Johan Brännmark (Stockholm University) gives a presentation with the title "Human Rights as Ideology".

Abstract: Human rights, and bills of rights in general, are typically thought to serve a function to protect against oppression and abuses of power. Some critics of the contemporary human-rights regime, such as Costas Douzinas, have however argued that at least as they function now, human rights and the liberal cosmopolitanism with which they often come packaged rather serve an ideological function in imperialist political projects and in the dominance of neoliberal capitalism. This kind of critique still recognizes a double-edged character of human rights (Douzinas, 2007, p. viii: “Are human rights a defensive barrier against domination and oppression or the ideological gloss of an emerging empire?”), and the question then becomes, first, how serious (on balance) the potential dark side of human rights really is, and second, how one can think about human rights, and put them into practice, so as to minimize their problematic ideological function and to strengthen their progressive potential. This talk discusses both of these issues.