Educational Philosophy and Theory

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ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20

Governmentality, democratic state, and education

in human rights

Oscar Orlando Espinel Bernal

To cite this article: Oscar Orlando Espinel Bernal (2017) Governmentality, democratic state,
and education in human rights, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49:7, 681-690, DOI:
10.1080/00131857.2016.1204734

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1204734

Published online: 10 Aug 2016.

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Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2017
VOL. 49, NO. 7, 681–690
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1204734

Governmentality, democratic state, and education in human

rights*
Oscar Orlando Espinel Bernal
Department of Philosophy, Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios – UNIMINUTO, Bogotá, Colombia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Faced with the incessant concern on the part of national and supranational Human rights education;
institutions in promoting, expanding, and implementing education human rights;
on human rights in schools and educational systems, it is necessary to governmentality; citizenship
stand back for a moment and review the political and discursive ways
in which these projects work and the mechanisms they are based on
within the current system. In order to do this, we will use the Foucauldian
methodological notion of governmentality. From this point of view, some
of the relatively recent practices of subjectivation, production, control, and
shaping of people needed for a project of nation come to light. At the same
time, these practices respond to a global project. Human rights education
(HRE) is postulated and closely associated with contemporary techniques
for citizenship training. Consequently, practices and discourses of human
rights and, more recently, of HRE worked within government modalities of
modern states as an exercise of control on populations.

Just like the concept of governmentality, biopolitics is a methodological notion used by Foucalt in devel-
oping his investigative work on the analysis of the political transformations of modernity. According
to Castro (2008) this is ‘a concept that should show its analytical potential in the thoroughness of the
historical processes’ (p. 191).
As it is known, through the concept of governmentality, Foucault steps back from autonomous,
self-subsistent, and omnipresent notion of the State as an entity, just as it had been understood. The
reason why he moves away from this notion is precisely because of his interest to focus on the analysis
of governance practices. In other words, he is interested in the processes of nationalization or, as he
chooses to call them, the governmentalization processes of the State. Focused on the analysis of the
political rationality of the State and rejecting the idea of making a ‘theory of the State’, Foucault proposed
to examine how the modern state emerged in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the conver-
gence of multiple technologies for driving behaviors. One of these technologies, and this thesis is crucial
for our research project, is the human rights discourse and the processes of citizenship construction.
From this perspective, Professor Noguera is right when he points out how the methodological notion
of governmentality works:
A methodological concept is a tool for thinking, an instrument to operate on a problem. In the particular sense that
I would like to point out in this paper, a methodological concept is a tool, an instrument that Foucault elaborated
in order to develop his research and teaching. (Noguera, 2009, p. 23)

CONTACT  Oscar Orlando Espinel Bernal  oespinel@uniminuto.edu

*Paper exposed on: Analysis of Public Policy on Education. Think Different International Seminar: Foucault’s Resonances on
Education celebrated at Bogota, San Buenaventura University from September 30 to October 2 of 2014.
© 2016 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
682    O. O. Espinel Bernal

