It is not only ideology that shapes human rights discourse but also reference points, 'best examples', cases that at their most successful combine a victim, a perpetrator and a right.
The neoliberal paradigm is economically dead but ideologically still very active especially in the education sector, which has assumed a far more business-like and 'entrepeneurial' value system.
Though always a construct by necessity, the gap between the idea and the reality of "we" is getting ever larger.
Colonial feminism is based on the appropriation of women’s rights in the service of empire and has been widely utilised in justifying aggression in the Middle East. But is it liberal?
The liberal demand to depoliticise culture, to abandon “dangerous ideas”, is highly political and leads liberals to consider all manner of coercive initiatives to engineer the liberal subjects they feel are missing among oppressed groups.
In the neoliberal epoch the humanities have undergone a radical transformation.
The longish episode of left-wing, racist and militarist étatisme, has been replaced by a no less militaristic, neo-liberal racist state, which while professing liberal values, is continuing the illegal occupation and war crimes in Gaza.
Historically, liberal thought was not aligned with female emancipation or gender equality. The idea that women were inferior to men and needed to be kept in a state of dependency was not a betrayal of liberalism – instead, it was at the heart of liberal thinking.
Are we caught between support for liberal intervention which often has disastrous, unintended, but often foreseeable consequences, on the one hand, and an anti-interventionism where we simply ignore the repression faced by many people, on the other?
The ethos of 'new managerialism' is stripping public services of moral and ethical values and replacing them with the market language of costs, efficiencies, profits and competition. Anything which is not easily quantified becomes undervalued or abandoned.
A liberal approach in neo-liberal times means learning about work and not just learning to work. Westminster remains stuck in a rut of recycling failed ideas entirely unsuited to its economic model of low wage, low skill work.
