1. Introduction
In an era of engrossing social transformation hastened by digital technologies, policy-makers and scholars aiming to address the dark sides of digitalisation commonly turn to human rights, demanding new human rights or new interpretations of existing human rights or calling for a return to roots to retrieve the original conception of human rights, in the hope of recasting the ethos of technological change. A basic premise of such moves is the idea that digital technologies and oligopolistic digital platforms have been developing in the absence of, or through the violation or distortion of, human rights. Facing an increasingly fascist Silicon Valley amid resurgent right-wing populism in the United States of America and across the world (Klein and Taylor Reference Klein and Taylor2025), resorting to and reaffirming human rights values to counter and transform Big Tech has enormous urgency. However, as pointed out by Dao (Reference Dao2024), recent recourses to human rights often imply a ‘historiography of amnesia’, which forgets the long history of human rights being intensely contested and transformed and hence the contingent character of human rights conceptions. Such an amnestic historiography is not only inattentive to the way human rights could serve ‘a vehicle for empire rather than an antidote to empire’ (Kennedy Reference Kennedy and Orford2006, p. 133), but also brushes off many counter-hegemonic histories, unsuccessful yet important attempts of those in the ‘peripheries’ to invoke and reformulate human rights as part of broader social movements to restructure the global distribution of wealth and power (O’Connell Reference O’Connell2018). Revisiting these histories is necessary for a more comprehensive appreciation of the complexity and payoffs of engaging human rights – as a tool, a terrain and a stake of contestation – for the struggle for global justice in specific historical moments. And in the current critical conjuncture, which Anghie (Reference Anghie2025) describes as the transmutation of neoliberal Empire to nationalist Empire, for which Big Tech has played an integral part, engaging human rights as a counter-movement strategy particularly requires a historically grounded appreciation of human rights’ many contradictions as well as possibilities under the present conditions.
This paper focuses on one of human rights’ counter-hegemonic histories, the story of the ‘right to communicate’. It takes the right to communicate story as a window to understand the promise and perils of using human rights to pursue structural social changes and to illuminate human rights’ contradictions as historically and materially produced. Not a positive human right in international law, the right to communicate was articulated and debated from the late 1960s to early 2000s by different actors for completely different visions of global justice and social change. This story not only presages some of the most pressing questions in contemporary international law regarding technology, human agency, corporate power and global distribution, but also captures key issues about how human rights concepts emerge and evolve under fast-changing and intensely contested social and material conditions to frame new agendas about the international order, how some human rights concepts get juridified and become ‘hard’ while others do not and how these processes change and reinscribe the meaning of human rights concepts. Taking place largely outside of formal international human rights institutions, the story featured bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where media professionals, communication scholars, telecommunications technocrats and human rights non-governmental organisations invoked and debated the right to communicate, exemplifying a rich process of social brewing of human rights ideas outside formal legalisation. As shall be seen, this story is interesting not only as it reaffirms the malleability of the human rights language to different articulations and strategic uses, but more importantly because it allows for an acute appreciation of the social, material conditions for rights articulation and contestation, given the intimate connection between the discursive struggle over the right to communicate on the one hand, and on the other hand developments in information and communication technologies, corporate power and by extension the changing social relations of late capitalism in these three and a half decades. In other words, this paper approaches the question of human rights’ promise and perils not from the perspective of indeterminacy of the rights language but by considering the social and material conditions of which human rights discourses and ideas are both reflective and constitutive in a particular sociohistorical context (Flohr Reference Flohr2025).
The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 lays out the theoretical approaches taken here for studying and retelling the story of the right to communicate. Drawing on recent critical human rights scholarship, my approach is primarily historical-materialist, which treats the conceptualisation and articulation of human rights as social processes, refracting and contributing to material battles over world-ordering under specific historical conditions, thereby connecting contesting ideas with the particular social contexts of decolonisation and the transformation of late capitalism. Section 3 traces debates about the right to communicate over mainly three periods: first, articulations by visionary media experts in the West in the late 1960s and 1970s in response to new mass media and communication technologies; second, articulations by proponents of a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) from the mid-1970s to early 1980s at UNESCO; third, articulations by the ITU and civil society groups in the post-NWICO era until the mid-2000s. Section 4 comes back to the question of the promise and limitations of the human rights language for social change to consider, from the perspective of historical materialism, why and in what sense the right to communicate is a failure. The last section concludes with thoughts on engaging human rights ideas as a counter-movement strategy in the current historical conjuncture.
2. A historical-materialist perspective on human rights
As a critical intervention in the ‘historiography of amnesia’ present in recent scholarship on digital technology and human rights, this paper draws on a rich body of critical human rights scholarship which has pondered for decades on the role of human rights in emancipatory politics while debunking common ‘myths’ about human rights (Marks, Reference Marks2013). Three strands in this critical literature are particularly important here: the first strand revisits the history of human rights’ complex entanglement with imperialism, capitalism and the ascent of neoliberalism to reveal the contingent, deeply political and often exclusionary features of human rights conceptions (Anghie Reference Anghie2013; Baxi Reference Baxi2008; Chimni Reference Chimni2004; Mutua Reference Mutua2008; Moyn Reference Moyn2019; Whyte Reference Moyn2019); the second examines contemporary human rights advocacy to demonstrate human rights as a form of power which distributes power and wealth in global governance despite being commonly presented as beyond or anti-politics (Brown Reference Brown2004; Kennedy Reference Kennedy2004); the third looks at counter-hegemonic practices of human rights, particularly by actors from the Global South, to advance their visions of a more just and equitable world order (Baxi Reference Baxi2008; Jensen, Reference Jensen2016; O’Connell Reference O’Connell2018; Öszu Reference Özsu2023; Rajagopal Reference Rajagopal2006). Engaging with this rich body of scholarship, this paper offers a microhistory of the right to communicate debate, where the rights language served as a site and tool for competing projects and itself transformed through the contestations.