From Foucault’s point of view, as Professor Noguera reminds us, even to think means disrupting,
­ isturbing, provoking, stressing, or inciting: ‘to think differently, to think the unthinkable before trying
d
to know or reproduce what is already known’ (Noguera, 2009, p. 25).
So, at this level, modern state biopolitics and governmentality, conceived as government on people,
on life, and on the conditions that favor the development of the actual economic and political system
established by public policies in global capitalism, are configured on both political and discursive
dimensions.
Therefore, from the perspectives of biopolitical and governmentality control conceived as methodo-
logical tools, it is possible to review how social and democratic rule of law, the values and principles that
inspire democracy, human rights, citizenship, democratic participation, subject of rights, among other
concepts work. All these statements, articulated in projects to promote i.e. citizenship skills, education
for peace, civic, environmental, and moral education, education for tolerance, multicultural education,
education for diversity and against discrimination,1 consumer education and consumer rights, among
many others, operate along with HRE and other contemporary techniques of citizenship training.
So far, we have explained the methodological approach of this work on political and discursive
practices of HRE. From this standpoint, these practices are presented as techniques that promote the
strengthening and stability of economic and social order by the application of universal principles; this
system is, at the same time, largely supported and legitimated by the design of structures, subjects, and
adaptations for the existing democratic systems. According to one of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège
de France (1 February 1978): ‘the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis
of the general tactics of governmentality’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 137).
As part of this rationality, human rights are presented as necessary, unchangeable, and unques-
tionable principles to achieve widespread aspirations of peace, social harmony, and progress. All these
statements are just empty words because of the manipulation they suffer by particular interests that,
paradoxically, operate as sophisticated technologies to address the population into the market logic
and the globalization of capitalism.
Thus, the human rights code becomes a discourse that expands and legitimates practices and struc-
tures that cause the opposite effect these great ideals invoke. Its tangible results are injustice, inequality,
mass impoverishment by the hand of the increasing accumulation and concentration of wealth, the
increase of barbarism, and different forms of violence. However, it should be noted that it is not our
attempt to take part in a hasty and uncritical rejection of HRE or the discourse of human rights itself.
Rather, our goal is to ‘think differently’ about these speeches and performances rather than to reproduce
what is already known.
Henceforth, our analysis will consider three groups of documents produced by supranational insti-
tutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights (IIDH). The
reason why this study is limited to the guidelines, concepts, and recommendations of these documents,
is explained by the fact that through the network of power relations that shape today’s globalized
world, country members of the UN undertake to develop and implement action plans for planning and
applying public policies to comply with these covenants and international conventions. From a hierar-
chic conception of power,2 these formulations are presented in a macro-level discourse that circulates
around the HRE in educational institutions, because, as expected, the demands of the international
community are appropriated on their guidelines, philosophies, purposes, and intentions subjecting
nations within supranational mechanisms and instruments.

The World Program for Human Rights Education

Since the mid-1990s, international agencies have directed their efforts toward improving human rights,
especially in the field of human rights within formal education. Since the World Conference on Human
Rights held in Vienna in 1993, the need to launch the epoch called the United Nations Decade for
Education in the field of human rights (1995–2004) was declared. As members of the UN General
Assembly, different countries pledged to develop a national action plan for education in the human
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   683

rights field in order to join the declaration of the decade. In this global project, HRE is considered as
the guiding principle and a right of citizens.
In this regard, the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna (Organización de Naciones Unidas
[ONU], 2006) measured that education, training, and information in the field of human rights are ‘essen-
tial for the promotion and achievement of stable and harmonious relations among communities and for
fostering mutual understanding, tolerance and peace’ (Organización de Naciones Unidas [ONU], 1996,
p. 1). It is generally understood that human rights, as a social historical construction, are essential to
maintaining and improving the social order, harmony, and community life. For this reason, the agencies
responsible for maintaining and monitoring world order focus their interests on strengthening rights
within countries and encouraging the development of a constitution that fulfills and protects them.
Meanwhile, within the action plan contemplated by the General Assembly of the United Nations,
HRE is defined as ‘training, dissemination and information efforts aimed at the building of a universal
culture of human rights through the imparting of knowledge and skills and the molding of attitudes’
(ONU, 1996, p.1). In other words, the production of knowledge and practices for the expansion of a
universal culture is defined around a code of established principles. Once this definition is applied,
it is possible to visualize the expression and calculation of the forms of subjectivitation projected in
the action plan of the World Program for Human Rights Education (Organización de Naciones Unidas
[ONU], 1993) for HRE:
human rights education should involve more than the provision of information and should constitute a compre-
hensive life-long process by which people at all levels in development and in all strata of society learn respect for
the dignity of others and the means and methods of ensuring that respect in all societies. (p. 1)
The main objective of this biopolitical exercise is to move toward a universal human rights culture
in which people assume their responsibilities and rights within the established social order. That is to
say, promoting a universal platform with all the homogenization and segregation implications resulting
from it3 in which each individual is able to live in society, but just in this specific type of society, respect-
ing, and assuming a chance of basic principles and fundamental freedoms destined to ensure peace,
harmony, development, and tolerance. This is, according to Foucault, what we can call government
practices for the ‘survival of the state’ in modern societies. (Foucault, 2009, p. 137)
It is important to remember that according to Foucault before the establishment of modern nation
states and unlike sovereign power, in which the law is the instrument of choice to protect sovereignty,
whenever the law is fulfilled by the law itself, for the art of governing (the concept we are using to
analyze the political-discursive forms of HRE), law is not necessarily what prevails because its power
depends on its use to achieve a specific purpose. In other words, in the context of the sovereign power
of the medieval period, the law is identified with sovereignty because it (the law) ‘conforms to the laws
imposed by God on nature and men’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 125), this means, the law is the order established
by God that is declared by the sovereign. Meanwhile, in the art of governing implemented in modern
States, the law reflects a suitable end in which unconditional adoption by citizens resides the stability
and subsistence of the State:
Law and sovereignty were absolutely united. Here, on the contrary, it is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but
of the disposition of things, that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, or, of as far as possible employing
laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means.
(Foucault, 2009, p. 125)
It is in this sense that the primacy of the tactics and techniques that make possible the realization of
the established order is maintained within the governance practices. In one way or another, citizens hold
this primacy. In the case of our analysis, the end of these governmental practices could be synthesized,
in the expansion, protection, and enhancement of a modern Western democratic model, and recently,
in the consolidation of a market democracy. This is where HRE projects become particularly relevant
as tools for the establishment of a universal culture of human rights and a system of principles with
functional beliefs for that model to be reproduced. Practices and knowledge become part of various
modalities of populations’ government’s tactics and techniques.
684    O. O. Espinel Bernal

