Introduction
In conceptualizing this Handbook, I have sought to highlight original scholarship from authors with a record of innovative approaches to human rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The goal in doing so is simple: to capture in ways that cannot be done in traditional scholarly approaches the complex dynamics by which human rights have had or could have an impact on MENA politics.
This is not an abstract goal. The stakes in this Handbookâs intellectual conversations are high at a time in which recent popular uprisings inflected by human rights principles have been violently repressed everywhere from Iran, across the Arab world, and in Turkey. In their place, long dominant authoritarianisms are resurgent. These authoritarianisms vary among secular, ethnic, and/or Islamist justifications, but share a common foundation in some form of nationalist sectarianism. The regionâs resurgent authoritarianisms show a resilience and ability to morph into progressively more brutal systems of power that leave many with the sense that there is no alternative.
This pessimism is quite reasonable given the MENAâs post-colonial inheritance of despotic power structures, current realities of failed governance that have exacerbated divisions along many fault lines, and extra-regional forces that consistently reinforce anti-pluralistic forces out of a misbegotten sense of âself-interest.â Nonetheless, it is also worth remembering that human rights have long been part of informing subterranean articulations of alternatives to dominant forms of culture, economics, politics, and society in the MENA. The saliency of these alternatives emerged quite visiblyâin artistic challenge, economic rebellion, political rebellion, and social resistanceâduring the popular uprisings that swept the region from 2009 to 2013. But, now that the hope represented by those uprisings seems a distant memory, there has been a return by many in academic and policy-making circles to status quo thinking that assumes the MENA is solely defined by choices between competing patriarchal authoritarianisms. Saudi monarchical Wahhabism or Iranian Shi`a theocratism? Egyptian secular military rule or anti-pluralist Islamisms? Syrian-style âstabilityâ or fiefdoms ruled by warlords? These and other such binaries are not just false choices, they are dangerously misleading ones. Lazily taking them as a frame effaces other possibilities, serving the purposes of elites invested in their perpetuation with devastating results for the regionâs peoples, societies, and states, as well as the broader regional and global order.
Most specific to this Handbookâs purposes, those frames have limited thought about even the possibility of alternatives to the status quo. Such possibilities have, nonetheless, persisted in many domains. This introductionâs overview of the Handbookâs three parts, nine sections, and thirty-five chapters shows how human rights, in particular, have become interwoven with discourses that reject false choices between exclusivist nationalisms. These human rights-inflected discourses have sought, instead, to somehow make space in the MENAâs political, economic, cultural, and social structures for pluralisms of different sorts. I will conclude this introductory chapter by attempting to show the importance of pluralism in the social domain, with particular reference to sexual orientation and gender identity-related (SOGI) rights. I argue that connecting social resistances to human rights is not just important in isolation; it is connected to sustaining interconnected resistances in the cultural, economic, and political rightsâ spheres.
In that light, the goal in this Handbook of coming to terms with human rightsâ potential impacts is ambitious, but more realistic than it might appear at first glance. It is, in essence, an attempt to make sense of how rights have been part of varieties of resistances against dominant power structuresâlocal, domestic, regional, and internationalâand, beyond that, what the variables are that will determine if they may do so more successfully in the future.
Pushing human rights scholarship into indivisibility, intersections, multi-disciplinarity, and beyond
Attempting to accomplish this goal has meant calling on scholars who in diverse waysâsometimes in disagreement with each other and, indeed, in disagreement with my own viewsâare at the cutting edge in thought about what human rights are, how they can be relevant to the MENA, and ways in which specific contexts in the MENA condition whether human rights will or will not have an impact. The contributors were chosen to represent a range of disciplines as well as regional and thematic expertise. Part I of the Handbook includes sections that, after Section Iâs introduction, further situate the reader within frameworks for thinking about human rights in the MENA. Section II gives a conceptual framework inclusive of different categories of human rightsâfrom social rights to political, economic, and cultural rights. Section III gives a political framework inclusive of key countries, sub-regions, and the U.S. as an omnipresent external hegemon. Section IV gives a transnational and international framework that makes clear the intersecting levels in global politics through which dynamics around human rights play out, and how powerful states increasingly contest human rights at all of these levels. Part IIâs sections focus the reader on issue areas that have been subject to particularly intense debate. Section V explores gender as a key battleground in battles over human rightsâ relevance in the MENA. Section VI gives different points of view on the intersections of religion and human rights in the predominantly Muslim MENA. Section VII takes on transitions and accountability and the overarching question of whether or not normative demands for change can be sustained through representative processes and institutions.
