Université de Fribourg

Human Rights and Democracy in a Global Context - Decoupling and Recoupling

Besson, Samantha

In: Ethics and Global Politics, 2011, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 19-50

Human rights and democracy have been regarded as a mutually reinforcing couple by many political theorists to date. The internationalisation of human rights post-1945 is often said to have severed those links, however. Accounting for the legitimacy of international human rights requires exploring how human rights and democracy, once they have been decoupled or disconnected, can be recoupled...