Human Rights as Political Imaginary

José Julián López

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319742731
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319742748
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

- Theoretically sophisticated and thoughtful analysis of the sociology of human rights, based on critical reading of a wide number of scholars

- Questions rather than reproduces mainstream sociological conceptions of human rights 

- Conceptualizes human rights as a political imaginary rather than as a moral ideal, a global ethic, or an emerging international legal standard.

© The Author(s) 2018

José Julián LópezHuman Rights as Political Imaginaryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74274-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

José Julián López¹

(1)

University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

End Abstract

The Human Rights Reflex

We see a picture of a human body, broken; visible signs of unspeakable brutality remain. We know that it is wrong. We know it with our eyes that attempt to avert their gaze; we know it in our minds, powerless to comprehend why; we know it in the phantom sympathetic pain coursing through our own bodies. For those who have souls, they know it with this faculty as well. Some argue that the capacity to understand the pain of others flows from a shared humanity and, in consequence, that the capacity to inflict this kind of pain requires divesting the victim of their humanity, and, in doing so, forsaking one’s own.

Today, the automaticity with which we know that what is depicted in the above image is wrong will, most likely, be the product of having been tutored on what is right and wrong by a powerful moral and political worldview, human rights. It is a worldview, invisibly stitched into our ethical and political faculties, that is self-evident to many. It is akin to an involuntary moral reflex. We know immediately and instinctively that this is a violation of a person’s fundamental human rights. Human rights are a series of inalienable rights to which each human person is entitled for no other reason than their humanity. Freedom from torture, freedom from wrongful imprisonment, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and the list goes on. This catalogue of rights is the heritage of all human beings, and lest we forget, it is codified in international law.

We see another picture. This is a little girl, laying back listlessly. Her torso is laced by a protruding ribcage, joints thicker than limbs. Her eyes bulge out in ghastly relief against an emaciated face where the skin is stretched into a death mask. A fly hovers on her forehead. This is wrong too. We know it with every fibre of our moral being. This should not happen. This young girl, any girl, like all human beings, has rights. She has a right to food. She has the right not to be stalked to death by hunger. We live in a world of human rights. Yet, the two images I just have described are not anomalies. We live in a world where human rights are constantly and brutally violated.

My professional entry, as a sociologist, into the universe of human rights was the product of the second image. My moral and political sensibilities, like many of my contemporaries, had been educated by the discourses, the images, and the practices of human rights. A monthly contributor to Amnesty International , the reaction to the image of the shattered tortured body, above, is my own. The image of a young girl deprived of food to the very edge of death is a picture that haunts me. I had seen countless pictures depicting similar situations before, but this one, for reasons that I cannot quite explain, seared itself into my soul. It welded my affective to my professional life. What is this thing called a human right to food? I asked myself. What can it do? Can it be bent to shield humanity from hunger?

As a sociologist, I am trained to understand social phenomena as arising from the interaction of complexly structured, historically situated, and institutionalized social relations that steer people’s lives, delimiting what is likely, possible, improbable, and in some cases impossible. My own work, and the work of a wealth of respected scholars, has convinced me that one of the biggest causes of contemporary hunger, and of many other forms of inequality and violence, is capitalism . As I understand it, capitalism is not founded on the mere existence of markets, which predate capitalism, or political liberalism. Capitalism is distinguished from other forms of economic organization by the private ownership and control over the productive capacity of a society, and increasingly of the world. Capitalism is not so much a thing, as it is a complex historically evolving form for organizing economic relations.

Capitalism , willingly or not, inexorably produces inequalities, the effects of which can be devastating if not deadly. To the surprise of many of its critics, it is considerably more resilient and adaptive than had been presumed. At the time of the Occupy protest in Zuccotti Park, New York, I remember seeing a clip where the idiosyncratic Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek announced that while we can readily envision the end of the world, it seemed impossible to imagine the end of capitalism . I reluctantly agreed and still agree that, for the moment, this is an accurate appraisal. But perhaps human rights and, more specifically, the human right to food could be mobilized, not to overthrow but to humanize the face of capitalism . This is certainly what many claim. Given the apparently perennate nature of capitalism for the time being, it is a claim well worth exploring.

