Les droits humains comme grammaire de « l’en-commun »

• Main Authors: Gabriel Blouin Genest, Sylvie Paquerot
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française 2016-10-01
• Series: Sociologies
• Subjects: human rights; in common; right to water; conflicts; constestations; international order
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/5654

Since the creation of the UN, human rights have become, following Bertrand Badie (1999) "the first of the common good of humanity". Multiple actors refer to them: the North and the South; governments and private actors; the left and the right. Argument of authority (Arendt, 1972), and even though their actual implementation is largely relative, how then should we understand the role and scope of these rights? To conduct this investigation, we consider human rights as a battlefield of the "in-common”. Never set and still disputed, this conceptual battlefield is the political space of the "in common" which expresses political conflicts and contestation. Through the case study of the global debate over the human right to water that marked the beginning of the millennium, we show the relevance of human rights as a political battlefield. This concrete application of the grammar of the “in common” leads us to examine the specific axes of political confrontation through the concept of order enshrined in the Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.