Liberal rights discourse has historically been used to justify imperial domination and war.

Evidence

Liberalism in service to empire became a shield behind which racism was hidden. The Bush administration was using liberal rights-oriented discourse—women’s rights, human rights, democracy—to shore up its imperial ambitions and many committed to these rights failed to understand the pernicious nature of liberal Islamophobia, that is, racism that deploys liberal tropes. This was certainly not the first instance in which liberalism had become a pillar of racism. Political scientist Uday Singh Mehta’s analysis of British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent shows that liberalism served to justify empire built on domination and the denial of liberal rights to the colonized. Jasbir Puar, a scholar of women, gender, and sexuality studies, has articulated how gay rights became part of this liberal offensive in the twenty-first century. Gay liberation had been co-opted to cast the United States as an exceptional state—a bastion of democracy and human rights—as a way to win over US and global gay rights organizations to the project of the war on terror. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 72

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in how ideology masks power — echoes Edward Said’s critique of liberal/colonial knowledge production ordered in the reader’s library.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘human rights’ rhetoric cosigns war — a throughline from British India to the gay-rights-backed war on terror.

Related

• Liberal rights discourse has historically justified rather than opposed empire (similarity 0.95)
• Human rights rhetoric masks imperial assumptions that racialize colonized peoples (similarity 0.81)
• Human rights and democracy discourse replaced older imperial justifications for war (similarity 0.81)
• Liberal human-rights rhetoric racializes by infantilizing those it claims to help (similarity 0.81)
• The liberal case for the war on terror abetted later Islamophobia (similarity 0.80)
• Responsibility-to-Protect discourse shifted sovereignty from nations to individuals (similarity 0.80)
• Human-rights discourse has replaced civilizational rhetoric as war’s legitimation (similarity 0.79)
• Liberal security politics amplified right-wing Islamophobia’s reach and power (similarity 0.79)
• Imperial branding shifted from white masculinity to multiracial feminist inclusion to deflect racism charges (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial rhetoric weaponized other men’s sexism to justify cultural erasure (similarity 0.79)
• Liberal humanitarian rhetoric masks imperial violence and infantilizes its targets (similarity 0.79)
• Imperial powers recruit gay acceptance to cast Muslims as civilizational others (similarity 0.79)
• Bush used women’s rights and democracy to justify war (similarity 0.78)
• Islamophobia spans the political spectrum and is embedded in empire’s infrastructure (similarity 0.78)