When I pursued my undergraduate degree in International Relations in Brazil, between 2016 and 2019, I encountered a curious narrative. Years later, I would hear it again from Egyptian, Congolese, Salvadoran, Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian colleagues and many others—this time during my first and second master’s degrees, in Finland and Austria.

I emphasize these contexts because they were deeply distinct academic and institutional environments. Even more distinct were the countries of origin of those repeating the same idea, perhaps united only by the fact that they belong to what Oliver Stuenkel calls “the rest” in his book Post-Western World, that immense category that seems to encompass everyone outside Western Europe and North America.

What narrative could be at once so simple and so powerful that it travels across such diverse geographies? The claim that Human Rights are a Western invention designed to legitimize colonial interventions under a new guise—the pretext of the Responsibility to Protect, the so-called R2P. In this reading, R2P functions as a contemporary version of the “white man’s burden,” immortalized by Rudyard Kipling. Before, the mission was to civilize “the rest.” Now, it is to protect us from ourselves, from our supposed intrinsic barbarism.

While still in Finland, I witnessed a first attempt to “defend the West” against this narrative. The argument consisted in problematizing the very concept of the West. Historical events considered central to its formation were listed—the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, political liberalism. Then came the observation that in several countries classified as Western these milestones did not unfold in the same way. The conclusion: the concept of the West does not fully apply to any case and is therefore useless.

The episode reminded me of the famous philosophical anecdote. Aristotle allegedly defined the human being as a featherless biped. Diogenes, in response, presented a plucked chicken and declared: here is Aristotle’s man. The irony exposes a real problem. Many concepts perform clear political, economic, and social functions even if they lack precise ontological definitions. We know who is human, even as we endlessly debate what defines the essence of humanity.

The same occurs with the concept of autocratization. It describes the movement of a regime toward less democracy—whether in the case of a dictatorship becoming even more authoritarian, a democracy degrading institutionally, or a democracy turning into a dictatorship. There is no fixed starting point, no clear finish line. Nor is there a single mechanism that defines it, or even a common process. Still, it is an indispensable concept for understanding contemporary politics.

The same applies to the West. There may be no consensual academic definition, but that does not mean it does not exist as an operative category in the real world. Just observe an international airport. Some passengers move through immigration in fast lines, circulate without visas, and rarely have their entry questioned. Others face extensive forms, interviews, financial proof, and the constant possibility of denial. The West may be an imprecise concept in theory. In practice, it functions as a perfectly recognizable system of privileges. From the immigration line alone we can identify who belongs and who does not (and for Brazilians who deny being Latin-Americans and imagine themselves part of the West, remember to apply for the U.S. visa before your Disney vacation!).

When problematizing the concept of the West proved insufficient, a second attempt to “defend the West” was to accept the colonial character of R2P but argue that, all things considered, the West was instrumentally necessary for development and the good life in “the rest.” A kind of “yes, I was your colonizer, but you should thank me.” Here it suffices to recall the characteristics of the Iberian colonial model and compare them with the current problems of Latin America to see how colonial activities were—and remain—vital to the destruction of developmental potential and the obstruction of the good life.

Spanish and Portuguese colonization in Latin America was marked by close integration between Church and State, resource extraction oriented toward external markets, institutionalized racial hierarchies, and extreme land concentration. Colonial elites tied to the Spanish and Portuguese crowns became local elites and maintained land concentration (which generated revolutions and civil movements from Mexico to Argentina). Religion continues to aggregate conservative interests, moving increasingly to the right in politics. Resource extraction continues—the Brazilian agro is pop” is a great example—which hinders industrialization. Racial hierarchies were never resolved, and today the descendants of enslaved people occupy the very favelas those enslaved people built. One often hears complaints about the personalism of Latin American politics, about how knowing someone in the right position offers advantages (“for enemies, the law; for friends, everything”). Well, Brazil’s territory, after all, was divided into hereditary captaincies—a mixture of public and private that still colors relations between these spheres today.

The reader might argue that this was historical colonialism, not contemporary interventions justified under the Responsibility to Protect. After all, R2P emerged within the United Nations, invokes the prevention of mass atrocities, and is formally anchored in universal principles. Yet one must ask: who decides when there is a humanitarian crisis? Who determines when sovereignty may be relativized? Who possesses the military and political capacity to intervene? Who is never the object of intervention? When the same international architecture that historically concentrated power in Western powers claims moral authority to intervene, colonial memory is not a rhetorical detail. It is a structural fact.

