Resisting dehumanization—exploring nonideal human rights education

Abstract Human rights and human rights education (HRE) have been criticized for being too ideal and decontextualized. Current critical HRE discussion emphasizes the political contestation of rights, and is suspicious of universals. Many such criticisms provide important insights for revising HRE. However, in this article, we argue that the denial of universality and normativity regarding the philosophical grounding of HRE is somewhat unjustified, and leads to moral and philosophical problems. Therefore, we seek to renew the theoretical foundations of HRE through the approach of nonideal theorizing. Drawing on the works of the previously neglected Judith Shklar and other nonideal theorists in the context of HRE, we construct a nonideal universalism founded on a negative moral conception of dehumanization. We argue that approaching human rights violations from the perspective of dehumanization offers theoretical renewal to the current discussion on human rights, and a basis for nonideal HRE. This is a new angle in the current critical HRE discussion because it takes the prevailing criticisms of human rights and HRE seriously but does not deny the non-negotiable, universal moral core of human rights. We argue that such a core is necessary for making sense of the moral responsibilities related to HRE and for transcending given contexts. We emphasize the importance of this moral approach for HRE and suggest that nonideal HRE can foster a sensitivity to injustice through political and moral imagination against actual cases of dehumanization. Additionally, nonideal HRE has the potential to disturb passive injustice and foster moral sensibility through education.