Returning to the matter of the general exposition of the official documents elaborated by the UN
we reviewed in this project, we should mention the World Program for Human Rights Education (2005–
2009) that began as a continuation of the Program for the decade adopted by the General Assembly of
the United Nations. The aim of this World Program is to strongly integrate HRE to formal primary and
secondary education systems in different nations. Although in these action plans the emphasis is on
formal education systems, it is clear that HRE should be included in any educational program as part
of a comprehensive education of the citizens. This seeks to ensure a universal culture of human rights
configuration to reaffirm governance practices on the population.
Another kind of document analyzed in this project is the set of reports elaborated by the Inter-
American Institute of Human Rights (IIHR) about the progresses on HRE in 19 countries of the region. In
these reports, HRE is one of the key fields for the analysis of the indicators in human rights progress4 in
every country. It should be noted that by the time the studies were conducted, these countries shared
certain characteristics in their internal and historical dynamics: they were emerging from a long period of
dictatorship and initiating the restoration of democracy and the consolidation of democratic institutions.
So they were developing constitutional, legal, administrative, and educational reforms under the rising
organization and mobilization of civil society to demand respect for human rights and the rule of law.
In this context, HRE is presented as a fundamental part of the right for education. An education in
which power relations and constitutive practices of subjects are interwoven and therefore it is essen-
tial for specific modalities of government of the people. According to the IIHR, HRE is the primary task
of democracies. That is why it has been established as a right that all states must guarantee for their
citizens. Thus, IIHR impels the State as a part of their ‘survival’ tasks, to set policies that support the
organization and promotion of the subject to make a real contribution to the practice of teaching and
learning in the field of human rights. HRE:
means that all persons, regardless of gender, national or ethnic origin, or economic, social and cultural status, have
the real possibility of receiving a systematic, broad and good-quality education that enables them to understand
their human rights and respective responsibilities, and national and international human rights systems. (IIDH,
2003, p. 5)
In short, these are subjectification practices within the framework of power relationships disposed
by governmentalization and control mechanisms of the State.
In order to draw some understanding to judge how HRE operate as a technology for shaping sub-
jectivity, the next sections are structured around four of the principal categories found in the literature
reviewed. These categories are: democracy, human rights culture, training subjects of rights and duties,
citizenship education. This brief inquiry will enable us to appreciate and show how HRE as a govern-
mental technique operates in particular regions and from four different angles of possible analysis.

An investment in democracy
In its third report, the IIHR (2004) seems to ‘shift’ away on the emphasis it gives to HRE. In its first two
reports, the IIHR focused the attention on the formulation of HRE as a right, echoing the Article 13
of the Protocol of San Salvador (Organización de Estados Americanos [OEA], 1988), and specifically
as an essential and a transverse component of the right to education. However, in its third report,
the attention seems to be more focused on the consolidation and strengthening of democracy
based on HRE.
It is for this reason that IIHR conceives that the education of children and teenagers as subjects of
rights will be a guarantee for the stability and future of democracies, whenever these subjects will be
those who actively engaged citizenship and determine the course of societies.
Based on these documents, we can find out how, from a governmental perspective, HRE is conceived
as the best investment for the establishment and maintenance of democratic systems as it would allow
channeling, sustaining, and legitimating the exercise of state power on populations. This code of values,
principles and beliefs would work on a universalization project as a strategy for adaptation, submission,
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   685

