The Power of Human Rights/The Human Rights of Power

Louiza Odysseos, Anna Selmeczi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138292147
• eBook ISBN: 9781351870191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The contributions to this volume eschew the long-held approach of either dismissing human rights as politically compromised or glorifying them as a priori progressive in enabling resistance. Drawing on plural social theoretic and philosophical literatures – and a multiplicity of empirical domains – they illuminate the multi-layered and intricate relationship of human rights and power. They highlight human rights' incitement of new subjects and modes of political action, marked by an often unnoticed duality and indeterminacy. Epistemologically distancing themselves from purely deductive, theory-driven approaches, the contributors explore these linkages through historically specific rights struggles. This, in turn, substantiates the commitment to avoid reifying the 'Third World' as merely the terrain of 'fieldwork', proposing it, instead, as a legitimate and necessary site of theorising. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

The power of human rights/the human rights of power: an introduction

Louiza Odysseos^a and Anna Selmeczi^b

^aDepartment of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; ^bSouth African Research Chair Initiative: Social Change, University of Fort Hare, East London, South Africa

The contributions to this volume eschew the long-held approach of either dismissing human rights as politically compromised or glorifying them as a priori progressive in enabling resistance. Drawing on plural social theoretic and philosophical literatures – and a multiplicity of empirical domains – they illuminate the multi-layered and intricate relationship of human rights and power. They highlight human rights’ incitement of new subjects and modes of political action, marked by an often unnoticed duality and indeterminacy. Epistemologically distancing themselves from purely deductive, theory-driven approaches, the contributors explore these linkages through historically specific rights struggles. This, in turn, substantiates the commitment to avoid reifying the ‘Third World’ as merely the terrain of ‘fieldwork’, proposing it, instead, as a legitimate and necessary site of theorising.

There is never a dull moment in the political and social life of human rights. Scholarly and political voices sceptical of the seemingly unstoppable rise of human rights have long argued that they form the moral and intellectual key-stone of a liberal hegemony producing consent to radically unequal socioeconomic relations.¹ Today scholars worry about the fissures in the fabric of liberal hegemony evident in part in the diminishing political commitment amongst those nations key to the sustenance of the international human rights regime.² Human rights advocates, on the other hand, have countered that, historically, human rights gave expression to claims seeking to demarcate the growing power of the fledgling administrative state and that, in recent years, are enabling of the politics of resistance in symbolic, discursive and legal terms: ‘human rights are meant to be good news for the underprivileged, the downtrodden, and the dispossessed’.³

Reaching well beyond human rights’ early geographical manifestations, the dichotomous reception of rights has also been apparent in the Third World. The emancipatory struggles of Third World countries against colonialism – arguably a human rights movement as such – were crucial in establishing universal human rights as a paradigm through the emergence of such struggles in the United Nations. In the aftermath of these struggles advocates of democratisation championed collective, and later individual, self-determination and universal rights, while the autocratic regimes emerging in the second half of the 20th century fundamentally called into question their force and scope.⁴ At the same time, however, many remained concerned with the political implications of both the origins of rights as secularised Judeo-Christian moral values,⁵ and as historically negotiated entitlements to claims made within the European solidification of the state and its need for standing armies.⁶ To this day human rights continue to be encountered with suspicion by those who are troubled by the contemporary mobilisation of human rights in the symbolic politics of the ‘colonial present’.⁷

How might critical scholarship on human rights help us better grasp and innovatively theorise the multiple and complex facets of this duality and ambivalence? This volume brings together scholars weary of the long-held ‘either/or’ approach, who argue that our perspectives on human rights are narrowed by such a dichotomous choice of dismissal or glorification. They view this dichotomy as increasingly obscuring what is a very complex, multi-level and multi-perspectival ambivalence of human rights. To this end, the contributions set out to investigate the duality and ambivalence of human rights and to provide analyses that move the debate beyond the dichotomous framing of rights as either politically progressive in enabling resistance,⁸ or politically compromised in conservative and often neo-colonial terms.⁹ Plural in their theoretical approach, they draw on a broad range of social theoretic, philosophical and political literatures to innovatively theorise the complex relationship of human rights and power, in the process offering novel interventions in our understanding of both of these contested terms. At the same time the contributions offer diverse empirical examinations of the often subtle and undocumented manifestations of this duality and complexity, which they discern in a range of human rights issues and challenges from the Third World and beyond.

Theoretical and epistemological trajectories

The papers use ‘human rights’ in the broadest sense, variably examining how human rights norms, legal frameworks, global and vernacularised discourses, as well as bureaucratic processes of monitoring and regulation, at times appear both to challenge and resist coercive and productive forms of power. The volume as a whole is committed to diversifying the theoretical understanding of the intimate relationship between human rights and power. In one important redirection of human rights scholarship, a number of contributions illuminate the duality of human rights through a more acutely theoretical emphasis on ‘subjectification’. By this we mean the complex range of processes through which human rights incite new moral and political subjects in the very acts of defining and claiming rights, including the ways in which truth discourses surrounding human rights allow people to understand themselves as subjects bearing rights and, as a result, able to pursue new paths of action, struggle and moral comportment for themselves and others. The focus on subjectification also opens up new lines of enquiry into how these processes of subject formation are under certain conditions encouraged, even imposed (Renner), while under different circumstances they are disciplined (Rajas) and even denied.

