Fabio Massimo Parenti

 

Abstract： “Humanitarian” wars and media campaigns to support them have shaped international relations during the last decades. Following the seminal work of Danilo Zolo, they have been the most recent manifestations of Western HRs doctrine application, which in turn presuppose the primacy of “individual rights” on “collective rights”, as well as the primacy of a new “universalistic criterion” over the “particularistic principles” regulating IRs legal framework - State sovereignty respect.

 

This HRs doctrine is embedded in Western liberal tradition, does not include the respect of other set of rights (common/collective rights) and is in blatant contradictions with the main principles regulating IRs, theoretically and practically. In this paper, I firstly review Zolo’s contribution in identifying these contradictions. Secondly, I will provide empi rical evidences to demonstrate the Western abuse of HRs doctrine for geopolitical goals; that is the use of a universalistic narrative of HRs to fulfil specific national geopolitical goals of dominations, as in the cases of Western wars and campaigns against Libya, Syria and Xinjiang Chinese Autonomous Region.

 

I conclude looking at the valuable efforts of Chinese scholars to develop a systematic HRs theory based on historical changes and peculiarities of societies. In this Marxist-inspired understanding of HRs, it seems to be there a space for combining “common/collective” and “particular/individual” values attached to peoples’ historical needs.