Defend Popular Will, Struggle for People(s)-Centered Human Rights!
This past Human Rights Day illuminated what Gaza has relegated to the dustbin of history: the oxymoron of “Western values and human rights.” Western civilization stands as a living negation of human rights, a truth illustrated by the ongoing atrocities in Palestine and the brutal legacies of Western intervention in Haiti, Congo, and Sudan. The era of Western human rights is over. The relevant frame, if human rights are to have any liberatory potential, is a People(s)-Centered Human Rights approach, and this is the narrative we must advance.
U.S. and Western human rights rhetoric functions as a tool of coercion, providing ideological cover for sanctions, occupations, regime-change efforts, and the destabilization of sovereign states from Africa to West Asia to preserve a global order of inequality. This hypocrisy is systematic. In our Americas, the principle of popular will is the cornerstone of sovereignty and self-determination and a foundational concept for the Zone of Peace we strive to uphold. Yet, this principle faces relentless assault by a modern imperial playbook resurrecting the interventionist logic of the over 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine. The recent electoral processes in Latin America, from Honduras to Venezuela, expose a deliberate pattern of U.S. interference. Simultaneously, within the United States, the ideological move to revoke birthright citizenship constitutes a profound assault, dehumanizing immigrant communities through the same logic that denies personhood abroad. This is vividly seen in the current political and rhetorical attacks on Somali immigrant communities, who face targeted discrimination and threats to their fundamental rights. These assaults, emerging alongside record-breaking U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, reveal the desperation of a declining empire that relies on repression at home and militarism abroad as its global legitimacy collapses.
These are not separate crises but parallel processes. The machinery that subverts sovereignty abroad reinforces a racialized, exclusive order at home. Therefore, our imperative is to champion a People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework, as embodied in initiatives like the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights. This framework recognizes that genuine peace and rights are achieved solely through bottom-up, popular struggle against interlocking systems of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Defending popular will, from resisting foreign coups to stopping domestic dehumanization, is one integrated fight. Our collective power must confront this pendulum of repression, forging a liberated future through organized, transnational solidarity.
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