Redefining the Right to Food

• Author: Pranoto Iskandar
• Position: Cambridge University Press, 2016
• Pages: 647-649

e Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law

ISSN: 2338-7602; E-ISSN: 2338-770X

http://www.ijil.org

© 2016 e Institute for Migrant Rights Press

Book Review

REDEFINING THE RIGHT TO FOOD

State Food Crimes, by Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Cambridge

University Press, 2016

One of the great debates in the foundational dimensions of the inter-

national human rights discourse is whether the fundamental nature of

basic rights theoretically allows for an acceptance of “positive rights”

as legitimate human rights. At the heart of this dispute is the fact that

“positive rights” require a hands-on approach that to some degree asks

for a signicant amount of public resources. It is at odds, for that mat-

ter, with the traditional 17th century civil-political rights that simply

aim in limiting the power of the State. Historically, the persistence of its

polarizing nature cannot be separated from the competition between

the two great competing philosophical traditions, i.e. collective-social-

ism on the one hand and individual-liberalism that predominated the

post-1945 eort in global order building. For what it’s worth, despite

the fact that its delicate nature has survived in the theoretical realm;

in the real world, as some have argued, there are empirical grounds to

claim with a growing condence that both the self-professed liberal

and socialist States are beginning to come to terms with the conciliato-

ry mode where both are converging to the center is inevitable.