Part III contains two concluding sections that end the Handbook in a particularly distinctive manner. Section VIIIâs Conclusions from a global viewpoint: theoretical justifications and contestations around human rights calls on human rights theoreticians with a global perspective to shed light on human rights in the MENA. The MENA is not an insular region disconnected from global currents, including those in academic circles. To the contrary, academic conversations about human rightsâ history, relation to the state, and their contradictory dynamics in many parts of the world can and should inform scholarship on human rights and the MENA. One emphasis in recent human rights scholarship, as evidenced in these chapters, is a move beyond traditional linear histories of human rights that see them as having progressively grown out of Enlightenment thought and post-WWII history. A top down diffusion of human rights from a singular foundationâphilosophical or historicalâis increasingly seen as less important to human rightsâ resonance (or lack of resonance) than the degree to which human rights have been malleable enough to be seized and re-purposed as useful tools to grassroots struggles in many different contexts around the globe.
This is directly relevant to the MENA and, as such, informs the conceptualization of Section IXâsConclusions from a grassroots viewpoint: reflections on dynamics around struggles for human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. These chapters come from scholar-practitioners who reflect on their decades of work on human rights in the region. It is a key premise of this Handbook that academic work on human rights in the MENA should more seriously engage with the reflections of those working on the ground. This is all too often missing in theoretical work on human rights in general and, most egregiously, on human rights in the MENA. Lynn Welchman pertinently concludes this section and this Handbook with the observation that academics need to be open to being âsurprisedâ âthat is to having their theoretical assumptions overturned by taking seriously the normative commitments and intellectual analyses of those on the ground. It is my hope that the Handbook consistently highlights precisely these sorts of unexpected surprises that flow out of tangible engagements with human rights in the MENA.
As a starting point in opening the path to finding such surprises, the Handbookâs approach is one that is informed throughout by themes of indivisibility, intersections (and, in this chapterâs conclusion, intersectionality), and multidisciplinarity. Indivisibility, in particular, is key to any serious human rights scholarship, yet too often we still see human rights in the MENA discussed in segmented categories. Virtually any rights issue, to the contrary, can and should be contextualized in multiple dimensions rather than as simply within one category such as âpolitical.â To understand the structural reasons behind the persistence of human rightsâ violations, it is essential to recognize that these violations take place in the context of systems of power that function simultaneously in the cultural, economic, political, and social spheres. Resistance against such violations, in parallel, has been most powerful when it has functioned across these spheres. Intellectual accountings of human rights must take into account, therefore, all of these dimensions if they are to make sense of controversies and contestations that revolve around human rights. As will be seen, this is a recurring theme throughout the Handbook.
Beyond rightsâ indivisibility, this Handbookâs chapters are also informed by a focus on intersectionsâthat is, how it is that human rights intersect with a range of issues and, more broadly, how rightsâ violations on such issues feed into domestic crises in governance and security. The theoretical assumption in this regard is that human rights are an urgent matter even from the most realpolitik of perspectives. Rightsâ violations are not discrete and disconnected but, rather, are intimately related to many of the globeâs geopolitical crises thatâfrom wars without borders to global refugee flowsâhave their roots in systematic human rightsâ violations. Given the destructive regional and global impacts of such crises, it is crucial to shine a light on how rightsâ violations are at their heart.
As these themes of indivisibility and intersections came to define the Handbook, it also became clear that in order to illuminate them it would be necessary to call on the resources of many academic disciplines rather than the narrow focus of just one or two fields. This Handbookâs chapters, therefore, come from scholars trained in a variety of scholarly traditions. This brings to bear multi-disciplinary perspectives on human rights and the MENA, helping to bring out rightsâ evolutions in different dimensions and their impacts on diverse issues.
After a review of the conceptual themes and other intellectual threads through which this Handbook is organized, as noted I will conclude this introduction by reference to SOGI-related rights. If we take seriously both indivisibility and not just intersections but intersectionality in the light of multi-disciplinary scholarship, such âsocialâ rights are clearly not marginal, but rather vital to envisioning longer lasting structural change in cultural, economic, political, as well as social life.