Understanding Anew What One Already Understands

This book, however, is not about the human right to food, though I will make occasional reference to my empirical work in this area. This book presents the work that I have undertaken to try to understand exactly what a human right is, initiated while researching the origin and the development of the human right to food. To a lawyer, a philosopher, an activist, or a human rights victim, the idea that one needs to figure out what a human right is might appear odd. Have I not just defined it above as a moral and political reflex, codified as a series of inalienable rights, enshrined in international law? This being the case, if human rights are still violated might it not be because people are not aware of their human rights, or do not know how to assert them? Perhaps what we need to do is foster a deep human rights culture.

The preceding claim was not, to my mind, implausible. Although a long-term advocate of human rights, it was not until I undertook research in this area that I discovered that I, like others, apparently had a human right to food. I just didn’t know it. I most certainly did not know how I would go about claiming this very basic right, if circumstances made it necessary. To be honest, I still don’t. Perhaps, the reason why the flow of human rights violations has failed to be stemmed is not because of a lack of human rights culture, but because the laws, codifying human rights, are not yet on the books in localities where the violations are taking place, or, if on the books, they are not being implemented, for lack of resources or the absence of political will. Or, maybe, they are just the wrong laws. Consequently, what is needed is more precisely contextualized laws, and so on. At the start of my research on the human right to food, I might have found some of the just mentioned strategies for improving the implementation of the human right to food persuasive. Now I do not. Many of the reasons for this are developed throughout this book.

Sociology has had different publics throughout its existence. In the past, it frequently caught the attention of groups, across the ideological continuum, interested in tackling social problems arising from inequality, discrimination, poverty, and exclusion. In the postwar period, in countries that developed welfare states, sociologists provided models and empirical evidence that fed into the conception, development, and evaluation of a range of social policies. Starting in the 1970s, other forms of knowledge began to displace sociology as a source of understanding for what social relations are and how they might be governed. This is to my mind unfortunate. Not just because I have a professional interest in sociology having a public, but because sociology, I am convinced, provides those individuals who live in society—that is to say, all of us—important insights and knowledge about our lives as social-relational beings. It provides resources for reflecting on how we might make our lives and the lives of those to whom we are unavoidably linked through a variety of social relations, many not of our choosing, more equitable, how we might best mobilize ethical and political energy to this end.

For many, sociology is a bit of gadfly, questioning what everyone already knows, even what sociologists, themselves, already know. The raw materials for sociologists are found in the conceptions, ideas, practices, routines, and occurrences of everyday life. Sociologists are particularly interested in exploring the ideas and practices that people cling to the tightest—the ones that they take to be self-evident, the ones that sociologists themselves take as undeniable. Sociologists, like all persons embedded in social relations, are predisposed to seeing the world in certain ways, through certain categories, judging some modes of action as appropriate and others as not. It could not be otherwise. This is, after all, what makes social life possible, an alignment of ideas and practices, with certain affordances that under certain circumstances modify or even revolutionize the alignment.

Sociological practice, despite its arrays of highly complex qualitative, quantitative, and historical tools of data collection and analysis, is founded on a simple intuition. One that, as it happens, most people nurture at some, or many, points in their lives: namely, that our individual and collective representations of how the social world works, does not quite correspond with reality. This suspicion, in some instances, can manifest in what I like to think of as a proto-sociology , a more basic form of thinking about the lack of correspondence between our representations and the reality of our lived experience, to wit, conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theory is founded on the distinction of how the social world is supposed to work and how it actually works. For conspiracy theory , the gap between the two is attributed to the alleged inordinate power of a specific group capable of beguiling the masses through mechanisms of mass deception and thought control, and through their direct access to the levers of power. In contradistinction, sociologists try to understand how the way people think about, act, and interact in the world is the product of “public narratives” and their “relational settings”, to draw on two expressions introduced by the sociologist Margaret Somers , which I develop at greater length in the next chapter.

