrocities receive enormous diplomatic mobilisation, media coverage and institutional pressure, while others receive statements of concern but little material consequence. This produces a hierarchy not necessarily of human worth, but of political responsiveness.
The distinction matters. A government may condemn genocide while continuing to provide military, economic or diplomatic support to the state responsible for it. The language of human rights therefore needs to be assessed not only by what governments say, but also by what they are prepared to do when their principles become costly.
Ukraine and Gaza: the problem of enforcement asymmetry
The contrast between Ukraine and Gaza has become one of the most difficult tests of the credibility of Western human rights discourse. The two conflicts are not identical. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war against Palestinians emerged from different historical circumstances, involve different actors and raise different legal questions. Nor is it accurate to say that Western governments have entirely ignored Palestinian suffering, as they have criticised Israeli actions, supported humanitarian assistance and, in some cases, backed legal or diplomatic pressure.
The issue is therefore more precise. It concerns the difference between rhetorical condemnation and material enforcement. Western governments imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and made the defence of Ukrainian sovereignty a central principle of their foreign policy. In Gaza, by contrast, the United States and other Western governments have continued substantial political and military support for Israel while lightly expressing concern about civilian suffering and international law obligations.
As of 15 September 2026, Israeli strikes were still killing Palestinians in Gaza despite the US-backed ceasefire that began in October 2025, with Reuters reporting at least five Palestinian deaths on that day, including two children. The UN human rights chief has also noted that the discovery of more than 630 bodies in rubble from destroyed buildings raises concerns about possible war crimes, with more than 8,000 people believed still to be buried beneath the debris. At the same time, the United States was reported to be considering a further $2.8 billion munitions sale to Israel. Reuters also reported that more than 73,000 Palestinians had been killed according to Gaza health authorities, while noting that Israel rejects accusations of genocide and maintains that it is acting in self-defence.
The relevant comparison is therefore not simply the number of statements made by Western leaders, but the relationship between principle and consequence. If international law prohibits attacks on civilians, the prohibition should not depend upon whether the perpetrator is an adversary or an ally. If civilian life has equal value, the political identity of the victim should not determine the intensity of international concern. And if humanitarian principles are genuinely universal, they must constrain friends as well as enemies. This is the real test of universalism.
Self-defence and the political grammar of innocence
The language of self-defence illustrates another problem. States understandably claim the right to defend their populations from attack, and international law recognises self-defence under specific conditions. But self-defence does not eliminate the requirements of international humanitarian law. A state can possess a legitimate security concern and still be required to distinguish civilians from combatants, take precautions and observe proportionality.
The political danger arises when self-defence becomes not a legal justification subject to limits but a comprehensive moral vocabulary. Once a state is positioned as the defender and its opponent as the aggressor, civilian suffering can be interpreted differently depending on which side experiences it. The same act can be described as terrorism when committed by one actor and security when committed by another. The point is not to deny the reality of terrorism or the legitimacy of self-defence, but to ask whether the grammar of self-defence is being applied symmetrically.
The law’s universal promise
International law contains mechanisms capable of challenging powerful states. The International Court of Justice’s proceedings in South Africa v. Israel, for example, demonstrate that states outside the traditional Western centre can invoke international legal institutions against a powerful state, though the Court’s provisional measures issued in January 2024 should not be confused with a final determination on the merits of South Africa’s genocide allegations. This distinction is important. International law is not simply a Western instrument, as it can also be used against Western-aligned states. That is why its universal promise matters.
But the existence of legal institutions does not resolve the political problem of enforcement. Courts depend upon states, international organisations depend upon political cooperation, sanctions depend upon governments willing to impose them, and humanitarian intervention depends upon military and diplomatic capacity. The formal equality of states therefore coexists with profound inequalities of power. A legal rule may be universal in its wording while its practical enforcement remains selective.
The West does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy
There is an obvious danger in this argument. If Western governments selectively apply human rights, does that mean governments outside the West should be left alone? If China invokes sovereignty, that does not settle questions concerning dissent. If Russia invokes anti-imperialism, that does not eliminate questions about its conduct abroad.
A critique of Western hegemony becomes intellectually worthless if it simply transforms into apologetics for non-Western states. Indeed, recent scholarship has warned against precisely this reversal. Shadi Mokhtari argues that critiques of the savages, victims, saviours framework can themselves produce a reverse version in which anti-Western governments are automatically cast as victims and their populations disappear from view (Mokhtari, 2026). This is an essential warning. The alternative to Western hegemony cannot be the hegemony of whoever happens to oppose the West. The subject whose agency matters most is neither the Western government nor the anti-Western government, but the human being whose lived reality both claim to represent.
The deeper question: epistemic power
The most consequential form of power may therefore not be the power to impose a norm, but the power to define the categories through which the world is understood:
- Who decides what counts as rational?
- Who decides what counts as modern?
- Who decides which religious practices are compatible with public reason?
- Who decides when a society is sufficiently developed?
- Who decides which forms of family are emancipatory?
- Who decides what constitutes legitimate sovereignty?
