México and the struggle for the human rights: grammars of dignity and intercultural dialogue.

Supervisor/s: José Manuel Mendes and Socorro Apreza Salgado

Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

The traditional approaches of the human rights have a reduced point of view about the nature, scope, characteristics and practices of them. On the one hand, there is a normative reduction, the idea of that the rights only exist inside a normative system and only if they use a normative language. On the other, they reproduce the reduction of the western modern societies about the normative systems, in which law is presented as the principal or even the only one.

Contrary of the common notion, this kind of reductions are not just methodological choices that allow us to understand in a neutral and proper way the complexity of the legal and social phenomena of the human rights. They are ideological paths that try to undermine the emancipation potentiality that can be find in some discourses about them.

The present thesis is based on the idea that the horizon of transformation present on the concept and practice of human rights is wider than the heteronomous social regulation of the traditional perspectives. The rights articulate inside a specific grammar of dignity, the struggles, contradictions, resistance and creative process of the daily life of our communities. In this sense, this work is going to analyze the way in which the Zapatista Army (EZLN- Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) and the Indigenous Council of México (CGI- Concejo Indígena de Gobierno) try to show others grammars of dignity and how the independent candidacy of an indigenous woman creates the opportunity of an intercultural dialogue and translation, and in this sense, they open the possibilities of social reconfiguration of the human rights and democracy.