Informing the terms of such enquiries, and thus giving an albeit loose theoretical orientation to the collection, several contributions put to work the thought of Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière and, to a lesser extent, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Brought to bear on a multiplicity of socio-political contexts, these thinkers’ conceptions of subjectivity and power provide a workable vocabulary for tackling questions around how human rights as discourse, as sensibly inscribed words of equality,¹⁰ allow or disallow the formation of rightful modes of being and acting. Accordingly a number of papers show that the power of human rights often hinges on their modes and processes of subjectification, for example in inciting subjectivities that enable new languages and new claims for resistance against dispossession and oppression in the papers by Coleman and Odysseos and for the indictment of regimes of market and border governance in the papers by Hilberg, Puggioni and Rajas. At the same time narrow uses of human rights are shown to fix complex lived experiences into non-malleable categories, as Renner shows in her study of the production of subject positions of victim and perpetrator in the Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Further, Selmeczi critically engages with the theoretical emphasis on subjectification which, as she shows, has often led to a deterministic understanding of subjects as the mere effects of power. She argues that theorising through ethnographic attention to struggle better elucidates the ways in which rights-claims and the letter of the law are used by movements to claim political personhood and to contest their political illiteracy, assumed by both political elites and critical academic analysts alike.

Indeed, one prominent epistemological commitment of a number of papers in the volume is to reason, and theorise, through historically specific struggles,¹¹ which allows the contributors to distance themselves from a purely deductive, theory-driven approach to the politics and power effects of human rights. Highlighting the dangers of a normatively predetermined approach to rights as values, Coleman provides a critique of approaches to rights in terms of an immanent ethics. Such approaches, she claims, ‘disconnect rights talk from actual contexts of struggle’. She proposes instead taking struggle as a starting point in order to facilitate a clearer view of the simultaneous malleability of rights – which allows them to be subsumed within neoliberal contractualism¹² – and the dialectics between normative principle and political critique, in which rights inspire new future visions to contest dispossession. This is echoed by the analyses of Hoover, Selmeczi and Odysseos, who chart the emancipatory potential enacted through the formation of new political subjectivities, thus re-inscribing the rights-bearing subject in struggles for restructuring home ownership, against eviction and urban gentrification, and for fair reparations and accountability for harm caused by multinational capital, respectively. Certainly Odysseos’ conception of human rights as an ‘optics of rightlessness’ innovatively articulates the consequences of the issue’s epistemological insistence to think together the duality of hope and possibility, on the one hand, and the limits of rights on the other, in order to address particular conditions of subjugation: in her case those conditions emerging from the socioeconomic disposability of certain citizens, sanctioned by state and society’s endorsement of global neoliberal capitalism.

At the same time the epistemological move to make human rights struggles the starting point of thinking about rights is informed by a normative commitment which refuses to reify the ‘Third World’ as the mere terrain of ‘fieldwork’ or the source of empirical data. Rather, we propose it as a legitimate and necessary site of theorising. Correspondingly we expand our use of the ‘Third World’ as not confined in any way to a geographical space or an accident of Cold War political history. This is attested to by the inclusion of the papers by Hoover on the claims made on the basis of the human right to housing in post-crisis USA, and by Rajas and Puggioni on the human rights of migrants in contemporary Europe. These contributions variably bring our attention to the racialisation of many forms of rights denial in what one might call ‘Third World America’ or ‘Third World Europe’. Explicitly or implicitly these papers – including Estévez’s – foreground the significance of the borderland for analysing the politics of human rights. Together with the issue’s expanded understanding of the Third World, the deployment of the notion of borderland here signals the authors’ engagement with, and problematisation of, human rights as the frame within which Western liberal regimes of power seek to govern ‘the other’, aiming to maintain, circumscribe and, often literally, wall off the supposed spaces of freedom through various exercises in the racialised redefinition of rightful life.

In this vein Rajas’s highly original discussion of the disciplining of the human rights of migrants in Europe through an evaluation of their market worth, illuminates how current national migration policies in EU countries bear the echoes of earlier eugenics migration policies in 19th and early 20th century USA. Puggioni, too, notes the denigration of ‘the other’ in EU border management, while Estévez discusses how the hybridisation of the state and organised criminality significantly dislocates the mechanisms of attribution of rights violations and persecution. This dislocation, in turn, affe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The power of human rights/the human rights of power: an introduction
• 2. The question concerning human rights and human rightlessness: disposability and struggle in the Bhopal gas disaster
• 3. Struggles, over rights: humanism, ethical dispossession and resistance
• 4. Who is the subject of neoliberal rights? Governmentality, subjectification and the letter of the law
• 5. The human right to housing and community empowerment: home occupation, eviction defence and community land trusts
• 6. Producing the subjects of reconciliation: the making of Sierra Leoneans as victims and perpetrators of past human rights violations
• 7. Disciplining the human rights of immigrants: market veridiction and the echoes of eugenics in contemporary EU immigration policies
• 8. Border politics, right to life and acts of dissensus: voices from the Lampedusa Borderland
• 9. The Endriago subject and the dislocation of state attribution in human rights discourse: the case of Mexican asylum claims in Canada
• 10. Between learning and schooling: the politics of human rights monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review
• 11. Power, privilege and rights: how the powerful and powerless create a vernacular of rights
• 12. Human rights and power amid protest and change in the Arab world
• 13. The power effects of human rights reforms in Turkey: enhanced surveillance and depoliticisation
• 14. Promoting health or securing the market? The right to health and intellectual property between radical contestation and accommodation
• 15. Appropriation and the dualism of human rights: understanding the contradictory impact of gender norms in Nigeria
• Index