Can we be Civil? What Activists and Policymakers Tell Us about Human Rights and World Society

Abstract

This study looks at the seeming intractability and predictability within the human rights debate between policy makers and activists and puts it under the lens to see what it tells us about these sets of actors and what their deliberation in turn tells us about international and world society. It does this by identifying some underlying fissures in this debate that require a closer examination. These features are moral agency, the relationship between order and justice, and the basis of human rights, they each represent different facets of underlying tensions between the two sets of actors of interest, which are predicted to take the form of a family tree of ideas between the two groups. The goal is to better understand the structure underlying this debate and develop analytical tools which can be used for this debate and used for the analysis of broader debates on similar questions in world society.