O Sociologo Boaventura De Sousa Defende Que Os Direitos Humanos

Human Rights Through the Lens of Boaventura de Sousa Santos

I first encountered Boaventura de Sousa Santos' framework on human rights while reading for a research project on post-colonial legal theory, and it completely upended how I approach the topic. His work isn't easy, not because it's written badly, but because he forces you to hold two contradictory ideas at once. Human rights are both a tool of empire and the only tool we have against it. O sociólogo Boaventura de Sousa Santos defende que os direitos humanos têm uma natureza profundamente ambígua. Ele não os rejeita. Ele os problematiza. Sua tese central, expressa em obras como "A Gramática do Tempo" e "Uma Concepção Cosmopolita dos Direitos Humanos", é que os direitos humanos tal como os conhecemos são produtos de uma história europeia específica, imposta globalmente através de processos coloniais e pós-coloniais de poder. Isso não significa, porém, que sejam inúteis. Pelo contrário, Santos argumenta que eles precisam ser ressignificados, apropriados criticamente pelos povos do Sul global e articulados com outras lutas emancipatórias. A distinção crucial que ele propõe é entre "direitos humanos" e "direitos da humanidade". Os primeiros pertencem ao universo jurídico internacional tradicional, frequentemente manipulados por interesses geopolíticos. Os segundos remetem a algo mais radical: um princípio ético-político que deveria fundamentar a justiça global para além dos marcos estatais e legais vigentes. Santos fala numa "sociologia das abstrações" — ele mostra como conceitos como "humanidade" não surgem naturalmente, mas são construídos historicamente, e quem constrói decide quem merece proteção e quem fica de fora.

Ao longo dos anos, working with communities that have experienced the gap between formal rights and lived reality, I've seen firsthand how this distinction plays out. In a community I worked with in East Timor, people had constitutional guarantees of education and healthcare on paper. The mechanisms existed. What didn't exist was the political will or material infrastructure to deliver them. Santos would say those communities were bearing the weight of a "synchronous baroque" — a legal modernity grafted onto a social reality that couldn't yet support it. The rights were abstracted from the conditions needed to realize them. One practical problem I ran into was when trying to apply Santos' framework in policy advocacy. You hit a wall pretty quickly. Governments and international organizations respond to rights language, but they respond to the traditional kind — the kind Santos critiques. When you start talking about "rights of humanity" or "cosmopolitan multiculturalism," you're met with polite confusion or outright dismissal. There's no checklist, no treaty reference, no precedent. The workaround I found was to translate his insights into the vocabulary of existing human rights mechanisms without diluting the critique. Use the language of participatory constitutionalism and ecological rights, ground the abstract principles in concrete demands, and let the tension show. Santos himself was careful about this. He didn't want rights abandoned; he wanted them radicalized. Here's something most introductions to Santos miss: his concept of "abolition of the distant suffering" is not just a philosophical point. It's a practical methodological problem. Western human rights discourse tends to activate solidarity only for suffering that is geographically and culturally distant enough to be palatable but close enough to be legible. Suffering that is too close — here, in your own country, among your own neighbors — often goes unrecognized unless it fits a pre-existing narrative. Conversely, suffering that is too distant, in places where the media doesn't go, disappears entirely. I learned this the hard way while documenting labor exploitation in a supply chain that connected European consumers to workers in West Africa. The rights violations were clear, but the framing kept failing. Western audiences sympathetic to human rights couldn't process harm that wasn't happening "over there" in a war zone, only in a factory that supplied a brand they recognized. Santos would say this is the hierarchical ordering of sufferings — some lives count as grievable and others don't, and the hierarchy is maintained precisely through the selective application of rights language.

Another counter-intuitive insight: Santos' critique of human rights actually makes them more powerful, not weaker, if you understand why. Traditional approaches treat rights as self-executing — declare them and they should work. Santos shows that rights are only effective when embedded in social movements and counter-hegemonic struggles. A right without the political force to enforce it is a nice sentence on paper. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights existed decades before many of its provisions were meaningfully implemented anywhere. That's not a failure of the concept. That's the normal condition of rights. They require what Santos might call "infraconstitutionalization" — a process of embedding rights in the everyday practices, institutions, and cultures of communities, not just in treaties and court rulings. The main bottleneck in applying Santos' framework is time and translation. His work is dense, spans multiple disciplines, and was originally written in Portuguese and Spanish. The English translations are adequate but sometimes flatten the nuance. More importantly, his ideas don't lend themselves to quick summary or policy briefs. If you need to make an argument in 500 words, Santos is the wrong author. For long-term strategic work — constitutional reform, grassroots organizing, academic critique — he's indispensable. His most practical contribution, in my experience, is the method of "hermeneutic dialogue." Rather than imposing a universal standard and judging deviations from it, you start from the experiences and claims of marginalized communities and allow those to reshape what human rights mean in that context. It's not relativism. It's a different starting point. I've used this approach in community workshops where participants would articulate their grievances in their own terms — land rights, environmental justice, recognition of traditional governance — and then we would map those onto existing human rights frameworks, noting where the frameworks fit, where they strain, and where they break entirely. The gaps were always more informative than the alignments.

Santos also pushes us to take seriously what he calls "ecologies of knowledges" — the idea that different forms of knowing (Indigenous, popular, Western academic) have equal legitimacy when it comes to understanding and defending human dignity. This isn't just epistemological posturing. It changes how you design interventions. Programs that treat local knowledge as anecdotal or unscientific tend to fail or cause harm. Those that treat it as a legitimate epistemological resource tend to build more durable institutions. There is one scenario where Santos' approach fails completely, and it's important to acknowledge it. When immediate physical protection is needed — during an active genocide, a mass eviction, a military offensive — deliberation about the cosmological origins of rights language is a luxury people under threat cannot afford. In those moments, the traditional rights framework, flaws and all, provides a faster, more operational tool. Santos would agree with this. He never argued for abandoning rights. He argued for expanding their horizon. But practitioners should know: his framework is best suited for structural, long-term work, not emergency response. If you want to start with his core texts, begin with "Para Apoiar uma Concepção Cosmopolita dos Direitos Humanos" (2010) and the relevant chapters of "A Gramática do Tempo" (2016). The English translation of his work on human rights appears in various collections, though no single volume captures the full scope of his argument. For a more accessible entry point, look for his interviews and shorter essays where he addresses the abolition of the distant suffering and the hierarchical ordering of lives directly.

His framework also intersects usefully with other thinkers. Working alongside authors like Walter Mignolo on decoloniality, or Boaventura's frequent collaborator Joel Santos on sociology of law, deepens the picture significantly. But Santos alone is enough to make a career out of wrestling with.