Human rights and the crisis of democracy: totalitarianism, populism, power relations and political participation

Abstract

The central objective of this study is to address the main human rights challenges that are directly related to the weaknesses of contemporary democracies in terms of political participation, faced with the threat of totalitarianism and populism. Based on a qualitative methodology of hermeneutic analysis, we return to Hannah Arendt's thought on the centrality and fragility of politics in her study of totalitarianism, with the contribution of Rainer Forst, capable of revealing the prevailing power relations, and of understanding to what extent we can identify legitimate ways of exercising power. The true value of politics will be the exercise of freedom, participation and authentic interaction with other human beings. This depends not only on the degree of social inclusion of each person in society, threatened by growing fragility and populist escalations on the right, but also on personality traits and resilience capacities correlated with the different degrees of emancipation experienced in each phase of life. The proposed path explores the role of the theory of recognition in the formation of subjects and outlines by extension a theory of transnational justice, based on the right to justification, which aims to create participation and legitimation structures allowing to assume and carry out the tasks of opening and criticism, culminating in the justification and adoption of binding transnational and international norms.