My approach to revisiting the right to communicate story is primarily historical materialism. This means that discourses and ideas of human rights in this story are examined by attending to the economic structure and social relations that undergirded their various articulations. In other words, my approach is to rematerialise human rights discourses and the critique of human rights, to understand the malleability of human rights as conditioned by a specific social–historical context rather than simply linguistic indeterminacy. Here, I draw on the recent materialist turn in the history of ideas, which moves away from ‘linguistic contextualism’ and recuperates Marxist historical-materialist methods of dialectics and immanent critique (Flohr Reference Flohr2025; Ince Reference Ince2018). Accordingly, discourses and ideas are not domains separate from social processes but are shaped by and inscribed in historically specific social relations and their inherent contradictions. The purpose of adopting historical materialism to revisit the right to communicate story is to make evident the way discursive struggles frame and reflect material battles for (re)organising global distribution, to understand why some discourses emerge and matter in particular historical moments and to understand the limitations of these discourses as expressions of the social contradictions in which they are embedded. As we shall see, over the three and a half decades, the social and material contexts in which the right to communicate story was situated included the rapid technological development in the information and communication sphere, the associated change in the structure of mass communication and the informatisation and transnationalisation of economic production, all of which took place against two broad and interlinked global processes: first, decolonisation, which by the late 1960s, evolved from achieving formal, political self-determination to obtaining economic and cultural autonomy in post-colonial countries; second, post-Keynesian transmutations of global capitalism through liberalisation and marketisation, crucially in the informational sectors. Actors articulating and debating the right to communicate showed different perceptions of the nature and characteristics of these changing social contexts and advanced different normative visions in response. The eventual disappearance of this notion, its non-codification, can therefore be understood through an immanent critique of the social contradictions the discourses were reflective of.
3. A brief history of the right to communicate
3.1. Early exploration: updating the UDHR in the space age
The story of the right to communicate starts with a French media expert, Jean d’Arcy. Having served for the intelligence of the Organisation de résistance de l’armée during the Second World War, d’Arcy founded Eurovision in 1954 with a conviction that communication should be enjoyed by everyone rather than a privileged few (Pierre Reference Pierre2003). He worked as the director of radio and television service of the United Nations Office of Public Information in the 1960s. In 1969, d’Arcy published an article (reprinted as d’Arcy Reference d’Arcy, Harms, Richstad and Kie1977a), titled ‘Direct Broadcast Satellites and the Right to Communicate’, claiming that:
‘the time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than man’s right to information, first laid down 21 years ago in Article 19. This is the right of man to communicate’.
In this piece, d’Arcy explained both the close connection of his idea of the right to communicate with the existing right of freedom of expression and the need that he perceived to have this new right. Anticipating the widespread use of information and communication technologies such as broadcasting satellites, computers and videotape recorders, d’Arcy believed that these technological innovations would liberate the exchange of information from the control of private and public monopolies and provide people with greater possibilities of communication, thereby creating new patterns of communication and new social structures. Communication would become a human right to be realised by technological advancement.
In d’Arcy’s view, the new technology of satellite broadcasting would benefit not only European countries but also Global South countries. As satellite broadcasting covered areas unreached by terrestrial telecommunication facilities, it could be used to deliver educational programmes and enable national unification and development in countries with large land areas such as India and Brazil as well as widely scattered countries such as Indonesia (d’Arcy Reference d’Arcy, Harms, Richstad and Kie1977a, p. 5). While raising the concern about satellite communication being dominated by a single powerful state, d’Arcy was rather hopeful that new laws based on co-operation between states would be adopted at UN bodies such as the Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space (COPUOS). Like his good friend Arthur Clarke, the world-renowned futurist writer who actively promoted space communication (Clarke Reference Clarke1968), d’Arcy believed in the transformative power of technology – ‘the new tool always creates the new structure’ and needs ‘new philosophy’ (Reference d’Arcy, Harms, Richstad and Kie1977a, p. 3; Reference d’Arcy, Harms, Richstad and Kie1977b, p. 51). Also a close friend of René Cassin (Pierre Reference Pierre2003, p. 82), d’Arcy often invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and presented the right to communicate as growing out of the freedom of opinion and expression in the UDHR in the age of space communication.
During the 1970s, d’Arcy popularised the idea of the right to communicate through his activities at the UN. In 1978, d’Arcy contributed an article to the MacBride Commission of UNESCO (discussed in Section 3.2), where he further explored this concept. Like his 1969 piece, d’Arcy adopted an evolutionary lens to human rights and saw the change in human rights as driven by technological innovation. He wrote (Reference d’Arcy1978, pp. 2–3):
‘In the age of the agora and the forum, when communication was direct and interpersonal, there first emerged – concept at the root of all human advancement and all civilization – the freedom of opinion […]. The advent of printing, the first of the mass media, gave rise, through its expansion and in defiance of royal or religious prerogatives to exercise control, to the corollary concept of freedom of expression. […] The nineteenth century, which saw the extraordinary development of the mass circulation press, was marked by constant struggles to win freedom of the press. […] The successive advent of other mass media – film, radio, television – and the abusive recourse to all forms of propaganda on the eve of war were rapidly to demonstrate the need for and possibility of, a more specific but more extensive right, namely, the right ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’. […] Today, a new step forward seems possible: recognition of man’s right to communicate, deriving from our latest victories over time and space and from our increased awareness of the phenomenon of communication.’
Along this ascending, evolutionary path, the right to communicate was deemed as encompassing all kinds of freedom related to information achieved in previous times and adding to them the elements of ‘access, participation’ and ‘two-way information flow’ (d’Arcy Reference d’Arcy1978, p. 3). d’Arcy argued (Reference d’Arcy1978, p. 7) that the mass dissemination of information to audiences in a one-way street was not communication, for such practice contradicted the essential idea of communication being interactive and should be rectified by the right to communicate, a concept which according to him implied the horizontal flow of information, access and participation and included the right not to communicate. On a more societal level, d’Arcy believed that the right to communicate, due to its emphasis on the interactive and pluralist process of cultural production, could help preserve cultural identities of peoples and nations. Notably, d’Arcy saw both individuals and communities as holders of the right to communicate (Reference d’Arcy1978, p. 3).
Through his work at UNESCO, d’Arcy’s idea attracted two countries – that is, Canada and Sweden. The Canadian government established a study group called ‘Telecommission’ to explore the future of telecommunications in the country (Dakroury Reference Dakroury2008). The group published its report in 1971, titled Instant World, in which the right to communicate was an underlying theme: ‘communications are of the people, by the people, and for the people. If it be accepted that there is a “right to communicate”, all Canadians are entitled to it’ (Canada Department of Communications Telecommission Directing Committee 1971, p. 229). The report deemed the right of free speech as insufficient in ‘the impending age of total communication’ and called for the right to communicate to be considered a basic human right (1971, p. 38). Sweden, on the other hand, also became interested in the right to communicate from the early 1970s and introduced a resolution to the UNESCO General Conference in 1974 asking the Director-General to study and define the right to communicate (Raboy and Shtern Reference Raboy, Shtern, Raboy, Shtern and Mclver2010, p. 32).Footnote 1 This marked the first time that the right to communicate appeared on UNESCO’s agenda, and Sweden later collaborated with UNESCO by hosting a meeting of experts in 1978 to examine the concept.
