The \u2018West vs. the Rest\u2019 (or, with a different choice of compass location, \u2018Global North vs. Global South\u2019) are impossibly elastic terms, resulting in categories for those terms with widely \u2013 even \u2018wildly\u2019 – divergent features in each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whatever about \u2018the Rest\u2019 , certainly \u2018Western\u2019 (scholarly) thinking is not just one categorical bucket (see Avoid #1). To make the most rudimentary points: consider the diversity of fertile organized scepticism, including but not confined to, anti-capitalist \/ oppositional social theory and analysis in \u2018Western\u2019 countries, e.g. France (Bettelheim, Althusser, Latour, Foucault); Germany (Marx and Engels, who found refuge in Manchester and London; the Frankfurt School); the United States (Chomsky, Arrighi, Said, E. O. Wright, Judith Butler) to name but a few. And being from Ireland, please note we were the first colony of what would become the British Empire – and the first of these colonies to throw off the yoke of Empire!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Organised scepticism\u2019 \u2013 the challenging of taken-for-granted assumptions and narratives – is an essential requirement of any serious scholarly enquiry. This entails an objective, systematic scrutiny of claims \u2013 from \u2018the West\u2019 AND from \u2018the Rest\u2019 (see Avoid #1 and Avoid #2). A certain Western thinker provides excellent advice here: \u201cI presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself\u201d (Marx, Capital, Preface to the First German Edition).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
* Finnerty, J. (2025) \u201cThe Three Avoids: Closing Remarks by Moderator\u201d, Parallel Session 2 Part 2. The 80th Anniversary of the United Nations: Toward the Universalization of Human Rights, Central South University Human Rights Center, Changsha, China, 18th October 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1 Avoid bad binaries! The \u2018West vs. the Rest\u2019 (or, with a different choice of compass location, \u2018Global North vs. Global South\u2019) are impossibly elastic terms, resulting in categories for those terms with widely \u2013 even \u2018wildly\u2019 – divergent features in each. 2 Avoid lumping! Whatever about \u2018the Rest\u2019 , certainly \u2018Western\u2019 (scholarly) thinking is … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-debates"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":814,"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions\/814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hrug.legal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}