The case of Libya in 2011 has become the most cited example when discussing the limits and risks of the Responsibility to Protect. The Security Council authorized the use of force to protect civilians threatened by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. The mandate referred to a no-fly zone and civilian protection. What followed, however, was an operation that quickly exceeded the containment of attacks against civilians and directly contributed to regime change. Gaddafi’s removal was not accompanied by a consistent plan for institutional reconstruction. The result was state collapse, territorial fragmentation, proliferation of militias, and a prolonged civil war that turned the country into an arena for regional and international disputes. For many in the Global South, the lesson was not that civilians were protected, but that a humanitarian mandate can become regime change without subsequent responsibility for stability.

A third attempt to “defend the West” is perhaps the most sophisticated. It does not deny the European origin of modern Human Rights discourse, nor does it ignore the historical abuses committed in its name. On the contrary, it admits both facts and argues that, nevertheless, Human Rights have become universal heritage. After all, the Universal Declaration was approved by states from different regions; anti-colonial movements appropriated the language of rights to claim independence; and today non-Western governments also invoke these principles in international forums. If everyone uses the grammar of rights, it no longer belongs to anyone in particular.

This argument is more difficult to dismiss. African, Asian, and Latin American leaders actively participated in constructing the international human rights system. The juridical language of human dignity did not remain confined to Paris or London. It was reinterpreted in Dakar, New Delhi, Mexico City, and Pretoria.

What Does It Mean to Reject this Third Defense?

To deny the universality of Human Rights would mean accepting at least one of two possibilities: (1) that the only philosophical tradition to produce the idea of universal, inalienable rights protecting the individual was the Western one—and therefore the imposition of R2P is colonial; or (2) that non-Western philosophical traditions produced a distinct or minimal framework compared to the Western one—and therefore imposing this particular framework over native ones would be colonialism. Some accept the defense but argue that, in practice, the system is unequal, perpetuates power relations, and though normatively universal, functions in reality as a source of exploitation. Let us address the two normative disagreements, and then turn to the practical one.

The Normative Disagreements

Emmanuel Levinas is a philosopher who greatly interests me. Born in Kaunas, in the Russian Empire, the young Jew from a Lithuanian family witnessed, while living in what is now Ukraine, the October Revolution in 1917. In 1923 he settled in France, and when he moved to Freiburg in 1928 he became a student of Husserl and Heidegger. Later, in Paris in 1939, he was captured by the Nazis, and in captivity he wrote his most influential work, De l’Existence à l’Existant. His philosophy dialogues with French thinkers, yet it is grounded in that of his two celebrated teachers — a markedly Western philosophy.

In an age of nationalisms, Levinas was a pan-European, perhaps even more than that. While Sartre proposed that, in the absence of God, man is free to create his own purpose (since he is born with none in particular), Levinas argued that, prior to any individual freedom, there exists responsibility toward the other. For him, history demonstrated that individuals who are excessively autonomous and self-centered can justify committing atrocities.

Perhaps the point of convergence lies in the notion that, being free, the individual is responsible for his actions. The fundamental difference is that, in Levinas, ethics is not an external limitation; it is the very structure of subjectivity. For Sartre, to recognize that I am determined by the other is bad faith — it is an attempt to shift responsibility for my choices onto someone else. For Levinas, by contrast, it is in the relationship with the other that I come to understand who I am; therefore, in this originary construction of the self, responsibility toward the other is equally originary.

The debate between Levinas and Sartre demonstrates something that could be illustrated by many other philosophical confrontations throughout Western history: various socialisms versus liberalism; collectivisms versus individualisms; rationalism versus empiricism; and many others. That is to say, throughout history, Western philosophy seems to have oscillated between two poles — concern for the other and concern for the self.

If we accept the idea that Human Rights are a Western production emerging from currents concerned with the other, then we must also accept that they are the production of one strand of Western thought, not a necessarily hegemonic idea within the West. If that is the case, then it suffices to look for an analogous situation outside the West to be satisfied with the idea that Human Rights are also the product of philosophical traditions elsewhere in the world. Otherwise, the only philosophical tradition to have produced the idea of universal, inalienable rights protecting the individual would have been the Western one — and the imposition of R2P would therefore constitute a colonial one.

