Anachronistic or is the human rights corpus still replete with the savage, victim and saviour metaphor?

Abstract

In a world of increasingly permeable boundaries it is questionable whether we can continue to see the human rights movement as trapped in the constructs of yesteryear. Yet according to certain human rights scholars', human rights is not so much an exercise in freeing the oppressed or ensuring that fundamental democratic rights are not eroded, but more so an exercise of sustaining vestiges of Western imperialism. In a significant piece, Professor Mutua has argued that the human rights corpus can be reduced to a damning 'Savage-VictimSavior' (SVS) metaphor. On the one hand 'savages' are created, giving rise to 'victims' and 'saviors' on the other. For Mutua, the good Western state is pitted against the illiberal, immoral and draconian nonWestern one - a process said to derive from Eurocentric ideas of colonial superiority and domination, and propounded by major human rights institutions today. This paper seeks to question some of the assumptions underlying various facets of what has emerged as the Third World Approaches to International Law Literature' (TWAIL) specifically Professor Mutua's SVS theoretical construct. Whilst illuminating, it is argued that the polarization implicit in his framework has been tempered. Propelled by globalization and an increasingly interdependent world, human rights (like all great traditions) have been forced to negotiate monumental change. The human rights analyst's guiding fiction of certain compartments, chiefly the Savage-Victim-Saviour metaphor, has fragmented. We can no longer deny an evolving human rights order.