HUMAN RIGHT TO CULTURE AND IDENTITY

Is it desirable or even necessary to have distinct human rights for cultural identities Do different conceptions of culture and identity and their potential to frame human rights violations as culturally appropriate complicate the question How should a human right to collective identity be outlined Claims to human rights as applying to a whole ethnic religious or cultural group instead of the individual prove to be complex This book reveals the pitfalls benefits and demands that surround the debate for and against culture and identity in human rights It connects a continuous and nuanced theoretical debate with highly topical empirical findings about collective rights for indigenous groups which for centuries have been suppressed and marginalized and now stand at the forefront of successfully demanding a human right to their own culture and distinct identity This book shows the ambivalences of those demands and discusses solutions so that human rights neither exclude marginalized cultural groups nor reproduce rigid distinctions between seemingly exclusive cultures