مطالب

A person’s identity is their sense of who and what they are, of who stands in significant relations to them, and of what is valuable to them. This is inevitably very broad, an immediate implication of which is that the concept of identity taken alone cannot do significant normative work. In some cases a person’s identity is bound up with the evil that they do or wish to do, and cannot thereby give them any right to do it. In other cases very powerful elements of a person’s identity – such as their attachment to loved ones – is certainly related to important rights, but it is not entirely clear that one needs the concept of identity to explicate or justify these rights; the deep involvement of their identity is arguably a byproduct of other important values in these cases (such as love), and those values can do the grounding work of the rights by themselves and more simply and clearly. <br />Nevertheless, when suitably qualified, a person’s identity is central to accounting for important political rights. These ranges from rights to participate in cultural practices of one’s group, which sometimes implies duties on governments to support minorities threatened with extinction, to – at the outer limit – rights to arrange political administration. <br />These rights are connected to both autonomy and fairness. Cultural rights are often taken either to be opposed to autonomy, or at best instrumental to personal autonomy (by providing ‘options’), but in fact, the ideal of autonomy, expressed by Mill as being the author of one’s life, requires that one be in control of significant aspects of one’s identity. Significant aspects of one’s identity are collectively determined within a culture. Cultures are not static, and their development is particularly affected by political boundaries. A fundamental right of autonomy implies, therefore, that groups be allowed, within reasonable constraints of general feasibility and stability, to arrange political boundaries to enhance their control over their identity. This shows the fundamental link between individual and collective ‘self-determination’. The right of collective self-determination is also based on fairness, since cultural majorities in existing states enjoy advantages that minorities frequently lack. <br />Spelling out the basis of identitarian rights in autonomy contributes to determining both the upper and lower limits of this and other rights of universal scope. First, it is important to distinguish between two senses of ‘human right’. The first sense is a right that a person has simply in virtue of being a person, or simply by being a human being. A second sense is a right of cosmopolitan scope. Every right in the first sense is a right in the second sense but not vice versa. That is, every right that people have merely in virtue of being people is a right that everyone has. But not every right that everyone has (and should have) is a right that they have merely in virtue of being a human or a person. Some rights that everyone has or should have today people could not have had in the past because institutional, economic, technological or other prerequisites were lacking. Some that everyone has today they may not have in the future because other values will have superseded them in a different institutional, economic, or technological setting.

Human rights, particularly in the form of international human rights law, intersect with religion and peace at foundational levels, as symbolically highlighted by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The Preamble to the Declaration proclaims in its very first line that respect for human dignity is the foundation of peace, and proceeds to declare that freedom of belief, alongside freedom of speech and freedom from fear, are the highest aspirations of humankind. One could similarly highlight the special relationship between the project of human rights, peace and religion, particularly religious tolerance, in the texts of the universal, as well as regional, human rights instruments adopted since 1948, as well as the text of the Charter of the United Nations of 1945. The relationship between contemporary human rights, on the one hand, and religion and peace on the other, is arguably determined by the structure of international human rights law as a political discourse, which describes the relationship between individuals, society and the State. The visible influence of social contract theory on the wording of the Universal Declaration reminds us that from its inception, the project of human rights is intimately linked to religious diversity (because of the birth of modern sovereignty in European wars of religion and evangelical imperialism) and peace (because of the connection that the Declaration draws between the stability of States and respect for the human dignity of citizens). Against this known conceptual and historical backdrop, this paper starts with the displacement, at the global level, of human rights by the ambiguous discourse of "human security," since the early 1990s. A general idea is that "human security", which has rapidly evolved to become an organizing principle of policy-making for governments as well as non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations, constitutes an alternative, sometimes deliberately advocated as such, to the discourse of human rights. Although received, and arguably uninformed, commonsense considers human rights as a threat to State sovereignty, the confrontation of human rights with "human security" reveals, first, how human rights is bound to sovereignty and, second, how "human security" refers to political parameters that are foreign to those of the UDHR. In that sense, this paper discusses how the structurally very deep relationship between peace, religion, and the project of equality in diversity promoted within international law by the UDHR is sidelined by the general project of "global governance," to which "human security" has contributed a legitimate basis for disregarding the sovereignty on which human rights depend. Methodologically, the paper seeks to bring together a structured and coherent conceptual backdrop to the resistance offered more recently by a group of States to the continuous use of "human security" within the United Nations and beyond. This is done through the use of the technical notion of "political theology," which systematizes the foundational place of religion in political discourse by describing political-theoretical language (such as that of the Universal Declaration) as secularized versions of religious worldviews. This allows for a constructive confrontation of human rights and "human security" as parallel political projects, in a way that describes the project of "human security," connected as it is with other strategic concepts of global governance (like the "responsibility to protect"), as a threat to the original architecture of international human rights law. This threat is shown to derive from "human security's" potential hostility to both human rights' international law component (sovereignty) as well as its human rights component (equality in diversity), particularly by associating humanitarian concerns with the passing security concerns of dominant States. 

To analyze and evaluate textbooks, researchers have either proposed scales and checklists to be filled by teachers and learners or conducted qualitative investigations of the match between SLA theories and textbook activities. This study, however, employs the microstructural approach of schema theory to scrutinize the reading passages of “Mosaic 1 Reading”. To this end, 17 passages of the textbook were randomly chosen and their constituting words were explored as semantic, syntactic, and parasyntactic schemata. The passages were also analyzed in terms of their readability indices. The results showed that they consist of 3722 schema types, 2979 (80%) of which are semantic in nature. Although the textbook aims at “academic success” at English language “proficiency levels”, it provides no objective definition of what they stand for. In terms of readability, however, the passages vary in difficulty from grade three in primary school to college level. Further, the textbook is discussed in terms of its constituting schemata and suitability to the Iranian context and suggestions are made for future research. The findings of this study have important implications for language teaching, testing and materials development. They show that language proficiency must be defined in terms of schema types and the bulk of class time must be spent on teaching semantic schemata rather than syntactic and parasyntactic ones. Similarly, for testing the reading comprehension of these passages, the number and type of test items must be based on the percentage of semantic and syntactic schema types and subjective criteria such as teachers’ intuition or experience must be avoided both in teaching and testing the comprehension of passages.