Globalisation:

Abstract

Summaries This article shows the intimate links between human?rights discourses today and globalisation. It highlights how rights discourses have contributed greatly to the radical critique of developmentalism, reconfiguring the notion of development by placing the human person, not the state, as the central subject and beneficiary. The article warns, however, of two contemporary processes of regression in rights discourses. The first is the emergent episteme that discredits thoughts that dare imagine alternatives to global capitalism and strays beyond the languages of economic rationalism. The second is the replacement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights paradigm with a trade?related, market?friendly human rights (TRMF/HR) paradigm that promotes and protects the collective rights of global capital. In the latter the rights to entrepreneurship, innovation and economic progress are said to create the essential conditions for better realisation of social and human rights.