The early genesis of the right to communicate, thus, came out at a historical moment when technological developments posed imminent and profound changes in mass communication and broadly social structures. d’Arcy’s vision was primarily an optimistic one, with the right to communicate expressing the liberating and democratising promises of new technologies. The acute attention paid to the technological conditions of information made visionary media experts like d’Arcy distinct from those drafting human rights treaties in previous decades, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, who by creating ‘a universal instrument of a lasting character’ precisely avoided mentioning technological aspects in their rights formulation (United Nations General Assembly 1955, p. 151). As will be seen, material conditions (including technological progress) remained a key focus of the right to communicate story.
3.2 The right to communicate at UNESCO: framing Third Worldist ambitions in rights terms
UNESCO had a long record of working on communication issues. From the mid-1960s, UNESCO began helping member states, particularly in the Global South, formulate mass media and communication policies in service of national development. The right to communicate was hence discussed in relation to the broader issue of communication policies and development at UNESCO (Fisher Reference Fisher1982; UNESCO 1976; Naesselund Reference Naesselund1975). Meanwhile, around this time, many Third World countries also started to denounce the existing pattern of international communication and information flows, first through the Non-Aligned Movement,Footnote 2 and then at UNESCO. These countries deplored the enormous North–South disparity of information flows, criticised the monopolistic power of Western news agencies and cultural industries and anxiously defended their political, ideological and cultural autonomy against new forms of domination by the West through information flows and technologies. They argued that international communication inherited colonial and imperialist patterns, such that in Venezuela for instance, it was easier to get European or North American news in Caracas than news from Argentina, Mexico or Peru (Díaz Rangel Reference Díaz Rangel1967, p. 42). They criticised the idea of ‘free flow of information’ propagated by the United States of America and called for replacing it with ‘balanced flow’ to decolonise and democratise international communication (Cong Reference Cong2023). This campaign, known as the NWICO, coalesced with UNESCO’s work on modern communication and development and its interest in the right to communicate. From the mid-1970s, UNESCO organised a series of expert meetings and published studies revealing North–South inequalities in communication and their impact on the political independence and socio-economic development of the Global South. In this context, Third World countries started drawing attention to the right to communicate and deployed it for the purpose of restructuring international communication and advancing national development.
A notable example is the Intergovernmental Conference on Communication Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean, convened by UNESOC in July 1976 at San José, Costa Rica, which paid attention to the right to communicate. Discussing its definition and practical implementation, some delegates saw that the right to communicate implied the ability of citizens ‘to have free access to and participate in the sources of information, but within the framework of full sovereignty and of the institutions and legal structures that each country had for defining its own policy’ (Intergovernmental Conference on Communication Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean 1976, p. 14). Access and participation were emphasised as the ‘vital problem’ of the right to communicate, and its realisation depended on the sociocultural context, the development of communication infrastructure and information production facilities, as well as human resource training and research. All of these were to be incorporated in a country’s communication policies, which many delegates believed should be based on respecting the sovereign right of the state to define its needs and priorities and should form an integral part of a country’s overall development plans (Intergovernmental Conference on Communication Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean 1976, p. 16). Some delegates also cautioned that using advanced communication technologies might exacerbate inequality of access among people. Moving from national to international levels, delegates stressed the inadequacy of the region’s communication capacity and called for regional effort to rectify the unbalanced international information flows. They argued that replacing ‘free flow of information’ with ‘balanced circulation’ meant not to hinder information flows but to demand ‘greater objectivity and the right to reply’, ‘to increase national and regional production of messages and to guarantee adequate international circulation of such messages’ (Intergovernmental Conference on Communication Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean 1976, p. 16). At San José, the strong emphasis on the social and material conditions for communication shows that the right to communicate was invoked to express these countries’ broader objectives of transforming social organisation on domestic, regional and international levels, and it is with these objectives that one may understand the uneasy melange of individual rights and state rights regarding information.
Later in that year, the nineteenth General Conference of UNESCO in Nairobi resolved to ‘intensify the efforts to put an end to the imbalance which, as regards capacity to send out and receive information, typifies the relationship between developed and developing countries’ (UNESCO General Conference 1976, p. 19). The Conference also considered that these efforts should take into account all the problems of communication in society as well as ‘those things which are needful for the establishment of a new international economic order’ (UNESCO General Conference 1976, p. 19). Following this General Conference, Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, set up an International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems to review ‘the totality of the problem of communication in modern society’ (M’Bow Reference M’Bow1977, p. 2). The Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Séan MacBride chaired the commission. Its studies in 1977–79 included the topic of the right to communicate. In addition to d’Arcy’s (Reference d’Arcy1978) article discussed earlier, the MacBride Commission considered the work of other communication experts. L. S. Harms, Professor of Communication at the University of Hawaii, and Desmond Fisher, Director of Broadcasting Development from Ireland, both following the one-way-street critique made by d’Arcy, offered their conceptualisation of the right to communicate. For Harms, the right to communicate comprised (Harms and Fisher Reference Harms and Fisher1978, p. 2):
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• ‘a right to assemble, a right to participate, and related association rights;
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• a right to inform, a right to be informed, and related information rights; and
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• a right to privacy, a right to language, and related cultural evolution rights.’
Harms’s formulation also suggested the individual as the subject of the right to communicate, but interestingly, he argued that the third component – that is, the right to privacy, should cover both individuals and cultural communities – ‘human groups have also a right to be let alone’ (Harms and Fisher Reference Harms and Fisher1978, p. 4).
Fisher, in his turn, argued that at the foundation, ‘everyone has an absolute and primary right to communicate’, which was deemed ‘universal and inalienable’ (Harms and Fisher Reference Harms and Fisher1978, p. 15). From this right emerged the freedom of information, freedom of expression and freedom of opinion, as well as entitlements necessary for the exercise of these freedoms. The responsibility of society was then to provide and limit, when necessary, such entitlements through its laws and regulations. These entitlements could be extended to society as a whole, but society as such had no basic rights and freedoms. Therefore, according to Fisher, the locus of the right to communicate rested in individuals only. Fisher acknowledged that North–South disparity would remain the greatest difficulty for defining the right to communicate (Harms and Fisher Reference Harms and Fisher1978, p. 18), but his own conception of the right did not reflect or address material inequality.
