ABSTRACT
Any discussion of rights and governance in a plural world must first come face to face with the multifaceted and mutually reinforcing upheavals that have buffeted the international system this past century: the phenomenon of ‘total war’ as reflected in two world wars and the possibility of nuclear war, the profound and seemingly unbridgeable gap between rich and poor, and the increasingly dangerous disruption of planetary ecosystems. To this must be added the organized mass slaughter of innocents, which is at the centre of much contemporary experience – one need only mention the German Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cambodian ‘killing fields’, the ethnic cleansing practices that followed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, and the Rwandan genocide. These indelible stains on the collective human conscience have inevitably given added poignancy to the human predicament, and paradoxically enough engendered a steadily expanding consciousness of a shared human destiny.
