When: Monday, September 26, 12:30 pm
Where: International Center Seminar Room 112
The Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies
Invites you to a lunch talk
by
Marie-Luisa Frick
University of Innsbruck/Harvard University
The Globalization of Human Rights – Hopes and Concerns
Since the negotiation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 the question of reconciling its universal claim with the fact of (partial) cultural relativity has never ceased to produce controversial debates among human rights theorists. It is, however, a widely accepted assumption that in a decolonizing world of 7.3 billon people human rights cannot be imposed, but have to be “translated” into as many “local” moral codes as possible. Against the background of considerable regionalist and particularist dynamics (“African”, “Asian”, “Islamic” human rights), I will try to put into perspective the promising prospects of such trends as well as the dangers they involve.
Marie-Luisa Frick is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Harvard Human Rights Program. Her research fields are: Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law, Ethics, Philosophy of Religion and Human Rights. In her recently completed Habilitation thesis she explored conditions for the idea of human rights to take root in different cultural/ideological environments. Among her publications are: „The Cultural Defense and Women’s Human Rights. A Critical Inquiry into the Rationales for Unveiling Justitia’s Eyes to Culture, “Philosophy & Social Criticism 40 (2014); she is coeditor of Islam and International Law. Engaging Self-Centrism from a Plurality of Perspective (Brill 2013), and Power and Justice in International Relations. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Challenges (Ashgate 2009).