Communication experts from the Global South also discussed the right to communicate during the MacBride Commission’s work and directly linked the concept to the Third Worldist agenda of the NWICO – that is, democratising and decolonising the extant structure of international information flow. Mustapha Masmoudi, Tunisian Information Minister and a leading figure of the NWICO movement, argued (Reference Masmoudi1978, p. 2) that ‘the right to communicate concerns not only the individual but also groups, nations and societies, and must be given appropriate expression at the international level, in relations between states, nations, societies and cultures’. He furthermore considered (Reference d’Arcy1978, p. 2) that the right to communicate contained ‘not only the right to be informed but also its corollary, the right to inform, to complete mutilated information and to correct false information’.
Masmoudi’s emphasis on the societal and communal character of the right to communicate was widely shared by communication experts, but more contentious were aspects in his idea that implied some form of state control over communication content. Here, like the discussion at the San José Conference, a particular conceptual difficulty remained the subject of this right and how to assimilate the right of individuals into a group right. There was disagreement among advocates of the NWICO. For example, Bolivian scholar Beltrán (Reference Beltrán1979, p. 16), drawing on Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s thinking on education, discussed the right to communicate by linking individual human rights with participatory democracy:
‘Communication is the process of democratic social interaction, based upon exchange of symbols, by which human beings voluntarily share experiences under conditions of free and egalitarian access, dialogue and participation. Everyone has the right to communicate in order to satisfy communication needs by enjoying communication resources.’
This democratic process which guarantees everyone the access, dialogue and participation in communication was coined by Beltrán as ‘horizontal communication’, contrasting the ‘vertical communication’ which characterised the extant mass communication. In avoiding mentioning collectives or nations as subjects of the right, Beltrán epitomised those NWICO activists in Latin America who were fighting domestic repressive governments (Freije Reference Freije2019). For them, who witnessed the domino spread of military coups across the region and the collusion of US-funded right-wing mass media, democratising international and domestic communication was one and the same battle, and the right to communicate became one of the avenues to reclaim the state from right-wing military dictatorship.
The MacBride Commission synthesised these various views on the right to communicate in its final report, Many Voices, One World (hereinafter the MacBride Report). By ‘synthesising’, the right to communicate articulated in this report demonstrates the way the MacBride Commission reconciled multiple internal and external controversies typical of many political projects during the Cold War. From early on, the MacBride Commission had to withstand relentless counteroffensives by many Western governments and media which touted the free flow of information and depicted the Commission as a Soviet plot to destroy media freedom (Preston et al. Reference Preston, Herman and Schiller1989). On the other hand, it well understood the deeply structural problems of international communication and was sympathetic to the demand for informational self-determination of Global South countries. The right to communicate became one spot where the MacBride Commission tried to bridge these ideological polarities essentially over the role of the state.
The MacBride Report saw communication as ‘a two-way process, in which the partners – individual and collective – carry on a democratic and balanced dialogue’ (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980, p. 172). The value of having a right to communicate lay in the necessary ‘two-way flow’ of communication rather than simply ‘free flow’. Acknowledging that the full content and value of the right to communicate remained to be decided, the MacBride Report positioned the right to communicate on an evolutionary process of human rights. Unlike the technologically driven evolution depicted by d’Arcy, the MacBride Report drew on the generational theory of human rights popularised by UNESCO in the late 1970s (Karel Reference Karel1977). According to the MacBride Report (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980, p. 187):
‘If the principles proclaimed by the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789) defined […] the “first generation” human rights, namely, civil and political rights, the October Revolution (1917) gave rise to economic and social rights, which […] constitute the “second generation” rights. What remains to be defined […] are the “third generation” rights. These are conceived as being rights rooted in solidarity […]. It is surely highly desirable to include among them the right to communicate – a wide-ranging formula embracing the right of local communities and minorities of all kinds to make their voices heard and the right of peoples to reciprocity and exchange of information.’
However, this does not mean that the MacBride Report saw the right to communicate as a collective right only. Rather:
‘Freedom of speech, of the press, of information and of assembly are vital for the realization of human rights. Extension of these communication freedoms to a broader individual and collective right to communicate is an evolving principle in the democratization process’ (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980, p. 265).
Therefore, the right was seen as both individual and collective, although how this combination works was unexplained. Perhaps precisely because of such reconciliation, the MacBride Report was endorsed by consensus at the UNESCO Belgrade Conference in 1980. The right to communicate became one of the solidarity rights championed by UNESCO (Paillet Reference Paillet1980; UNESCO 1980), acknowledged as forming ‘one of the basic elements in the definition and implementation’ of a NWICO, of which the general task was to ‘help achieve the goal of assuring for everyone the right to communicate’ (International Institute of Communications and UNESCO 1982, p. 5).
At this point, it is worth dwelling a bit more on the controversies surrounding the right to communicate during the heyday of the NWICO movement. As mentioned, just like the NWICO which was bound up with the ideological battle of the Cold War, the right to communicate was fiercely opposed by those ‘free flow’ adherents who argued that the ‘free flow of information’ was a better formula than anything that the NWICO proposed (UNESCO 1985, p. 5). It was also rejected by the Soviet side, who criticised the MacBride Report as ‘too westernized in its terminology and its approaches’ (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980, pp. 172, 280). This ideological battle led to some, such as the International Commission of Jurists, arguing that the right to communicate should be dissociated from the NWICO (UNESCO 1985, p. 10), a strategy of ‘de-ideologicalization’ which also appeared two decades later (discussed below in Section 3.3). Besides the Cold War context, as hinted above, a major contention was the theoretical question about the subject of the right, which the MacBride Report fudged by presenting the right to communicate as a third-generation right. In a time when the nation state remained the primary political form of social organisation, the recognition of collective rights necessarily turned on the issue of the rights of the state, which became particularly thorny when it came to information. Claims that the right to communicate formed a pillar of the NWICO to rectify asymmetries of international communication were constantly countered by the argument that the right to communicate should not be extended to states and governments due to the inherent risk of justifying censorship (UNESCO General Conference 1983, p. 137). Still another important controversy of the right to communicate was about its necessity. The critique was that most aspects and elements of the right to communicate had already been defined and provided in existing human rights instruments and that the problem concerned enforcing existing human rights, not creating new rights.Footnote 3 A closely related worry here was that creating new rights might undermine the enforcement of existing ones. Another issue tied to necessity was desirability. Some critics pointed out that articulating new rights without ensuring access to educational, technical and financial resources necessary for their implementation would be pointless (UNESCO 1985). Furthermore, as communication is so integral to all aspects of human life, doubt was raised that it was not only philosophically unnecessary but ‘perhaps wrong to describe it as a human right’ (Fisher Reference Fisher1982, p. 41). These ideological, theoretical and practical debates over the right to communicate demonstrate the inevitably contested character of human rights terms, when deployed to express social and political aspirations.
