Scholars have struggled with identifying the exact reasoning that leads to the list of human rights in Rawls's Law of Peoples. This essay argues that the list can best be explained by a reasoning based on the value of self-determination of peoples. At the same time, it argues that this reasoning still has serious difficulties. In particular, it is necessary to clarify whether human rights may always be enforced by coercive means against states that violate them. However, once this has (...) been clarified, the balance of reasons on which Rawls’s argument rests no longer indisputably supports his conclusion. (shrink)

In efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, social entrepreneurship has gained popularity as a vehicle for positive change in developing countries. The multiplicity of stakeholders, diverging sociocultural contexts and the hybrid mission complicate the process of legitimacy construction for social entrepreneurs as a basis for the acquisition of scarce resources. This study investigates how social entrepreneurs operating in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia tackle this challenge of bridging conflicting directions in discursive interaction with their European funders. We conduct a multimodal (...) discourse analysis to uncover discursive strategies for legitimacy construction by combining linguistic data from interviews with visual data from social media accounts. Legitimacy construction, and thus resource acquisition, centers on three aspects which interlink pragmatic, cognitive and moral legitimacy: developing innovative solutions, mobilizing private-sector efficiency, and contributing to local empowerment. Presenting these aspects as mutually reinforcing overcomes contradictions between social and business logics and provides an expanded space for legitimacy construction of social entrepreneurship. Discursively constructing legitimacy around a ‘glorified version of social entrepreneurship’ mobilizes resources but downplays the risk of being an entrepreneur in the Global South, contributing to increasing corporatization of social purpose organizations. (shrink)

In her political philosophy, Martha C. Nussbaum defends liberal political principles on the basis of an objective conception of the good of human beings. This paper examines whether her argument succeeds. It identifies three methods to which Nussbaum refers in order to select the central human capabilities, whose exercise is seen as constituting the human good. It asks whether these methods – the interpretation of actual ways of human self-understanding, the search for necessary anthropological features, and the idea of an (...) overlapping consensus – can yield liberal political principles. The paper concludes that it is doubtful that the first two methods will lead to this result. As to the third method, it may yield liberal principles only insofar as it relies on the notion of human dignity which is interpreted in a way that contains a strong view of equality of all human beings. In this way, universal liberal principles are not primarily based on considerations of the human good, but on a genuine moral standpoint. (shrink)

Pensadores griegos y orientales, filósofos antiguos, medioevales y modernos, han tocado el tema de lo corporal de manera fragmentaria que reducen lo corpóreo a mero instrumento. Para evitar este tipo de interpretaciones, queda el expediente de acudir a la síntesis holística; a la versión del "cuerpo total" que somos. La economía imperante es la del "cuerpo poseído". Se tasa, vende y desecha en el mercado la fuerza de trabajo. Se ejerce sobre él una violencia que nos rebasa en todos los (...) frentes; es radical, porque atenta contra la integridad y la dignidad de los cuerpos. Restañar las heridas corporales de nuestros pueblos requiere de la formulación y siembra del conocimiento de la Ética del cuerpo que deberá ir acompañada por un proceso de reconstrucción simbólica de la idea de "cuerpo" en el que todos participemos. Si armonizan necesidades y capacidades corporales propias y ajenas y compaginan nuestras acciones con el respeto al entorno natural, casa del cuerpo, podremos vislumbrar que vamos sobre el camino correcto. The Greek and Eastern thinkers, ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, have dealt with the body only in a fragmentary way that sees it as a mere instrument. To avoid this kind of interpretation we resort to a holistic synthesis-the "total body" version that we really are. The dominant economics is the one of the "possessed body" that can be priced, sold and disposed of as working force. An overpowering violence is applied to it; it is a radical violence as it attempts on bodies' integrity and dignity. The healing of the wounded bodies of our people requires formulating and planting the seeds of the body's ethics that will accompany the reconstruction of an idea of body to be shared by all of us. If we harmonize our own and others' body's needs and abilities, and our actions are in accordance with our natural surroundings, we will be able to make out the right path. (shrink)

En los años 1998 y 1999, un conjunto de familias reconocidas como Huarpes, residentes en el departamento de Lavalle, de la provincia de Mendoza, han sido inscriptas como “comunidades indígenas” en el Instituto Nacional de Asuntos Indígenas. Dichas familias vienen protagonizando un momento de reorganización social vinculado fundamentalmente a una constante lucha en defensa de su territorio. El siguiente artículo se propone analizar los dispositivos y mecanismos sociales a través de los cuales los adscriptos étnicos construyen territorialidad y estructuran sus (...) formas de sociabilidad sobre la base del parentesco, del liderazgo familiar y el nomadismo. (shrink)

En la teoría etnológica y política contemporánea, la conceptualización de las acciones de adscriptos étnicos en términos de acciones orientadas por intereses constituye el núcleo conceptual de la definición de lo político. Comunalizaciones, movimientos culturales, democracia plural radical, reivindicaciones de derechos colectivos diferenciados, son todas ellas nociones que refieren a acciones colectivas y a la producción de identidades sobre la base de orientaciones culturales o ethos comunes en el ámbito de la esfera pública. La interpretación de tales expresiones como formas (...) institucionalizadas y públicas de acción colectiva se funda en un concepto de vida política como "vida común", como "acción colectiva pública". La siguiente presentación se propone interrogar los márgenes categoriales sobre los que se construye y fundamenta la teoría etnopolítica contemporánea, analizando las nociones de "común" que ponen en circulación como así también la tensión entre universalismo y particularismo que hacen emerger. In the contemporary political and ethnological theory, the conceptualization of the ethnic ascribed people actions in terms of "interest actions" is the conceptual core of the definition of politics. Communalizations, cultural movements, radical pluralist democracy, differentiated collective rights claims, are all notions that refer to collective action and the production of identities based on cultural orientations or common ethos in the field of public sphere. The interpretation of such expressions, as institutionalized and public forms of collective action, is based on a concept of political life as "common life", as "public collective action". The following article proposes to inquire the categorical margins on which the contemporary ethno-political theory is built and founded, analyzing not only the notions of "common" put into circulation but also the tension between universalism and particularism that do emerge themselves. (shrink)