identification, and engagement of citizens with what is presented as a project of the Nation, progress,
communal welfare, development or modernization, to name just some of them.
The following quotation from the third report of the IIHR (2004) is an illustrative example of this
HRE instrumentalization:
We believe that this Third Report provides some answers and, as a result, will help us advance toward the goal of
making children and adolescents aware of human rights and democratic principles, and teaching them to respect
and defend them. Investing capital and pedagogical resources in schoolteachers will be the best way to defend
democracy in Latin America in the medium term. (p. 6)
HRE, it is said, sets the conditions for a viable democratic system, in the hope that would bring
progress toward peace, coexistence, sustainable development, inclusion, and social justice, among
other promises.
A few lines prefacing the report allows us to understand the reasons why HRE should be linked to
education and what its purpose is concerning the stability of the system and population control:
Teachers working with children and adolescents have an opportunity to shape the future of democracy and plant
seeds in the minds of their students, who, in a few years, will have the right to vote and be members of political
parties, civil servants, activists of civil society organizations, active citizens and decision makers. To provide them
with a comprehensive education, we need teachers with good scientific and technical qualifications and the highest
human qualities. (p. 6)
Clearly, in order to produce the stability of the democratic system, it is necessary to monitor the
mechanisms of participation within this system. Presumably, the main task would be to train and model
the future citizens who will exercise their rights, including their rights to vote, of freedom, association,
and political participation, and, above all, to shape and model their consciousness that will affect or
suffer the established social order. At school, these future citizens are not only in the process of crystal-
lizing their personalities, but also in the formation of their subjectivities, ideals, principles, and values.
For this reason, it is vital to adjust efforts, practices, techniques, and forms of subjectivity in national
and international policies.

A human rights culture

Continuing with the analysis of subjective modalities presented in the global project of HRE that is
compiled in the documents just examined, another statement should be revised because of its regular-
ity and implications within the practices of subjects’ production. This is the statement of human rights
culture as it fits in the global hegemonic project that has absorbed human rights discourse.
As mentioned above, in order to respond to the rules signed by nations through international cov-
enants and conventions, each country is committed to develop and implement different action plans
to promote HRE. In these action plans, education systems based on educational policies (institutional
and administrative reforms, laws, and decrees) have been contemplated. Also, these plans must have
an impact on the content of courses, textbooks5, and the school’s curricula. All these efforts arise in
order to integrate into the school the education and training necessaries to make the universal culture
of human rights possible.
Everything that is taught as well as how it is taught must express the human rights values and prin-
ciples and promote the training of subjects of law (individuals with legal rights) committed to both the
enforcement and the effective exercise of their rights.
Human rights education goes beyond cognitive learning and includes the social and emotional development of all
those involved in the learning and teaching process. It aims at developing a culture of human rights, where human
rights are practiced and lived within the school community and through interaction with the wider surrounding
community. (ONU, 2006, p. 50)
Also, we should mention the fifth report of the IIHR recommendation (2006) which determines
that all the adaptations and the contextualization in different levels (in our case, school and teachers)
must be adjusted with the regulations and guidelines established by the higher entities, ensuring the
control of processes.
686    O. O. Espinel Bernal

The more centralized models are, the more they tend to reduce the complexity of procedures diminishing social
actors participation and their opinions. In the opposite extreme, other models emphasize the national and local
aspects arguing the most important are to promote normative and technical skills leaving the obligation to interact
with the educational community (local school) in a second place. (p. 39)
In other words, the State is obligated to generate the policies and guidelines for developing and
integrating HRE while the institutions and educators are responsible for implementing and supervising
its enforcement. This is paradoxical, precisely because the declared ultimate purpose is to generate
and promote democratic environments fomenting creativity, innovation, etc. This proves the creation
of subjectivities is limited to the obedience and how the mechanisms of participation, are centralized,
standardized, controlled, and filtered by the higher levels within a hierarchical system.