The MacBride Report marked the high point of the NWICO movement. Moving to the 1980s, the movement, constantly attacked by many Western governments and media as a Soviet-backed campaign to destroy media freedom, soon lost momentum, and its demands for democratising and decolonising international communication were largely reduced to a set of voluntary technology assistance and development programmes. An example is the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) set up by UNESCO, tasked to develop communication infrastructures without imposing any financial obligations on UNESCO member states, hence having no real substantive function (Harley Reference Harley1981, p. 153). The difficulties were further exacerbated by the withdrawal of the United States of America (along with the United Kingdom and Singapore) from UNESCO in 1984 which led to a significant budgetary loss. Also quite symbolically, a few months after the release of the MacBride Report at UNESCO, a group of news organisations met at Talloires, France,Footnote 4 and penned a Talloires Declaration which invoked the UDHR and called on UNESCO to ‘abandon attempts to regulate news content and formulate rules for the press’ (New York Times 1981), Jean d’Arcy being one of the signatories. Later, he argued (d’Arcy Reference d’Arcy, Fisher and Harms1983, p. xxv) that the Third World had made their ‘legitimate request for a new world information order’ and that ‘the industrialized nations…have demonstrated their willingness to help correct the present imbalances [in] communications infrastructures and training’ through the IPDC. d’Arcy’s position reflects a profound de-radicalisation in the global debate about North–South communication inequality in the 1980s. By the end of the 1980s, as M’Bow stepped down as Director-General and with the end of the UNESCO 1982–89 plan, both the NWICO and the right to communicate disappeared from UNESCO agendas (Nordenstreng Reference Nordenstreng, Vincent, Traber and Nordenstreng1999, p. 261).
3.3. The right to communicate on the cusp of neoliberal globalisation: deradicalisation and disappearance
After the NWICO and outside UNESCO, the right to communicate was taken up by the ITU, which had barely spoken the human rights language before the 1990s.Footnote 5 An organisation traditionally coordinating between member states’ telecommunication administrations to ensure global interconnectivity, the ITU went under significant reforms during the 1980s in the midst of a global wave of telecommunication liberalisation (Mansouri Reference Mansouri2023). By the early 1990s, the ITU formalised the participation rights of the private sector in the Union’s activities and maintained close ties with the world trade regime which included telecommunications as a matter of trade in services during the Uruguay Round negotiations (Woodrow Reference Woodrow1991). While the ITU’s restructuring was uneasy, ideological battles as witnessed at UNESCO a decade earlier did not occur. The US Ambassador Gerald Helman for example observed at the 1992 World Administrative Radio Conference, ‘[t]here was no serious North-South cleavage. There was excellent and constructive hemispheric consultation and cooperation – a happy omen for the future’ (Helman Reference Helman1992).
It was in such a post-NWICO, ‘happy omen’ mood and against the background of sweeping telecommunication liberalisation that the ITU picked up the right to communicate to envision telecommunications of the twenty-first century. The ITU’s Secretary-General, Pekka Tarjanne, argued in 1992 that the values to ‘guide telecommunications policy and shape the industry in the future’ should be human rights and that ‘the UDHR should be amended to recognize the right to communicate as a fundamental human right’ (Reference Tarjanne1992, p. 45). A few years later, the ITU led a UN inter-agency project on universal access to basic communication and information service, which circulated the term ‘the right to communicate’ among various UN bodies. In a speech in April 1997, Tarjanne drew attention to the trendy concepts of ‘global information society’ and ‘global village’ and various social, political and economic changes ushered in by the information and communication revolution. In such a changing time, Tarjanne (Reference Tarjanne1997) argued that the enjoyment of human rights in practice became increasingly dependent on the access to communication and information services, and that ‘in the Global Information Society, universal access to basic communication and information services – what I like to call “the right to communicate” – should be viewed as a fundamental human right’. He then warned that there existed a ‘communications and information gap’ between developed and developing countries, which might be widened ‘into an unbridgeable chasm’ if no action was taken ‘on the part of the world community’ (Tarjanne Reference Tarjanne1997). The inter-agency project passed a Declaration on Universal Access to Basic Communication and Information Services (International Telecommunication Union 1997),Footnote 6 which mentioned the right to communicate as a topic for exploration and signalled the intent of executive heads of the UN organisations to address the issue of the information gap, with the Global South described as suffering from ‘information poverty’.
In brief, the ITU’s interest in the right to communicate seemed to be more rhetorical than conceptual. No definition or general description of the term was attempted. Rather, the term was largely used to rebrand the ITU’s work in the world telecommunications industry and in the UN family. This should not come as a surprise given the mandate and expertise of the ITU, but its use of the term nevertheless affected the conceptual contour of the right to communicate. Most importantly, while telecommunications now became relevant for a whole range of social and economic issues and for North–South relations, the right to communicate as proclaimed by the ITU became more narrowly confined to access to information and communication services, which was framed by the ITU as being about ensuring global coverage and interconnectivity of telecommunications. Against the backdrop of telecommunication liberalisation, the goal of global coverage and interconnectivity would mainly be achieved through a pro-competition market environment and low tariffs. This suggests an understanding of communication as primarily a technical issue and only secondarily a social, political and cultural issue. Issues deliberated in previous decades such as participation, the multi-directional process of communication and democratisation, not to mention the idea of collective rights, were left out of the picture.
