Does the Third World Lack Human Rights?

     The circulation of goods, social movements, people and rights discourses created many transnational subjects during the 1990s, as discussed by Inderpal Grewal in Transnational America. The circulation of rights discourses is of particular interest due to its vulnerability of being used as a veiled agenda to neocolonize and imperialize a nation-state, particularly "Third World" nations by the "developed" West. In this case, being a developed nation goes beyond the ability to remain modernized and technologically astute, to also include existing a paradigmatic nation of democracy and stellar example of the implementation of human rights. In particular, the idea of women's rights as human rights creates a global rights discourse that leads to problematic oppression wars. In these oppression wars, even when civil rights concerns are acknowledged in the West, particularly those of women, the West is still presented as ideal nation-states of democracy and human rights. "These formulations...use the concept of "third world" non-European "backwardness" to explain why the "third world" lacks human rights. (129)" The questions then emerge: Does the "Third World" lack human rights? Are "developed nations" the paradigm of democracy and the realization of human rights?
     Interestingly, this rights discourse with Western nations as paradigms of democracy leads to such contradictions as a preoccupation with rape culture in India without not level to that of the rape culture of America, viewing the hijab as oppressive while not applying the same scrutiny to the habit of Catholic nuns, and certain global feminists viewing themselves as ambassadors to the world's women with a concern for their rights and seeing themselves as the appropriate leaders of women's rights. A savior complex comes into play: feminism downgrades itself to that of being tunnel visioned in only seeing the patriarchal problems of black and brown worlds. All of sudden, the patriarchal, sexist realities of white men is erased, and it is the brown Mexican man and the black Muslim man who are the upholders of patriarchal regimes.
     The next issue comes when universality is enforced. All women must want the same thing. If women don't all want the same thing, then some women must not want what's best for them. The creation of knowledge includes the knowledge of what constitutes human rights and how they should best be enforced. The creation of knowledge leads to hierarchies of whose truths or interpretations of realities is most "right." Interestingly, in the enforcement of human rights, along with ethics and the like, the reality of who ends up with ethics to eat off of versus who ends up with concrete resources to use or exploit as they see fit. As James Baldwin said, "When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being reluctatnly and bloodily seperated from the land and the African who is still attempting to digest or vomit up the Bible." A world without ethics of course is not the answer, but we must scrutinize who decides what is ethical and who decides who violates rights and the recourses for those violations.