Counter-Elites Swimming Up-Stream: The Challenge of Pursuing a Political Rights Agenda where Economic Rights Trump
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Brian Keith Grodsky
Abstract
The most recent spate of ‘democratic revolutions’, ushering in the fourth wave of democratization, seems to lend support to those advocating for the primacy of political and civil rights, over economic, cultural and social ones, in the human rights framework. In this article, I challenge that idea, arguing instead that the most recent regime changes, like so many that have preceded them, were, if anything, more about economic rights than political ones. I reassess not only the most recent ‘revolutions’, but also those that took place over the course of the 20th century, showing commonalities among the human rights goals of communists, anti-communists and contemporary pro-democracy leaders. By framing these various revolutionaries as human rights agents, and mass publics as their allies, this article is designed to engage readers in a debate about what, if any, sorts of rights truly hold primacy. The difference between today’s pro-democracy leaders and yesterday’s communist ones rests on the perceived international legitimacy of the democratic template. Yet all of these leaders, I argue, have essentially struggled for political change not as an end, but as a means to improved economic rights.
© 2012 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- NGOs and Development Reconsidered
- Editors' Forum: Law and Human Rights in Global History
- Prefatory Note
- International Law and Human Rights: Diverging and Converging Histories
- The History of Human Rights: The Big Bang of an Emerging Field or Flash in the Pan?
- Stigmas and Memory of Slavery in West Africa: Skin Color and Blood as Social Fracture Lines
- Counter-Elites Swimming Up-Stream: The Challenge of Pursuing a Political Rights Agenda where Economic Rights Trump
- Decision-Makers in the Dock: How Trials, Human Rights Advocacy and International Law are Shaping the Justice Norm
- Book Reviews
- Review of Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
- Review of Noel Salazar's Envisioning Eden
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- NGOs and Development Reconsidered
- Editors' Forum: Law and Human Rights in Global History
- Prefatory Note
- International Law and Human Rights: Diverging and Converging Histories
- The History of Human Rights: The Big Bang of an Emerging Field or Flash in the Pan?
- Stigmas and Memory of Slavery in West Africa: Skin Color and Blood as Social Fracture Lines
- Counter-Elites Swimming Up-Stream: The Challenge of Pursuing a Political Rights Agenda where Economic Rights Trump
- Decision-Makers in the Dock: How Trials, Human Rights Advocacy and International Law are Shaping the Justice Norm
- Book Reviews
- Review of Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
- Review of Noel Salazar's Envisioning Eden
