ABSTRACT
The United Nations has hailed the universal declaration of human rights as a ‘milestone document’ in the pursuit of protecting the rights, freedoms, and dignity of people around the world. Valuable as the Universal Declaration has been, however, it is neither the product of nor has it led to a uniformly just world order. In the United States, for example, even as the nation played a major role in the creation of the document, racial segregation, both de facto and de jure, was a sociopolitical reality at the time the declaration was signed. Music scholarship on human rights has favoured the notion of using music as a resource to tackle economic, social, and cultural matters, while often explicitly drawing ties back to the United Nations’ initiatives and directives – without much criticism of the foundation on which ‘human rights’ discourse has been situated.