Training subjects of rights and duties

Another relevant element highlighted in this documentary analysis on the functioning of these pro-
grams is the recurrent concern about the training of subjects of rights through the HRE discourses and
practices. The fundamental purpose holding these claims is to make each individual perceives himself,
first of all, as a subject of rights. This recognition as a subject of rights means to be able to exercise and
demand respect for them, but also to recognize them in others. From this point of view, the recognition
of rights, that is, a system of rights, involves simultaneously the recognition of duties. A ‘subject of rights
and duties’ is a functional concept and subject within government practices analyzed.
Thus, the National Plan for Education in Human Rights (PLANEDH) begins its Introduction as follows:
There is no doubt about HRE is the most rational and promising way to learn and become aware of the values and
principles that highlight human beings dignity; the importance it has acquired to regulate the relations between
the State and society and to understand how human rights have become a source of inspiration to build adequate
answers to make front to a growing sociopolitical complexity, the continuous social changes, the new demands
required to the educational system as well as to determine the responsibilities of the State in this scenario. (Ministerio
de Educación Nacional [MEN], 2007, p. 4)
This first paragraph of the Introduction of PLANEDH, where HRE is presented as a tool to recognize,
promote, and strengthen the values of the (Western) society and thus to ‘regulate’—as an exercise of
power and domination—the relations between the State and society, and vice versa. Human rights are
understood as the code that sets the rules and legitimizes the actions and relations between both of
them; a code that limits the exercise of freedom, aspirations, and personal projections and at human
dignity itself because it is already and intrinsically defined by the system of principles and values that
argue to ‘exalt’ them. In general, what operates here is an established system of rules and principles
that regulates the personal demands in front of the State, and the States demands against the subject:
a subject of rights.
Now, the gradual expansion of the human rights concept and its interdependence with others has
enriched this purpose and has made the role of human rights education more complex: while it operates
as an instrument for preventing fundamental rights violations, it must become, at the same time, an
engine for individual and social transformations, construction of citizenship, and realization of democ-
racy (IIDH, 2006, p. 12). Then this concept is not limited to the prevention and possible denunciation
of human rights violations, but advances on the practice of transformative initiatives and conditions
in societies within the established framework of citizenship and democracy. Thus, it becomes in the
limits of a transformer exercise at an individual and a social level.

Citizenship education
In recent years, we have seen a growing wave of the citizenship and citizenship training discourses in
large scenarios across society, but mainly in the field of social sciences and of course, particularly in
education. There is a progressive increase in the interest of the various state sectors to consolidate skills
that ensure proper training of citizens who make up society. The recurrence of this discourse responds
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   687

to the features and events of tumultuous years that inherit some consequences from the recent past.
Ruíz and Chaux (2005) following Kymlicka (2001), enumerate some of the situations that have weakened
the structures and institutions of democratic order:
The increasing number of people abstaining from voting in democratic societies, the resurgence of nationalist
movements in some economically developed countries, the social tensions of a multiracial and multicultural pop-
ulation, the crisis of the welfare state and the unfavorable balance of the environmental policies so far, among
others. (Ruiz & Chaux, 2005, p. 10)
All these political and social events set the contemporary political scene and become a major concern
for democratic system’s harmony and sustainability. The ongoing war environment in the world through-
out the twentieth century that continues, vehemently, to this day could also be added as another factor.
In the Colombian scene, the situation is no different. On the contrary, it is intensified due to the
internal conflict our society has suffered in the second half of the twentieth century, although, clearly, it
has its roots in early periods of Colombian history. According to Ruíz and Chaux (2005), this conflict has
led Colombian society into a crisis of humanity and ‘the crisis has also meant a crisis of citizenship, that
is, a crisis in the ability to build just and equitable social conditions for all articulated by political means’
(p. 10). It is precisely in this context that the National Plan for Human Rights Education (PLANEDH) arises.
This troubled reality inevitably affects the democratic project adopted in the new Constitution of
1991, in which the Colombian state is conceived as a Social Rule of Law that protects, promotes, and
guarantees civil and political rights, in addition to the recognition of the social, cultural, and economic
rights. This Constitution ‘provides guidelines, mechanisms and procedures required for the construction
not only of a democratic system, but, more importantly, for a culture of democracy’ (Ruiz & Chaux, 2005,
p. 11). Obviously, this project is compromised by the aforementioned events; each of one deteriorates
the consistency of the democratic structures in the country and increases a loss of confidence in the
institutions and its representatives. All this constitutes an attack against the stability of the State and
the government that it exerts over the population.
The concept of Social Rule of Law is developed through three organic principles: legality, independence and
collaboration of the branches of government for the fulfillment of the essential purposes of the State and with
criteria of excellence. The respect for human rights and the compliance of the guiding principles of government
action are the practical consequences of the philosophy of the Social Rule of Law. In this way, a Social Rule of Law
is strengthened when both the citizen and the State share values and attitudes of a universal nature. (PLANEDH,
2007, p. 61. Emphasis added)
Kymlicka emphasizes on how citizenship education6 is one of the essential functions of educational
institutions, and how, in fact, this was one of the purposes for which the whole education system was
created. ‘One of the basic tasks of school is to prepare future generations for their responsibilities as
citizens’ (Kymlicka, 2001, p. 251). However, HRE policies operating as government technique is about
citizens that are capable and particularly in the provision to preserve the social structures within and for
which they have been trained throughout their life. ‘This implies that in addition to the guidelines and
established practices for the governance rule, it requires a subjectivity and a culture in which democracy
is lived in concepts, values and habits’, as stated by The Curriculum Guidelines for Training in Constitution
and Democracy. (Ministerio de Educación Nacional, MEN, 1998a, p. 13) This series of statements reflect
a clear articulation with government practices, the biopolitical exercises, and subjectivation modalities
prepared by public policy in the sphere of HRE. On the other hand, and reaffirming previous exposition,
in the formation of civic competences it is assumed that ‘what a society politically aims and is embodied
in the Constitution cannot be excluded from its educational practices, so this is why is so important
citizenship education’ (Ruiz & Chaux, 2005. p. 11). Citizenship training articulated to biopolitical practices
that shape subjectivities, beliefs, and aspirations operate as a technology for the population control.
As expected, according to what we have been exposing, this citizenship education goes beyond
civic education and recognition of laws and institutions:
Citizenship education is not just a matter of learning the basic facts about the institutions and procedures of political
life; it also involves acquiring a range of dispositions, virtues, and loyalties which are intimately bound up with the
practice of democratic citizenship. (Kymlicka, 2001, p. 251)
688    O. O. Espinel Bernal

