Ambivalentnost ljudskih prava i goli život. Biopolitičke refleksije o devedesetim godinama
Ambivalence of human rights and bare life. Biopolitical reflections on the 1990s

Summary/Abstract: A paper entitled The Ambivalence of Human Rights and Naked Life. Biopolitical reflections on the 1990s in the first part aim to offer a concise genesis of the concept of human rights and successive codification in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although legally non-binding, the concept of human rights is a normative standard, from which many legal rules of performance can be deducted, and is generally understood as part of soft law. The protection of human rights, one of the main principles of the United Nations, accompanied by convincing rhetoric, is, in the words of Amartya Sen, “ubiquitous in the modern world” and some authors see the protection of human rights as a “soft power of humanity”. However, as such, it has internal incoherences to be analyzed in the second part of the paper, where we will confront the declared ideals of human rights and the lack of efficiency and limited application and implementation of the same. The second part of the paper reflects on the “right that exists but does not mean”, which faithfully depicts the context of human rights in the 1990s in the reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Then we introduce the biopolitical category of “naked life” which represents, every form of life “included in the order only in the form of its exclusion.” Exclusion from the political order and derived phenomena such as the direct or indirect threat to human life show a gray area between declared human rights and their real application. The aporias and ambivalences of human rights point to the contradictions, incompleteness and uncertainty that defines this idea, but on the basis of which it is possible to project minimal social change in order to protect them.

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