Towards the decolonization of the universal history of Human Rights: A (re)interpretation in a Latin American key

Abstract

The interpretation and analysis of the international history of Human Rights has been characterized by a strong influence of discourses and narratives promoted from the Global North. This is not only evident in the majority of academic works and articles related to the subject, but also in those speeches coming from other spaces that advocate their recognition and vindication. A reflection of this is the classification of T. H. Marshall (1960), in which he distinguishes three historical phases in civil, political and social rights, also known as first, second and third generation rights. These narratives have been received and reproduced in the Global South as an official history, without subjecting their postulates to analysis from their own historical perspective.

In this sense, the objective of this work is to carry out a critical analysis of the way in which the history of Human Rights has been narrated from the Global North, and proposes a new historicization from a Latin American perspective, trying to show that our past is crossed by various violence and chaotic episodes that give the particular history of these rights its own identity. In a regional context marked by poverty, social exclusion, inequality and violence of various calibers, the final conclusions will try to highlight the importance of carrying out constant practices of decolonization of this history to confront these problems without repeating the same history.