Therefore, education for citizenship is not limited to obedient and passive compliance of rules;
moreover, it extends to the consolidation of an individual and collective will oriented to accept such
an order and also to engage and seek, in every single action, to establish and maintain such a system.
This is the real aim of biopower applied by the State on each of the society members for its leadership
and government over them. In this regard, especially after its internalization as practice of the self, this
training should lead citizens to reject all actions or behaviors that may threaten society so the citizen
joins the control functions of monitoring the behavior of other citizens. Moreover, after citizens recog-
nize and respect in every single action the social order, they become, thanks to education for citizenship,
guarantors and protectors of the social and political system.
This is precisely what the Curriculum Guidelines for Ethics and Values project from the Ministry
of Education of Colombia (MEN, 1998b) aims to make possible for educational institutions not only
to identify what it means to be a citizen, but also to promote knowledge and skills from which the
community that participates or is involved in the training process get compromised and work for the
nation project of the Constitution.

One final thought: Overcoming the subject of rights category

Human rights serve as regulators and controllers of social practices and relations between the social
partners, institutions and organizations, legitimating, and providing the framework within which it is
imbued the legal or illegal, right and wrong and what is feasible and what is not. In this sense, it pro-
duced some kind of ahistorical perception of rights in which these are situated as a fixed universal set
of immovable, natural, and therefore unquestionable principles. This ahistorical view disregards and
overshadows the social status of human rights and the history of its formation, establishing them as
abstract principles with a dogmatic, formal, and instrumental character.
As is well known, human rights are acknowledged as the basis for the freedoms, justice, and solidarity
consolidation within the self-defined democratic modern states. However, they are usually very far from
it, and moreover tend to camouflage authoritarian systems. Freedom, justice, solidarity, and democ-
racy are conceived within the coordinates of the prevailing capitalist system: co-opted and restricted
freedom; justice managed by particular interests, solidarity focused on individuality, and democracy
legitimating practices inclined to authoritarian and oligarchic regimes.
What we mean with the analysis of this political discourse is to show, using the methodological
notions of governmentality and biopolitics, how HRE lead to a vicious circle in which the State action,
in the hands of its leaders, is governed precisely by the set of principles, values, and rights that they
establish and regulate. This means that the same democratic system promoted by following the Western
model, determines the standards and regulations of its own actions and thus the principles that control
and legitimate it. Consequently, from our perspective, the HRE promoted by public policies is limited
to the recognition of the already existing norms and mechanisms for their protection.
In the end, freedom, equality, and all the transformations so frequently quoted in public policy
speeches are regulated by the rules of the universal human rights system. Any action out of such
socially accepted parameters could be sanctioned and rejected. The body of rights points the only way
to go; it is the ground and limit; states the cardinal points for social action; determines the behaviors
and lifestyles that can be accepted as correct forms of relationships between the State and its citizens
and vice versa. Stated briefly, the claim of a model has already set itself is instituted as the claim of the
subject of rights.
Seen in this light, the transformation, maintenance, or if you will, the improvement in the economic
and political order in the social system is paradoxically, and thanks to the context of human rights, the
source of social marginalization, injustice, the inequity impoverishment of the population, and violence.
Ultimately, it is the rearrangement of the system in order to maintain the equilibrium under promises
of justice, freedom, and peace that function as guiding principles for action of populations andat the
same time vanishes by the system itself.
 Educational Philosophy and Theory   689