Sociologists try to model these narratives and relational settings and then devise research questions that might provide evidence for, or against, the proposed models. The stage of modelling, that is, conceptualizing the social phenomenon of interest—for example, What is a human right ?—is a crucial one.¹ It is a cognitive mechanism that serves to interrupt, however imperfectly, the flow of everyday conceptions and practices. Were this not the case, sociologists would merely contribute to providing evidence for what we already know. If successful, however, sociological modeling opens up a space for seeing things otherwise and for empirically putting the explanatory capacity of these modes of seeing things otherwise, these “sociological visualities ” (Woodiwiss 2001), to the test. In a way, then, doing sociology is a collective research practice where one attempts to know anew what one already knows. Because of the current moral and political self-evidence attached to contemporary human rights, the approach that I take in this book involves the following:

Where the self-evidence of the social world imposes itself through current affairs and everyday life, a capacity for surprise needs to be maintained […]In questioning the moral self-evidence by taking it as an object of study rather than an object of judgements and emotions, we drive a wedge into what is generally the subject of consensus. (Fassin 2012, 244)

The purpose of the wedge is neither to be fastidious nor to dismiss the ideas that people hold dear. It is to open up the consensus with an eye to trying to determine its social conditions of possibility and efficacy. In the past there has been consensus on a range of things that today we find surprising. Thinking about how we might live differently, hopefully better, depends on being able to generate a sense of surprise regarding how we now live.

Above, I noted that the raw materials for sociology are taken from the routines and ideas of everyday life. Another category of crucial raw materials, for sociologists, is composed of the theories, models, findings, and explanations developed by other scholars. What in academic parlance is called the literature is, after all, no less a part of the everyday lives of scholars. As I noted above, sociology is a collective research practice. Critically working on and exploring existing explanatory accounts, conceptual tools, and weighing the available evidence is how sociology as a discipline advances, when it does. This book is, in part, intended as an exploration of how sociologists have conceptualized human rights. Although there is much that can be usefully garnered from the work of the scholars that I present here, I have come around to thinking that there are two fundamental limitations in the field of the sociology of human rights, as it exists at the moment. The first is that the field currently takes the form of an academic archipelago, a series of islands of concepts, models, theories, and findings that are relatively isolated from one another. Consequently, one of the goals of the book is to provide a sympathetic, yet critical, overview of the field, to draw out some of the submerged assumptions linking the islands in the archipelago.

The second limitation of the field, as I see it, is that it relies on a thin conception of human rights. A thin conception of human rights, a notion that I spend much of the next chapter unpacking, refers to the practice of conceptualizing human rights as an abstract idea, a moral ideal, or a legal principle. Ideas are important in social life, to be sure. But ideas always come from somewhere; they are carried by all manner of agents, human and non-human. They are connected to particular forms of social organization and are embedded in routine social practices. One needs only think about religious ideas, the manner in which they are depicted visually, inscribed in texts, apprehended through reading practices, disseminated by preachers, and celebrated and reaffirmed in communal practices. Ideas, even powerful ones like religious ones, do not travel on their own steam. They do so through socially enabled public narratives, that is, widely shared and reproducible representations, and through the social pathways enabled by particular social arrangements, that is, social-relational matrices.

Part of the thinness in the conceptions of human rights derives, as I show at greater length throughout the book, from the taken-for-granted status of their backstory, namely, that they arose in the context of an unprecedented consensus in the wake of the postwar period, as crystallized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. It is assumed that it is the moral and political weight of this consensus that has pushed human rights forward. Said differently, it is presumed that human rights have become so central to our contemporary moral and political understanding, and even our individual self-understanding, because they are morally persuasive to the point of being self-evident. Who would deny that the brutality and inequality that human rights activists routinely denounce is wrong? Only compelling moral and legal principles, it is believed, could have secured the consensus that existed then and is still manifest today. Fortunately, in recent years, a new critical historiography has emerged to contest this widely accepted chronicle of the origins and development of human rights. I draw heavily on this historiography in my discussion of the sociology of human rights scholarship, and use it to sketch how we might sociologically thicken our understanding of human rights.

Summary of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Human Rights as Political Imaginary
• 3. Sociological Foundationalism for Human Rights?
• 4. Practising Human Rights
• 5. Humanizing the Citizen
• 6. Beyond Human Rights Law Naïveté
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter