Why Human Rights Still Matter in Contemporary Global Affairs

Mahmood Monshipouri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367901479
• eBook ISBN: 9781000065732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book elucidates why human rights still matter in contemporary global affairs, and what can lead to better protection of international human rights in a post-liberal order.

It blends theoretical, empirical, and normative perspectives, while providing much-needed analysis in light of the perils of populism, authoritarianism, and toxic nationalism, as well as highlighting the hopes with which people around the world view human rights in the new millennium. Systematically combining theoretical perspectives from across the disciplines with numerous case studies, it demonstrates not only the complexities of the domestic conditions involved, but also the ways in which human dignity can be preserved and promoted during periods of rapid change and uncertainty. Finally, the book addresses the question of how to protect human rights in such a world in which the active promotion of democratic values and enforcement of human rights may not be necessarily aligned with evolving economic and geopolitical interests of many great and diverse powers on the global scene. As such, it is a timely intervention for human rights as a concept as it has been attacked and eroded by the instability in our world today.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of human rights in politics, law, philosophy, sociology, and history and to humanitarian bodies, practitioners, and policy makers.

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Why human rights still matter in contemporary global affairs

Mahmood Monshipouri

More than any time in recent memory, there is a risk of trivializing the importance of human rights and diminishing their significance in a disrupted and violent world. Human rights discourse appears to be in the grip of a political panic and in danger of sinking into a meaningless exercise at a moment of gross global insecurity and increasing disarray. It has become fashionable in academic and policy circles to cast a dark shadow on the future of human rights and link it to the current disjuncture between authoritarianism, populism, globalization, and immigration. This book’s central theme is that, in the long term, the commitment to and resilience of human rights can and will withstand political assaults of xenophobic nationalism, populism, authoritarianism, and political renunciation of norms, as well as the economic challenges of neoliberalism. If we fail to stand up for the principle of equality in dignity, social justice, and democratic and humanitarian values, the lingering criticisms of and attacks against progressive movements resulting from polarization, economic protectionism, concentration of wealth, fear of terrorism, and nativist reactions to immigration crises will have grave consequences.

A brief review of the theoretical and policy debates regarding the efficacy of human rights on the global scene is a good place to begin analysis of human rights in the current global context. If nothing else, these debates reveal the diversity and complexity of the issues at hand. While critics charge that international human rights laws have become increasingly impotent in achieving rule compliance among sovereign states, proponents consider such laws—which prohibit practices such as torture, slavery, extra-judicial killing, and arbitrary detention or exile—indispensable to enduring peace, order, and justice in the international community. The proponents, however, have seen a growing rift among them on what is the most effective way to protect and promote human rights, both domestically and on the international stage.

Critics

There has been a dramatic shift in the way in which some experts have viewed the pursuit of social justice, democracy, equality, and the fulfillment of human rights. An increasing number of interdisciplinary scholars have taken a critical look at the history and development of human rights. Eric A. Posner, for example, has argued that the movement for international human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives as violations of human rights have continued despite the ratification of several treaties normalizing human rights standards.¹ This may help explain why some states seem to enter into human rights treaties insincerely, knowing full well that such treaties do not lead to any meaningful obligations and that the proliferation of rights—or what Posner calls the hypertrophy of human rights—is likely to result in the collapse of the global human rights system into an undifferentiated status in which all interests must be protected for the sake of the public good.