Here we might begin with Confucianism. Despite confusion surrounding the name — European Jesuit missionaries in China Latinized the name of Master Kong (in Chinese, Kǒng Fūzǐ, or 孔夫子) as Confucius — and some marginal conceptual misunderstandings, the West became acquainted with the tradition early on. Confucianism emphasizes that every person possesses intrinsic moral dignity and must be treated with humanity. Although it prioritizes duties rather than individual rights (a hallmark of many Eastern philosophies, and later fundamental in the construction of social and political duties of states toward their citizens, now part of Human Rights), its ethic of reciprocity sustains ideas of respect, social responsibility, and just governance.

We might instead begin with Buddhism. Buddhism grounds dignity in the universal capacity for enlightenment. Concepts such as compassion and the rejection of violence sustain principles analogous to the right to life, religious freedom, and moral equality among human beings. The emphasis on overcoming suffering echoes the social and humanitarian dimensions of Human Rights.

Even Hinduism, with its caste system and social hierarchy, has produced interpretations of Dharma as social justice and human dignity, broadly aligned with Levinas’s logic. The responsibility of the self in relation to alterity begins in the very construction of the self.

Imagine, then, if we begin from an expansion of Levinas’s logic — the other not merely as an originary component of the self, but the self as constantly conceived relationally. This is Ubuntu, an ethical-philosophical tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa that formulates being as a constant process, conceived, destroyed, and reconstructed by family, friends, community, society, country, continent, and perhaps even the world as a whole. The philosopher Kwame Gyekye explains that Ubuntu does not ignore the individual, who possesses singular value, but rather that the self flourishes within the community. Beyond philosophical construction, Ubuntu was crucial to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

We might even propose that much of Western philosophical history directly related to the construction of Human Rights only occurred due to the influence of non-Western philosophies. Between the 8th and 13th centuries, for example, the Islamic world not only preserved anciet Greek philosophy but transformed, systematized, and developed it. Without this process, much of Aristotle and Plato might have been lost forever. During the Abbasid Caliphate, especially under Al-Ma’mun, the House of Wisdom was founded in Baghdad — a center where Greek philosophy was translated, debated, and developed. From this context emerged renowned figures of Islamic philosophy such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes.

Al-Farabi, “the Second Teacher” (Aristotle being the first), was fundamental in building bridges between different Greek schools of thought. His theory of the virtuous city conceives politics as always serving the rational fulfillment of humanity — a prerequisite for later theories of rational dignity. By proposing that revelation and reason exist within a unified rational system, Al-Farabi places the pursuit of happiness at the center of ethics, arguing that justice or virtue are fully realized only when humans achieve happiness.

Avicenna, or Ibn Sina, formulated the famous “floating man” thought experiment to argue that even isolated from all sensory contact, a human being would possess self-awareness. In this logic, rationality is the foundation of the human, and since there is no distinction between the rational potentialities of different humans, all are endowed with equal humanity. Avicenna became famous for the proof of the “Necessary Being,” a thought experiment that seeks to justify the existence of God, thereby grounding the notion of collective responsibility. For centuries, “philosophy” in Europe meant, in part, “Avicennian philosophy.”

Averroes, or Ibn Rushd, was fundamental in deepening Avicennian thought regarding human dignity as a product of reason, and the protection owed to those unable to use it fully. Without the Aristotelian recovery via the Islamic world and its development, notions such as natural law or politics as ethical realization would not have been possible — and without these, there would be no Human Rights.

These traditions demonstrate that concern for the other, ethical responsibility, and the valorization of human rationality are not Western exclusivities. Confucianism emphasizes moral dignity and social duties; Buddhism, compassion and intrinsic equality; Ubuntu, the relational conception of self and community; classical Islamic philosophy, with Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, rationally grounds universal dignity and justice as ethical fulfillment.

Consequently, one may argue that universal Human Rights did not arise from nothing within the European context, but benefited from dialogues, developments, and cross-appropriations of philosophical traditions from diverse regions. They are, in a sense, a global construction. “The rest” produced philosophy as profound and complex regarding the dignity and rights of the human person as the West.

The very drafting of the documents that constitute Human Rights, and their negotiations, are closely linked to efforts from the “rest of the world.” During the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, after World War II, states and delegates from different regions of the world played active and decisive roles. The Soviet Union, for example, was responsible for including fundamental social and economic rights, such as access to work, education, and social security, balancing the Western liberal emphasis on civil and political rights. Delegates from African, Asian, and Latin American countries—many newly independent—participated in drafting, negotiating, and voting on the text, reinterpreting human rights language in light of their own historical, social, and political experiences.

