The following content has been provided by the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Right, well I am delighted to be here and I told him to say that I only had two days'

notice to get this ready, so I have the excuses for it not being adequate, but actually it

was about two weeks, so you've spoiled it Fred, you've landed me in it, so I hope...

Anyway, I've...

This is the topic.

Just stop burbling Terry and get on with it.

I dressed up specially, Greg noticed that I've got my special Bangladesh shirt on.

I also had a special haircut, very bad haircut, especially for the conference, and I'll just

give you all one tip, one bit of advice.

When you go to have a haircut, make sure that you share at least one language with the person

cutting your hair.

So this is divided into two parts, rights and where they come from, and how I want to

explore the idea that human rights actually are related to specific aspects of human history,

human development, and I want to look at how current ideas of human rights reflect particular

characteristics of what I've labeled simply for shorthand the welfare capitalist mode

of production.

I will be using this concept of the mode of production quite a lot.

So in this, what I'm arguing is that there is no simple capitalist mode of production.

Capitalism varies an enormous amount, and what I will want to focus on towards the end

is how we've shifted from laissez-faire capitalism with the emergence of ideas of human rights

into welfare capitalism and now into neoliberalism and what that means for us in relation to

work on disasters and rights.

So that's the sort of trajectory.

And then the second part is based on explanations of disasters and where they come from, how

they happen, when do we invoke God, nature, or social construction.

So if you'd like, in the last 200 years, we've seen a shift from explanation in European

understanding from the idea that God creates disasters through to the idea that nature

creates disasters, and in the last 40 years with DRR research, we've moved into the idea

that disasters are actually socially constructed.

So I want to look at how that happens and which parts of the world has that happened.

Where has it not been completed, that sequence of methods of explanation?

And to do that, for both part A and B, I will be wanting to use the concept of modes of

production and the systems of explanation of human behavior that are coming out of that.

So we start with part A, rights and where they come from.

I think yesterday in our discussions, we were all pretty well prepared to accept that the

notion of rights is socially constructed.

I don't think anyone in the room thinks that there is a kind of an abstract universal set

of rights which exists outside of human invention because that would require it to be supernatural.

So I think we're all comfortable with that.

So we then need to have an understanding of how they're socially constructed.

What are the systems of behavior, economic, political, social, which construct them?

If they are socially constructed, how are they socially constructed?

And my argument is that the idea of human rights largely emerges with Western industrial

capitalism because capitalism has to make a democratic pretense.

Capitalism is the only mode of production as it emerged historically which has to make

the pretense that all men are born equal.

And it's there in the French Revolution, in the Bill of Rights in the United States, it's

there to some extent in the English Civil War.

It's there in the idea that people have equality and this notion is fundamentally different