The movement for international human rights law, Posner argues, is neither politically practical nor universally shared.² There is little evidence, Posner notes, that human rights treaties have generally improved the well-being of people or even enhanced respect for the rights contained therein.³ The continuing ambiguity surrounding human rights treaties, along with conflicting values and interests that so often drive state actions, has meant that the ratification of treaties has fallen well short of generating significant improvements in terms of compliance and enforcement of those rights.⁴

The facts, however, belie Posner’s overall argument that human rights treaties and laws have lacked enforcement mechanisms. The Convention Against Torture (CAT) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been reasonably reliable and instrumental in preventing torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment throughout the world, as well as establishing criminal accountability, even as the evidence in most cases remains far from definitive and unimpeachable.⁵ Furthermore, one study has demonstrated that the ratification of human rights treaties is associated with higher levels of respect for human rights. Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), for example, which contain clauses aimed at reducing economic benefits to human rights abusers, have helped improve the human rights conditions in beneficiary countries. This hard law has decreased human rights violations in part because it provides abusive regimes an economic incentive to respect international standards.⁶

Another view has noted that the human rights superstructure reflects a Western colonial project that is likely to fail. Human rights, Stephen Hopgood suggests, have been turned into normative and legal agreements by the agency of the Western European middle class, which was reinforced and transformed in the 1970s by US power with that country’s attempt to spread neoliberal democracy and state building.⁷ We are entering a “neo-Westphalian world,” according to Hopgood, in which the normative structure of human rights, which has been kept alive with the struggle for justice, dignity, and humanitarian relief, is challenged by two other global forces, namely, state sovereignty and nationalism on the one hand, and a resurgence of religious neo-conservatism, evangelism, and Islamism on the other.⁸

Unlike the Europeans, who integrated human rights into their domestic decision-making by creating institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, Hopgood observes, Americans have resisted such a commitment to human rights laws domestically. The United States has opted out of major human rights treaties, especially those requiring economic redistribution and social rights, has refrained from joining the Rome Statute of the ICC, and has been reluctant to criticize strategic allies, such as Israel, for human rights abuses.

Some critics have called into question Hopgood’s arguments, claiming that he overlooks the extent to which the idea of human rights has taken hold among non-Western political activists.⁹ If local human rights advocates in places like Indonesia, Tunisia, and Ghana, among others, can indeed secure some gains, David P. Forsythe notes, this will do much to discredit the argument about universal human rights as an imperial project. If restricted and closed societies, such as Saudi Arabia, continue to slowly liberalize, particularly with regard to the status of women, this will help debunk the notion that liberal values are merely Western and thus doomed to fail. Unlike Hopgood, Forsythe argues that one can still be cautiously optimistic about human rights in non-Western regions.¹⁰

Similarly, other experts have pointed out that human rights law has origins in the Global South as well as in the Global North. Many countries in the Global South, especially in Latin America and Africa, Kathryn Sikkink asserts, have created regional institutions to advance human rights while also implementing these rights through national court decisions. These courts in Brazil, South Africa, and India have rendered novel decisions about enforcing difficult economic rights such as the right to water, food, health, and shelter. These multiple and diverse origins, along with the broader institutionalization of human rights in the Global South, demonstrate that human rights have gained greater currency and legitimacy than the critics suggest.¹¹ Still, critics note that political resistance to human rights are not entirely independent of shifts in political power. The progress on human rights continues to be largely dependent on the ideology of governing actors in place.¹²

Other observers, albeit from an entirely different perspective, have noted that new forms of expertise have pushed the human rights movement away from the original conditions of its breakthrough rise in the 1970s. The original utopian appeal of human rights consisted precisely in their modest, ideologically neutral, and real-world character. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn writes, “were forced to move not simply from morality to politics, but also from charisma to bureaucracy.”¹³ By addressing issues such as “governance” in postcolonial states, the human rights movement arguably became the most vivid illustration of the embrace of politics.¹⁴ The question is whether this utopian image and appeal can be sustained beyond the process of politicization. Human rights advocates, Moyn goes on to argue, should “restrict themselves to offering minimal constraints on responsible politics, not a new form of maximal politics of their own.”¹⁵

In particular, Moyn has argued that human rights activism has made itself at home in a plutocratic world dominated by populist-nationalist politics and that the human rights movement has failed to “learn enough of a new interest in distributional fairness to keep inequality from spiking.”¹⁶ While Moyn is correct that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) was about social empowerment and protection, it arguably was not about distributive justice. The UDHR was about baseline protections of basic freedoms and socioeconomic rights as equal and inalienable entitlements of all individuals, in order to live a dignified life. Those rights were to be exercised against the state and society. The fact remains that the neoliberal economy has been more about the economic interests of the powerful countries than about enhancing basic freedoms.