HRE is promoted on the basis of these hopes for a better, just, and peaceful world. But the institutions
that coordinate the public policies on HRE we have analyzed, just as the modern capitalist democracies,
reside on false promises and hopes. HRE produces the effect of strengthening institutions and values
within the existing governmental practices as a biopolitical exercise of population control.
These statements are nothing but empty words until the training and education of people do not
overcome the category of subject of rights in question, which is immersed in a rigid universal rights
system. On the other hand, this system is presented as the legitimate discourse of this same sociopolitical
order governed by an economic system which oppresses, subjugates, marginalizes, and concentrates
the wealth and privileges in the few.
It is therefore necessary to find ways to allow human rights as social, historical, and political con-
structions, to be transformed into authentic tools for promoting empowerment, transformation, and
the creation of new alternatives within communities. These tools should encourage us to think dif-
ferently in order to act differently. To accomplish this task, this inquiry tried to denature, deconstruct,
and problematize the universal and instrumental discourse around HRE that has emptied the power
of questioning that, in our view, entails the idea of human rights.

Notes
1. 
‘As the PLANEDH is conceived, it is clear that education in human rights dialogs and challenges with other binding
but not equal languages. As human rights education had been seeking ways have emerged new educational plans
as education for citizenship, environmental education, moral and civic education, peace education, education
for equal opportunities, education for tolerance, multicultural education, education for the diversity and against
discrimination, including current suggestive propositions’. (PLANEDH, 2007, p. 6)
2. It is necessary to point, as Castro-Gómez says, the heterarchic perspective of power from which this inquiry is
placed. ‘The hierarchical theories of power argue that more global power relations “structure” the less global ones
creating the conditions for the lower levels to become subject to the logic of the higher levels [...] By contrast,
in one heterarchic theory of power (as Foucault offers us), social life is seen as composed of different chains of
power, operating with different logics and which are only partially interconnected. Between the different regimes
of power are disjunctions, incommensurabilities and asymmetries, so it is not possible to speak of a “ultimately”
determination from the global regimes’. (Castro-Gómez, 2007, p. 167)
3. From this framework, the global project of HRE seeks to universalize principles and values of fundamental rights
and the Western democratic model, both historically constructed concepts from specific contexts and for different
particularities. ‘The same hegemonic trend surrounds the human rights discourse and leads to imposing its
universalization from a dogmatic perspective’ (Espinel Bernal, 2013, p. 165). The imposition of a cultural hegemony
that cancels the diversity: a universal culture with expressions of homogenization and individualization.
4. Another two areas identified in the report: access to justice and political participation.
5. At this point, it is relevant to note the way that these biopolitical strategies arranged by public policies find an
essential and powerful ally in the markets and in particular in the textbook industry and production of school
supplies. There, it is not only regulated and codified what is to be taught, but how it should be taught.
6. 
‘Citizenship is the political condition that allows us to participate in the definition of our own destiny, something
that either it is complied or exercised [...] Compliance to citizenship implies a basic understanding of the customs,
values, traditions, and forms of interaction and the symbolic exchange of the place we inhabit. This is at the same
time what constitutes the foundation of civility. [...] Being an active citizen, moreover, means to exercise with a
sense of responsibility a political role, which largely can be defined by the collective participation projects in which
become tangible the idea of building or rebuilding a just and inclusive social order’ (Ruiz & Chaux, 2005, pp. 15, 16).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Oscar Orlando Espinel Bernal is a professor in the Philosophy Department of Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios—
UNIMINUTO and education faculty of National Pedagogical University, Bogotá, Colombia, PhD student of Philosophy at
University of Buenos Aires, master’s in education at National Pedagogical University, member of the research group Thought,
Philosophy and Society on UNIMINUTO. Email: oscar.espinel@yahoo.com. Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios. Brazil
690    O. O. Espinel Bernal

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