On the committee that drafted the text in 1947‑48, alongside figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, were thinkers and diplomats from multiple origins: the philosopher and diplomat Charles Habib Malik of Lebanon was one of the main debaters and conceptual architects on the drafting committee, advocating, for example, for the inclusion of an article on the social order necessary for rights to be realized in practice—which became Article 28 of the Declaration—and presided over important debates during the adoption of the final text. The diplomat and intellectual Peng‑chun Chang of China, vice-chair of the Human Rights Commission, played a crucial role in mediating deadlocks and defending truly universal language, even opposing references to God or nature as the foundation of rights, in order to make them accessible to diverse cultural traditions. Moreover, Hansa Jivraj Mehta of India, together with other women delegates such as Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic) and Begum Shaista Ikramullah (Pakistan), decisively influenced the formulation of terms that ensured gender equality—including changing terms such as “all men” to “all human beings” in the final text.

The Practical Disagreement

As I have previously argued in the column “Interdependence and Its Empty Promises,” regimes that defend Human Rights in the West are fully capable of committing abuses — and history certainly proves that they have, even after the creation of R2P, sometimes in its name. The crucial difference, however, does not lie in the absence of errors, but in the existence of mechanisms to recognize them, judge them, and, however imperfectly, repair them.

Human Rights are not merely a set of abstract values. They are also an institutional arrangement: courts, treaties, monitoring procedures, international organizations, free press, civil society organizations, transnational advocacy, global public opinion. This system may be instrumentalized, selective, unevenly applied (and often is). But it exists. And its existence creates a permanent space for contestation.

There is a structural difference between violating a right within an order that recognizes the violation as such and violating a right after denying that it exists. In the first case, even if hypocrisy is present, there remains a common language, legal parameters, and possible avenues of accountability. In the second, the very grammar of critique is dissolved.

It is precisely for this reason that states accused of abuses rarely reject Human Rights outright. On the contrary: they sign treaties, participate in councils, produce reports. The political cost of completely abandoning the system is high. The rhetoric of rights has become so widespread that even authoritarian governments feel compelled to justify themselves within it. That, in itself, is an indication of its normative strength.

The problem is not merely when a state violates rights. The greater problem is when it seeks to empty the very meaning of rights, redefining them in ways that render them unrecognizable. When “security” absorbs all freedom, when “cultural values” become arguments to suppress dissent, when “sovereignty” is used to block any external scrutiny, what is at stake is no longer imperfect application of Human Rights, but the erosion of their architecture.

Here lies the fundamental distinction. A system may be unjustly applied and still preserve the possibility of correction. But if the system itself is dismantled — if treaties cease to be recognized, if courts are captured, if independent organizations are criminalized — violation ceases to be contingent and becomes structural.

This is the practical dimension that is often lost in debates about colonialism and universality. It is legitimate to criticize the selectivity of the international system. It is legitimate to denounce poorly conducted interventions or political instrumentalizations of humanitarian discourse. What is not trivial is abandoning the system itself.

To deny the practical universality of Human Rights because their application is unequal is to abandon the only minimally shared global language that allows the denunciation of abuses — including those committed by the very powers that historically concentrated authority. Anti-colonial movements appropriated this language to demand self-determination. Minorities use it to demand equality. Women use it to claim protection from violence. Indigenous peoples use it to defend their territories. If the language is imperfect, it is nonetheless a common language.

References

Al-Farabi. 1985. Al-Farabi on the Perfect State. Edited and translated by Richard Walzer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Averroes. 2001. The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Translated by Simon Van den Bergh. Reading: Garnet Publishing.

Avicenna. 2005. The Metaphysics of The Healing (al-Shifa). Edited and translated by Michael E. Marmura. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press.

Gyekye, Kwame. 1997. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. “The White Man’s Burden.” McClure’s Magazine 12 (February): 290–291.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 2010. Ética e infinito: diálogos com Philippe Nemo. Tradução de João Gama. Lisboa: Edições 70.

Molinero, Giulliano. 2025. “Interdependência e suas promessas vazias.” DPolitik, May 30, 2025.

Skidmore, Thomas E., and Peter H. Smith. 2005. Modern Latin America. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library.

Stuenkel, Oliver. 2016. O mundo pós-ocidental: Potências emergentes e a nova ordem global. São Paulo: Zahar.