“Human Rights, Development and Coloniality: a Global Outlook”, by Prof Julia Suárez-Krabbe (Roskilde University/Denmark)

Abstract: Human rights and development cannot be understood separately. Both rest on the ontological separation between ‘human’ and ‘nature’, and so, while human rights deals with the social relationships among human beings, development deals with how human beings relate to nature, so that they can manage and exploit it in their favor. To understand how the power of these discourses work, I use the idea of bad faith, which is exemplified through the folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Unlike the story, the validity of ideas in real life is not exhaustively verifiable through sight. Thus, the force of colonial discourse lies in how it succeeds in concealing how it establishes “truths” that work to naturalize and protect its power. The talk shows how hegemonic models of human rights deny colonialism and coloniality while correlative conceptions of development justify or excuse colonialism and coloniality. This effort involves a historical outlook on the ideas and practices of human rights and development that displays how these are the products of race, and function as technologies of implementation of the death project. Finally, the talk explores alternatives to these through the prism of indigenous and other southern theories and epistemologies.

BIO: Julia Suárez-Krabbe is a Colombian-Danish anti-racist and decolonial activist and academic. She is Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University. Her work centers predominantly on racism, human rights, development, knowledge production, education and decolonization. She is the author of “Race, Rights and Rebels. Alternatives to Human Rights and Development from the Global South” (2016).