- Who decides when intervention is humanitarian?
- Who gets to speak in the name of humanity?
These are questions of epistemic power. Western universities, legal institutions, international organisations, media systems, financial institutions and diplomatic networks have historically exercised disproportionate influence over the production and circulation of knowledge about politics and rights. That does not mean every Western scholar or institution consciously seeks domination, as hegemony rarely works that way. Its most powerful form is often the one that no longer appears to be power: a particular conception of the individual becomes common sense, a particular conception of progress becomes development, a particular conception of political legitimacy becomes democracy, and a particular conception of moral freedom becomes human rights. The ideology becomes most effective when it ceases to look like ideology.
Universalism without monopoly
The answer, however, cannot be cultural relativism. If every society can define human rights entirely according to its own traditions, governments can invoke culture to justify almost anything, and universalism would collapse into sovereignty. But the opposite extreme is equally problematic: if one civilisation claims the authority to define universal morality for everyone else, universalism risks becoming a language of hierarchy.
The challenge is therefore to construct universalism without monopoly. That requires a distinction between universal principles and universal authority. The principle that human beings possess moral worth need not belong to any civilisation. The prohibition of torture need not be Western. The prohibition of arbitrary detention need not be Christian, secular, Islamic, Asian or European. The idea that political power should be constrained can emerge from multiple intellectual traditions, and even the principle of human dignity can be articulated through theological, philosophical and secular vocabularies.
What should be rejected is not universality but the assumption that universality requires a single authorised interpreter. A genuinely universal human rights order would have to be universally contestable: its principles would remain open to argument, its institutions would be accountable, its interpretation would not be monopolised by one geopolitical centre, and its enforcement would have to be capable of constraining allies as well as adversaries.
Beyond liberal triumphalism
The most difficult conclusion is therefore not that human rights are Western. They are not. Nor is it that liberalism is simply a mask for imperialism, which would be historically and philosophically inadequate. Liberal ideas have repeatedly been used against imperial power: anti-colonial movements appropriated the language of equality and self-determination, dissidents have invoked liberal rights against liberal governments, international law has sometimes constrained powerful states, and human rights institutions have provided resources to people resisting authoritarian governments of every ideological orientation.
The contradiction is more interesting than the condemnation. Liberalism contains principles capable of challenging the very hierarchies within which liberal institutions have historically operated. That is why the objective should not be to destroy universalism, but to democratise it.
The philosophical challenge is to recognise that the autonomous individual is not the only possible account of the human person. The historical challenge is to acknowledge that the universal language of law emerged within structures of empire and unequal power. The political challenge is to ensure that human rights are not converted into instruments selectively deployed according to geopolitical convenience. And the epistemic challenge is to accept that no civilisation possesses a monopoly on moral reason.
Conclusion: Who speaks for humanity?
The contemporary debate over human rights is often framed as a confrontation between universal values and cultural relativism, but that framing is too simple. There is another conflict beneath it: the conflict over who possesses the authority to define the universal.
Liberal secularism has provided some powerful tools available for limiting political power and protecting individual freedom, but it is not historically neutral. Its categories emerged from particular philosophical transformations, including the movement from God-centred moral authority towards the autonomous individual. Those categories were subsequently institutionalised during an era of European imperial expansion and became entangled with colonial law, development discourse and international governance. The result is not that contemporary human rights are illegitimate, but that their legitimacy cannot depend upon forgetting their history.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an international achievement. Human rights norms have been used by people across the world to challenge governments, including Western governments, and international law has created principles that can constrain power. These achievements should not be dismissed. But universal principles become politically dangerous when their interpretation is monopolised.
The central question is therefore not whether the West is hypocritical, but whether any political centre should possess the authority to decide, in the name of humanity, what humanity is. That question applies equally to Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Ankara, Moscow, Beijing or any other centre of power. A government invoking liberalism, religion, sovereignty or anti-imperialism cannot claim immunity from scrutiny. The test across all political orders must probe the mechanics of power rather than deferring to a single procedural baseline:
- Through what historical and philosophical frameworks is state power categorised as legitimate or illegitimate?
- How do populations navigate or contest the authorities who claim to speak in their name?
- How does moral and legal enforcement track or diverge from geopolitical alignments?
- In what ways do international legal structures distribute vulnerability or constrain the powerful regardless of alliances?
- Can populations subject to state discipline speak from their own ontological positions rather than being filtered through external rescue narratives?
- Whose specific definitions of order, freedom, and protection are institutionalised as binding law across differing civilisational traditions?
The deepest challenge to human rights politics is therefore not relativism, but epistemic humility. Universalism becomes more credible, not less, when it recognises that its own historical formation is open to criticism. A genuinely universal order cannot require everyone to adopt one civilisation’s conception of modernity before becoming fully human. Human rights should not be the property of the West, nor of any religious civilisation, nor of any state, institution or ideological tradition. Their universalism should mean precisely that no one has a monopoly on defining humanity. The real test of human rights is consequently not whether they can be imposed upon others, but whether they can constrain those who possess the power to impose them.
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