About The Workshop
SW 55- Human Rights and Legal Culture: The Dialectic of Value, Norm, and Praxis
Convenors: Muharrem Kılıç; Nadire Özdemir
Contact: muharremkl@gmail.com, nadire.ozdemir@gmail.com
This special session aims to address human rights not merely as formal norms within a positive legal system, but as a multi-layered field of meaning and legitimacy constructed through historical experiences, social structures, and philosophical foundations. This perspective interprets human rights not as a complete normative whole, but as an intellectual and practical structure that is constantly reproduced within the ontological and ethical tension between “what is” and “what ought to be.” In this vein, this special session aims to bring together the classical normative tradition represented by Kant’s duty ethics and Rawls’ theory of justice with the praxis-centered approach shaped by the Frankfurt School’s critical theory on a dialectical ground. Thus, human rights are subject to philosophical inquiry not only in terms of their legal validity but also in terms of their historical conditionality, social origins, cultural foundations, and transformative potential.
The theoretical framework of the session is built upon the dialectical relationship between the values that form the ethical origins of human rights, the institutional and normative structures that embody these values within the legal system, and the praxis through which these norms gain concreteness in social life. This dialectical relationship is understood not only as a connection constructed at the theoretical level, but also as a constitutive field of tension that determines the historical formation, transformation, and continuity of human rights. The process of values transforming into norms and norms transforming into forms of social action demonstrates that the legitimacy of human rights is not merely formal validity; on the contrary, it is produced within processes of public reasoning and communicative consensus. As emphasized in Habermas’s theory of communicative action, the social acceptance of the normative order can only gain a sustainable basis of legitimacy when it is constructed through rational discourse practices. In this context, legal culture emerges as a dynamic interface that transcends the technical application of norms and determines how they are interpreted, internalized, and positioned within social worlds of meaning.
Additionally, within the scope of this special session, the claim of universality of human rights will be subject to critical scrutiny within the framework of cultural contexts, political power relations, and regimes of knowledge production. As Douzinas points out, the discourse of human rights can function historically both as an emancipatory ethical ideal and as an ideological tool that reproduces the legitimacy of modern forms of power. This dual character necessitates analyzing rights not only through their normative content but also through their functional and discursive dimensions. Similarly, Foucault’s analyses of the knowledge-power relationship reveal that legal norms are shaped within specific historical and political power structures rather than being the product of impartial and universal reason. When evaluated from this perspective, praxis should be understood as a dynamic cultural, social, and contextual process in which norms are constantly reinterpreted, negotiated, and transformed.
Finally, this special session approaches human rights not as a complete, closed, and self-contained normative system, but as an ethical-juridical-political structure that is dynamically constructed, questioned, and transformed in line with historical conditions, social struggles, cultural structures, and political negotiations. The structural tensions between value, norm, and praxis reveal both the transformative potential and the institutional and political fragilities of this structure. From this perspective, human rights cannot be understood merely as a technocracy of norms or an abstract ethical ideal. On the contrary, human rights emerge as a dynamic field of meaning, interpretation, and struggle located at the intersection of law, ethics, and politics. In this context, the session aims to encourage a critical rethinking of legal culture and to subject the normative status, social function, and philosophical foundations of human rights in the contemporary world to a comprehensive process of inquiry.
Submit a provisional paper title and abstract (350-500 words) to contacts’ email address.
Deadline: April 15, 2026.
