ABSTRACT
For most people, the concept of human rights is about political ideals, policy guidelines, and/or life practices. As such, they have often become a pretext for one state to intervene in the internal affairs of other sovereign states or become a bargaining chip to exchange for other desired values. Human rights advocates today condemn the use of human rights for purely political purposes, and suggest that such use undermines the credibility of human rights arguments in the long run.1 Their critical perspective presumes, indirectly perhaps, a status quo ante where human rights are both natural and universally guaranteed. That is exactly what this chapter will dispute. I will argue not whether human rights are good or bad, right or wrong, but that, in practice, human rights are not part of an original state of nature, and are, rather, psycho-cultural derivatives of wo/men’s quest for collective identities. In other words, human rights are historically constructed notions that without question mean different things in different contexts for different people.
