ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the future of human rights, a future that is periclated by a whole variety of developments in theory and practice. For national power-elites, "human rights" provides vocabularies of legitimation of governance. Suffering is ubiquitous to the point of being natural, and is both creative and destructive of human potential. Religious traditions impart a cosmology to human suffering towards which secular human rights traditions bear an ambivalent relationship. The languages of human rights are integral to tasks and practices of governance, as exemplified by the constitutive elements of the "modern" paradigm of human rights—namely, the collective human right of the colonizer to subjugate "inferior" peoples and the absolutist right to property. Human rights universalism somehow begins to become problematic at the beginning of the end of colonialism, in association with the principle of self-determination proclaimed in the two covenants. True, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) also occurs at the onset of the Cold War.