It must be acknowledged that economic globalization has proven to be identity-threatening and has failed to speak to grievances of the disadvantaged and voiceless. However, responsibility for these problems should not be assigned to the human rights movement. Rather, the problem should be attributed to the neoliberal economic order—an order that is espoused by the political and financial elites, the major beneficiaries of economic globalization, who tend to view social justice as a major barrier to sustaining their privileged positions in society. The human rights movement, according to one expert, has been neither based on nor influenced by neoliberalism.¹⁷ Likewise, experts such as Moyn offer “no evidence that a human rights movement devoted to egalitarianism would have been able to stop the neoliberal juggernaut.”¹⁸ Where the human rights movement has apparently failed is in building a consensus on obligations imposed by social and economic rights on states.

Advocates

Given that these critical perspectives and their provocative assumptions have prompted pessimism over international politics of rights, international humanitarian law, transitional justice, and criminal courts, there is clearly a need to provide a more positive and balanced view. One such view urges us to step back from the gruesome headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our mental and arcane biases. In a new study, Stephen Pinker demonstrates that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not only in the West, but throughout the world as well. This progress is the direct result of the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a mere aspiration, the Enlightenment—that is, the belief in science and reason—has brought humanity massive improvement. The Enlightenment project, however, faces serious challenges, including tribalism, populism, authoritarianism, demonization, and magical thinking. In the absence of a rigorous defense of the Enlightenment, we are likely to witness a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to undermine the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.¹⁹

It may be helpful to examine two prevalent perspectives on human rights discourse—a dichotomy that has created a healthy tension between the two perspectives, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. One view holds that human rights discourse has been and continues to be a revolutionary movement aimed at building a road map to reform and structural change. This view holds serious implications for undoing, restructuring, and “fixing” conventional international relations theories.

The proponents of this perspective rely heavily on several methods, including advocacy, activism, discourse, norm diffusion, and localization, to advance human rights. While admitting that human rights are under attack across the globe, they argue that human rights and modern moral standards as embodied in international treaties are still relevant, that treaties are essential to building a stable international society, and that only through the courageous actions of human rights advocates—both locally and globally—will we continue to overcome ongoing threats to human security and dignity.²⁰ There is also a need for more synergy and coherence between states’ policies and actions in a political context that is inherently unpredictable and prone to tensions and crises.

The proponents of this view have relied on a “spiral model” of human rights change that describes the various socialization processes through which international norms have been internalized into the domestic practices of various authoritarian states during the Cold War era. The existence of various mechanisms and conditions that produce behavioral compliance, they argue, has given rise to the internationalization of human rights.²¹ Such overly optimistic perspectives in the face of contemporary negative and hostile trends toward human rights have come under attack, in large part because they tend to underestimate the extent to which the pushback from new and resurgent forms of nationalism and their endorsement of illiberal values could result in norm failure.

An alternative view held by the proponents of human rights portrays human rights discourse and practice as an opportunity or a moment of intervention that can be deployed to hold the powerful actors—inside and outside of the state—and the market forces—global and local—accountable. The advocates of this view, who are acutely aware of the lack of international regulation, monitoring, and enforcement, tend to go about implementing change in a different way. They confine themselves not just to “speaking truth to power” but also to building coalitions and searching for alli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Why human rights still matter in contemporary global affairs
• PART I: Framing the human rights discourse
• PART II: Human rights practice: legal and moral responsibility
• PART III: Protecting economic rights in a globalizing world
• PART IV: Human rights challenges in a fractured, violent, and intolerant world
• PART V: The way forward
• Selected bibliography
• Index