Besides the ITU, the right to communicate was also taken up by civil society groups in this period. Many leftist communication experts and journalists, who felt deeply ambivalent about the state-centred approach of the NWICO and its institutionalisation at UNESCO, continued their work and dialogues outside inter-governmental forums in the post-NWICO years. An example of this was the annual MacBride Round Tables from 1989 to 1999, which aimed
‘to promote the development of international communication towards a new world information and communication order, and to promote the acceptance of the Right to Communicate as a basic Human Right in society, and to promote a grass-roots campaign on behalf of the right to communicate’ (Lee Reference Lee, Becker and Mansell2023, p. 223).
The International Association of Mass Communication Research, which had crucial inputs from some key advocates of the NWICO, also served as an incubator for a sprawling transnational movement for the democratisation of communication in the 1990s. Examples of such advocacy in this period included the People’s Communication Charter and the Platform for Cooperation on Democratization and Communication. It is notable that what had driven policy-makers like Tarjanne to speak about the right to communicate at the ITU, namely the sweeping liberalisation of the information industries, also drove these civil society groups, although in a precisely opposite way. Unlike the ITU and its member states who spoke of the right to communicate as a moral label for the process of liberalisation, many activist-intellectuals used the term to counter the rising neoliberal thinking and technological determinism in the world’s communication policies.
The civil society campaign reached prominence at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS),Footnote 7 which was organised by the ITU and open to participation of non-state actors. A campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) was launched in 2001, which then became a coordinator at the WSIS Civil Society Sector. They criticised the dominant narratives of the information society for being too narrowly defined and technologically determinist. Instead, they posed questions about the commercialisation and the concentration of ownership and control over the production and dissemination of information, as well as issues about cultural hegemony and political domination (Siochrú Reference Siochrú2004, p. 213). The right to communicate therefore attempted to redefine the information society by providing a portal for broader social justice issues. The CRIS called on civil society organisations to join the force to build an information society ‘based on principles of transparency, diversity, participation and social and economic justice, and inspired by equitable gender, cultural and regional perspectives’ (Chakravartty Reference Chakravartty2006, p. 252). Cees Hamelink in his keynote address to the WSIS Civil Society Sector argued that, rather than the so-called ‘information society’, what was needed was a ‘communication society’ which drew inspiration from human rights and recognised the right to communicate (Hamelink Reference Hamelink2002).
The advocacy of the right to communicate appeared to have had certain visible impact at the WSIS, for the term was soon also spoken of by the European Commission (European Commission 2003) and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (United Nations 2003). Nevertheless, the right to communicate was controversial within the WSIS Civil Society Sector, showing the inherent heterogeneity of civil societies. In February 2003, a draft declaration on the right to communicate was proposed in the Civil Society Sector but was soon criticised by the World Press Freedom Committee (Koven Reference Koven2003), which had also vocally attacked the MacBride Report two decades earlier and the right to communicate campaigns in the 1990s (World Press Freedom Committee 2000). Other human rights organisations, such as Article 19, were also critical of the term and considered that the focus should be on enforcing existing human rights (Drake and Jøergensen Reference Drake, Jøergensen and Jøergensen2006, p. 30). The draft declaration was eventually dropped, and the term ‘right to communicate’ was changed to ‘communication rights’ (Hamelink and Hoffmann Reference Hamelink and Hoffmann2008).
The new term was understood as closely related to but conceptually different from the right to communicate. According to the CRIS, the right to communicate was associated with the NWICO which called for a new right to be added to existing rights and demanded a formal framework in international law for its implementation. By contrast, the term ‘communication rights’ turned away ‘from promoting a new formal right to communicate, in the singular, in international law’ and focused on realising existing human rights related to communication ‘on the ground’ (CRIS Campaign 2005, p. 19). As an ‘umbrella term’, it encompassed an extremely wide range of rights and topics (CRIS Campaign 2005, pp. 40–43), as a practical strategy to build a broad front against both corporate interest and authoritarian governments. The consequent focus on existing rights however raised an obvious question about the conceptual boundary of the term, its internal coherence and ultimately its distinct normative value as a stake and locus of contestation.
Eventually, neither the right to communicate nor communication rights made their way to the WSIS outcome documents. This came as a great disappointment to many advocates at that time who saw the WSIS’s outcome as largely endorsing the neoliberal ideology. The WSIS outcome documents were still embellished by human rights-related terms, which described the information society as ‘people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented’ and stressed that ‘freedom of expression and the free flow of information, ideas, and knowledge, are essential for the Information Society and beneficial to development’ (World Summit on the Information Society 2005). The reference to ‘free flow’ here shows that the legacy of the NWICO had by then been entirely lost and that the human rights language appeared at the WSIS as free of political and ideological contestations. Also importantly, the human rights decoration of the WSIS documents had left intact other critical political–economic issues, such as the commodification and concentration of ownership of information. In this respect, the critical, counter-hegemonic effect of the civil society campaign was rendered minimal, for the campaign consciously disassociated itself from the NWICO and took human rights as a tool without questioning it. Co-optation was an unsurprising result, and as critical scholars observed, the private sector at the WSIS had been expertly using the equally protean and flexible discourse of sustainable development, which largely shrank the oppositional distance between these different visions (Chakravartty Reference Chakravartty2006).
While this brief history closes at the mid-2000s, what happened after the WSIS merits a quick note. On the international arena, it remains that no international human rights instruments formally recognise the right to communicate. With the rise of the internet and later digital technologies, much of the energy spent in advocating the right to communicate was redirected to the ‘right of internet access’ or ‘digital rights’ where many fundamental debates during the right to communicate advocacy were rehearsed. On regional and local levels, importantly, the right to communicate has appeared in domestic constitutions such as in Bolivia and Ecuador during the Pink Tide governments (Gonzalez Rodriguez Reference Gonzalez Rodriguez and Frau-Meigs2012), showing that the rights discourse remains crucial and intimately connected to anti-hegemonic and radical democratic politics in a region that once pioneered the NWICO campaign.
4. The right to communicate and social change
The story of the right to communicate contains heterogenous positions and articulations. Broadly speaking, the discourses, invoking and aiming to update the UDHR, were anchored in the humanist tradition of human rights. Following this tradition, individuals were deemed as agents having the inherent right to communicate rather than simply being informed. Emphasis was put on individuals’ access to and participation in the communication process to rearrange the structure of modern mass communication. The move from freedom of expression to the right to communicate was explained through a narrative of technologically driven human progress (e.g. d’Arcy’s conception) or the generational evolution of human rights (e.g. the MacBride Report). During the NWICO campaign, the humanist tradition was taken by some Third World scholars to advance the twofold agenda of democratising domestic and international communications, which served as an important internal critique of the NWICO. The NWICO campaign also complemented the humanist conception of the right to communicate with the crucial ambition of decolonisation, seeking to eradicate the imperialist structure of international communication and collectively empower the Third World. Incorporated by the NWICO, the right to communicate became an individual and collective right, with which Third World countries emphasised material conditions necessary for restructuring international communication (e.g. the San José Conference). The collective aspect of the right to communicate was dropped along with the defeat of the NWICO and the culmination of telecommunication liberalisation in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the right to communicate as a counter-hegemonic discourse eventually disappeared, partly due to a return to existing human rights.
