Human Rights in Thick and Thin Societies: The Universal Declaration and Bridging the Gap

In an increasingly diverse and multi-polar world, the international human rights field risks losing its legitimacy because of its focus on a particular set of values—autonomy, individualism, equality, choice, secularity, and rationality—that are not necessarily universally shared. There was once a broad consensus on human rights and the need for a flexible yet universal approach. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a product of extensive negotiations, passed the United Nations with no dissensions in 1948 and still enjoys wide support today. Although it articulated a common position, the UDHR stood upon diverse philosophical foundations and understood that human rights could be articulated differently in dissimilar parts of the world. Moreover, it took a remarkably narrow approach to the role of the state and human rights regime, assuming that social institutions and embedded moral codes were also essential to advancing human wellbeing.
There are, broadly speaking, two radically different approaches to creating a society: one focused on maximizing freedom and the other on maximizing the robustness of relationships and institutions. Whereas “thin societies” are highly individualistic, value choice and fairness, and emphasize moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, “thick societies” are highly sociocentric, value order, hierarchy, and tradition, and emphasize moral concepts such as duty, respect, reputation, patriotism, sanctity, and purity. These two visions of society exhibit starkly dissimilar perceptions vis-à-vis social institutions, the state, and human rights. Thin societies prefer a human rights framework that offers broad protections for individual choice and which gives the state a large role in enforcing rules. Thick societies, in contrast, prefer a human rights framework that ensures certain minimum standards are met and provides maximum flexibility for local adaptation.
As a study of two cases— European debate on male circumcision and Rwandan’s gacaca, a hybrid institution established in the aftermath of the country’s genocide—demonstrate, the human rights field needs to adopt a flexible universalism that provides a looser framework for the great variety of acceptable moral matrices. This approach is closer to what the UDHR framers had in mind, and it aligns with the liberal pluralism articulated by political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin. Liberal pluralism recognizes that although there is a clear distinction between good and bad, and between good and evil, there is no supreme good, definitive ranking of goods, or common measure of goods (liberal monism) for all individuals, communities, or societies because they are qualitatively heterogeneous.
The differences in outlook between thick and thin societies are likely to become increasingly important to the human rights field. Human rights, therefore, need to be better embedded within different cultures around the world in order to ensure that they are promoted locally—without the need for substantial interference from governments and international actors. A return to basics could help actors adopt a universal minimal standard that allowed local stakeholders to develop and implement context-specific strategies.