Governmentality, democratic state, and education in human rights*

AbstractFaced with the incessant concern on the part of national and supranational institutions in promoting, expanding, and implementing education on human rights in schools and educational systems, it is necessary to stand back for a moment and review the political and discursive ways in which these projects work and the mechanisms they are based on within the current system. In order to do this, we will use the Foucauldian methodological notion of governmentality. From this point of view, some of the relatively recent practices of subjectivation, production, control, and shaping of people needed for a project of nation come to light. At the same time, these practices respond to a global project. Human rights education (HRE) is postulated and closely associated with contemporary techniques for citizenship training. Consequently, practices and discourses of human rights and, more recently, of HRE worked within government modalities of modern states as an exercise of control on populations.