To this day, global communication remains undemocratic; the ‘digital gap’ or ‘information poverty’ persists; commodification of information (or data) and concentration in the ownership and control of information and communication infrastructures exacerbate; political oppression and polarisation become further intensified through social media platforms; and global tech giants wield unprecedented power in virtually all aspects of our social life. For communities in the Global South in particular, large media groups and technology companies coupled with local conglomerates and long-term neoliberal social policies have reinforced disempowerment and alienation in the domain of communication (Mastrini and Becerra Reference Mastrini, Becerra, Winseck and Jin2011), leading to sprawling rights movements and critical literature countering ‘digital colonialism’ or ‘AI colonialism’ (Kwet Reference Kwet2019; Mejias and Couldry Reference Mejias and Couldry2024; Nothias Reference Nothias2025). The renewed decolonising agendas in the current predicament may suggest that the right to communicate story – so far as it aimed at ‘new structures based on a new philosophy’ – was ultimately largely a failure. How can we explain this failure, and what lessons can be drawn from it? Following the historical-materialist approach, this section discusses the right to communicate discourses and their limitations as conditioned by and expressions of the social contradictions in which they were embedded. Here, I focus on three interrelated questions: how to understand communication as an interpersonal and yet socially conditioned process, and relatedly how to understand the aspect of access and participation in communication, and how to understand the role of technology in specific historical moments. By examining these questions, it becomes clear that, while aiming for a more democratic and equitable (global) society, many humanist discourses themselves incorporated and acted on some key aspects of capitalist ideology such as the reification of technology and the split between the social, the political and the economic, and therefore excluded the economic and material dimension from the project of democratising communication.
Starting with the first question, the right to communicate aimed to rectify the monopolistic, one-way street structure of mass media. However, anchored in the humanist tradition, many discourses by focusing on the individual as the communicator had also adopted a naturalised conception of communication. The way these discourses engaged with the material conditions of communication as a social process was to demand individual access and participation rather than more directly demand reorganising or commonising ownership of communication resources, technologies and infrastructures, therefore leaving intact the private property regime underpinning the largely oligopolistic market of global communication (Hamelink Reference Hamelink1983, p. 38). These material conditions here are crucial not only by directly affecting interpersonal communication but because they were critical sites where the reorganisation of socio-economic activities in late capitalist societies took place in the 1970s and 1980s.
What many humanist discourses of the right to communicate expressed (e.g. those articulated by Western experts such as d’Arcy, Harms and Fisher) was the idea that interactive communication – ‘two-way flows’, access and participation – equates to power-sharing, suggesting a conception of class-free democracy, which was largely compatible with ideas about ‘post-industrial society’ and ‘global village’ by conservative visionaries such as Daniel Bell and Marshall McLuhan who reacted to profound social crisis in the capitalist world of the time by rejecting class conflicts (Ross Reference Ross1974). While the humanist discourses saw the right to communicate as particularly important for enhancing social democracy and hence adhered to the classic individual–state dichotomy, they were silent on how this right might have salience for the reallocation of class power in contexts such as economic production, particularly at a time of increased informatisation, financialisation and transnationalisation of economic activities since the 1970s. A question that could have been asked would be what the right to communicate might mean for workers’ decision-making power in corporate management to organise economic production and the process of informatisation.Footnote 8
The fact that communication is always a mediated social process was made most evident in the context of North–South contestation due to the vast asymmetry of information resources and capacities and the long-lasting legacy of colonialism. The NWICO was explicitly connected to the New International Economic Order (NIEO) (Hamelink Reference Hamelink1978), suggesting the imbricated and mutually reinforcing relation between ideological and cultural domination and economic dependence. Thereby, the humanist notion of the right to communicate, and its aspects of access and participation, became linked with the battle over the material redistribution of the world. However, the battle here was fraught in at least three aspects. First, while some intimated that the right to communicate included ‘the right not to communicate’, no one seriously wanted to be isolated from the world, which then raises the question of how one could participate in a highly asymmetric and exploitative global system while changing it from within at the same time, the same question that had confronted the NIEO.Footnote 9 Second, the NWICO campaign stressed the importance of state intervention, but many advocates saw the Soviet model with disdain due to domestic governmental repression in their countries.Footnote 10 This means that the role of the state in the NWICO remained decidedly ambiguous and demonstrates the fundamental difficulty of using the rights language to reclaim the state – born into and situated in the coercive capitalist world system (Whyte Reference Whyte2023) – as a humanist project. Third, the Third World demands regarding access to communication infrastructures and resources did not lead to more equitable material redistribution, but ultimately deradicalised the right to communicate and the NWICO campaign. Notably, as mentioned in Section 3.2, the IPDC transformed Third World demands into voluntary assistance from the Global North. The right to communicate discourses did not cause this turn to charity but could do very little to mitigate it. As human rights lawyers were debating that third-generation human rights had ‘un débiteur indéterminé’ and could hardly be invoked against anyone (Kooijmans Reference Kooijmans1990), the right to communicate here shows vividly how political forces made sure a certain right could not have any juridical meaning when material power was at stake.
