Towards a Theorization of the Right to Communicate Research

Since the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, communication has been considered one of the basic human rights, based on the juridical language of Article 19 of the Declaration, among other subsequent covenants and treatises. Still, this human “right to communicate” undeniably lacks an established research literature related to communication studies, contrary to its solid grounding in the scholarly literature of law, international relations, and human rights. This is not to deny, however, that the right to communicate—as I have argued elsewhere—possesses very strong intellectual, philosophical, and historical origins that can be traced back to the seventeenth century in the words of philosophers such as John Milton, John Locke, and Voltaire, through to more contemporary philosophers such as John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas (Dakroury, A. (2009). Communication and human rights. Kendall/Hunt Publishing.). John Durham Peters argues, in his exploration of the history of the idea of communication, that human communication “is a rich tangle of intellectual and cultural strands that encoded our time’s confrontations with itself” (1999, p. 2). He suggests that if we want to understand communication within these intellectual strands, we have to “understand much more” (ibid.). In other words, we need to conduct a historical analysis of ideas that are intertwined, and not merely adopt a linear view or understanding of a given idea in a given period. This chapter attempts to situate the “right to communicate” debate theoretically, within scholarly debates conducted widely under the umbrella of communication studies, by introducing a number of different intellectual positions that theorized, sometimes indirectly, a notion of a right to communicate. They do not consist merely of one theory of a right to communicate but rather form intellectual threads that are intertwined as well as inspired by the advocacy of human rights research.