The point about material (re)distribution brings me to the question of the role of technology. In the right to communicate story, a notable parallel is between the progressive narrative of human rights and the narrative of technological development. In the three-and-a-half-decade trajectory, articulations of the right to communicate, whether by Western media experts or Third World officials, often presented technological development as necessary and irreversible, compelling the reconceptualisation of human beings and societies as well as human rights. Certainly, a simple idea of new technologies leading to new human rights had attracted a counter-argument that no new human rights specific to new technologies are needed precisely because human rights are universal and eternal. But it remains that these debates, whether for or against new human rights, typically emerge in response to technological advancements and to the new techno-social imaginaries about the world they usher in. Whether human rights evolve in the form of new rights or new interpretations of existing rights, there is a powerful, underlying view which positions human rights as driven by, and therefore posterior to, technological development. As a result, the right to communicate expressed no specific normative vision about how technology per se ought to evolve. Implicit here is a view of technology as apolitical and universal rather than coming from and intervening in specific social relations and having specific distributional effects (Graeber Reference Graeber2015). It is henceforth fair to say that many of these humanist discourses were unable to intervene in and influence the social process from which information technology emerged and was utilised and with which information was created, circulated and consumed. This apolitical view on technology is unfortunate also because it was precisely in the late 1960s and 1970s that information technology became intrinsically intertwined with the growth of the service and financial sectors, which were becoming a prominent engine for economic growth as Global North countries began to de-industrialise and outsource manufacturing with profound social implications on domestic and international levels (Hamelink Reference Hamelink1983; Schiller Reference Schiller2007). This means that the liberating effect of information and communication technologies for interpersonal communication should be seen at most as a by-product of technological evolution primarily for capital accumulation, which the humanist discourses of the right to communicate were unable to confront.
The Third World demand for material redistribution during the NWICO included technology. For example, Argentinian lawyer Aldo Armando Cocca, involved in proceedings at UNESCO and COPUOS, understood (Reference Cocca, Fisher and Harms1983, p. 31) the right to communicate as ‘a fundamental right of mankind to express itself, to enter into relations with and to communicate interactively with other peoples and local communities’, and meanwhile urged that ‘allocation of technological resources for these purposes be given high priority’ (emphasis added). Yet, it was also well acknowledged that pre-existing practices of technology transfer had negative impacts for Third World countries and that Third World countries needed to develop indigenous technological capacity (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems 1980, p. 217). Therefore, the Third World demand contained an ambition to determine for themselves the appropriate technology and path of development. However, this ambition bore very little fruit due to the extant international economic and information order. As studies of the 1970s and 1980s show (e.g. Hamelink Reference Hamelink1983; UN Centre on Transnational Corporations 1982, 1983, 1984), in the midst of rapid development and uptake of informatics, satellite remote sensing and trans-border data flow – all transforming existing global economic activities in ways that profoundly benefitted powerful transnational corporations – Third World countries remained passive recipients of these technologies, with their demand in practice shrinking to emphasising redistribution rather than encompassing the pre-distribution social process of the production of technology.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the right to communicate re-emerged as a useful rhetoric pronounced by technocratic policy-makers to promote universal coverage and connectivity of telecommunications. Such discourses further accentuated the earlier imaginaries of class-free societies and technological determinism. Tarjanne announced that McLuhan’s global village was becoming a reality, and the United States government propagated the ‘global information superhighway’ (Gore Reference Gore1994, p. 2). The right to communicate here was to be realised through privatisation, empowering the transnational telecommunication corporations. Equally crucial, the right to communicate discourse provided the ‘values’ for the newly and increasingly liberalised telecommunication market. Civil society’s advocacy of the right to communicate challenged the neoliberal and technologically determinist vision of the information society in a time when states, international organisations and the private sector also used human rights discourses for self-legitimation. Hence, civil society’s choice of the right to communicate discourse was indeed an unfortunate strategy at the time when human rights had already became the dominant ‘modality of global governance’ (Golder Reference Golder2014, p. 83) rather than counter-hegemonic avenues for emancipatory projects only.
5. Concluding reflections
This paper sought to tell the story of the right to communicate to reflect on human rights’ promise and limitations in shaping social (including technological) change. The story saw intersecting and competing threads – that is, humanist visions about modern technology and democracy, decolonial movements for collective and self-empowerment of the Third World and the promotion of and struggles over neoliberal marketisation. Reading these discourses of the right to communicate from a historical-materialist perspective, it becomes clear how certain rights articulations were made possible in specific historical contexts and ultimately how these discourses changed little the structure of world communication. Early intimations of the concept typically lacked an understanding of communication as a technologically mediated process integral to and constituted by capitalist social relations. Reifying technology, these discourses were therefore consistent with the depoliticised visions of ‘post-industrial society’ and ‘end of ideology’, which emerged precisely at the time when the so called ‘golden age of capitalism’ in the West was over and when technological innovation in the information sectors became deeply intertwined with the increased financialisation and transnationalisation of economic production. The NWICO’s appropriation of this concept in the late 1970s and the subsequent demise of the movement show possibilities of creative and strategic use of the rights discourse to mount a challenge to the capitalist and imperialist structure of world communication and the limitations of such use. Crucially, the emphasis on material conditions in their articulations of the right to communicate demonstrated the intricate connection between North–South informational imbalance and economic dependence, and precisely because of such deeply entrenched structural inequality, the right to communicate discourses during the NWICO could not be translated into actual legal rights and obligations of global (re)distribution but instead into the charity of wealthy states. In the period from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, the right to communicate functioned less as a critical voice than more of, to borrow Jessica Whyte’s term, the ‘moral’ of the global telecommunication market.
The post-WSIS rights campaign, just like the broader global human rights project in the neoliberal era, had a decidedly ambiguous impact of institutional mainstreaming and political co-optation (Koskenniemi Reference Koskenniemi2010). While it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully recount the paradoxes of human rights’ entanglement with the evolving global information order, of which the story of the right to communicate is only a slice, this story sends the crucial message for the current critical conjuncture that the struggle for democratising communication is now, as has always been, inherently one about fundamentally changing social, material relations under the capitalist system. For this struggle, human rights provide a crucial, albeit relatively easily co-optable, discursive tool and terrain, hence never the magic mantra. The reassertion of humanist values in modern communication needs always to be grounded in a programme aimed at reorganising social relations from which information, technology and communication are made possible. In times of oligopolistic and increasingly fascist Big Tech emboldened by and enabling resurgent far-right politics, the struggle for global social justice using the human rights language is then also a critical reclaiming of human rights as a project of recreating social and material conditions to nurture solidarity against cannibalistic capitalism (Fraser Reference Fraser2022).
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Justina Uriburu and Francisco-José Quintana for inviting her to present an early draft of this paper at the workshop, Oppression and Resistance in the History of International Law (European University Institute 2024), and would like to thank all participants at that workshop for their generous engagement and insightful comments. The author also expresses her gratitude to Yifeng Chen for inviting her to present and test some of the ideas underlying this piece at the Global and Comparative Law Lecture Series at Peking University Law School and to all attendees for the warm and incredibly stimulating conversations.
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