Human Rights Discourse in Our Time
I write this book on the discourse of human rights at a time of perpetual crisis to fulfill such rights: bombs are falling on civilians in Yemen and Syria; minority communities across the world are confronting an increasingly militarized police force; countless refugees are fleeing war-ravaged countries; millions are languishing in prisons around the world; indigenous people are witnessing the corporate takeover of lands; billions of people around the world are attempting to eke out a living while a few thousand appropriate enormous wealth. Certainly, one may claim that there has never been a greater need for attention to rights, nor a greater need to enforce policies that will protect people from a range of rights violations . I am also mindful, however, that the oppressed, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, exist in a perpetual state of emergency. Writing about rights discourse , then, has to acknowledge both the unique shape that the crisis has taken in our time and the historically formed antagonisms and struggles that it emerges from.
In the years following 9/11 , âhuman rights â as an area of activism, knowledge, and practice has foregrounded acts of terror, torture, preemptive wars, the large movement of dispossessed migrant and refugee populations; however, it has not provided an oppositional front to or a pointed inquiry about wealth disparities or focused on larger economic questions. One only need to consider how questions concerning rights have been central to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Syria. Indeed, one could say that, with some exceptions, there has been little talk about political life outside of the language of rights . 1 In the case of many of these conflicts , however, rights talk very seldom focuses on general economic questions. So, for instance, the fact that the unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip in 2017 was over 43% has rarely been addressed in terms of a human rights crisis (âUnemploymentâ), and yet there is ample rights talk in the West advocating the cause of Chinese dissident, Ai Weiwei. My point here, of course, is not to deny that Weiweiâs persecution by the Chinese state may indeed be designated as a human rights violation ; rather, it is to reiterate that human rights talk emanating from the West is selective in its topics of concern, and that much of rights talk originating in the West underplays economic rights in favor of narrowly defined civil ones.
Yet another example would be the case of Afghanistan. The so-called free elections in Afghanistan, for example, get a lot more coverage in the Western press than questions about the ownership of Afghan national resources or the extent to which a future Afghan government will be beholden to international monetary organizations . 2 This book attempts to expose this problematic absence in rights discourse of attention to economic questions. Specifically, I examine the proliferation of and concurrent silences in the discourse of human rights talk in our time in the context of the always-present global financial crisis and the fluid variations in capitalâs adjustments, as well as the financial interests and political alliances of different states.
âOur time,â of course, is a suitably ambiguous marker, but for my analysis of rights discourse , I want to focus on the period since the events of 9/11 , not because I want to grant that event a historical singularity, reasserting the hegemonic global role of the United States rather than highlighting the everyday crises that envelop the lives of the global underclass, but because, as I will argue below, that event provides a significant departure point for an emergent transnational formation of rights discourse . I am not suggesting that the many recent armed conflicts across the globe, the increasing militarization of state apparatuses, the emergence of a range of âterrorâ groups besieging local populations, the catastrophic environmental damages caused by state and corporate forces, the large-scale migration of the poor and destitute, and the continuing economic hardships of almost half the global population who live on less than $2.50 a day are entirely new phenomena. Certainly âhuman rightsâ as a way to name and narrate multiple atrocities, usually enacted by States, has a modern provenance in the West that goes back to the UDHR Declaration of 1948, and I will, throughout this book but especially in Chapter 2, locate the recent discourse of rights within this tradition and within a larger historical frame, exploring possible reasons for its current formulation. 3 Since the UN Declaration , there have been many conflicts and atrocities that have been designated as human rights abuses , and the war in the Balkans in the 1990s and the Rwandan crisis provoked two of the most significant moments of the expansion of rights language . However, it is my contention that the shape of a new kind of rights language began forming soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union (see Chapter 2).
I would assert, moreover, that the discourse of transnational human rights has become the emergent, distinctive way of managing recent points of crisis, especially in the post-9/11 moment. For instance, although human rights discourse has consistently been expressed in the form of a transnational universalism since the UN Declaration (see Chapter 2), after 9/11 , there has been an increasing tension in the way rights discourse balances, on the one hand, traditional state-defined rights related to health, education, housing, and political representation and, on the other hand, the claims of a more widely and intensely globalized marketplace of rights guided by the imperatives of trade and commerce (see Chapters 4 and 5). Also, as I will argue in the chapters below, contemporary iterations of war and ethnic nationalism have significantly reshaped existing notions of citizenship, subjectivity , and biopolitics. Specifically, the ever-expanding global wars against âterror,â the increasing use of surveillance to regulate and categorize âoutsiders,â particularly migrants and refugees, and the rise of nationalism across the globe require rights discourse to negotiate and formulate complex and often oppositional and contradictory notions of democratic citizenship.
Clearly, this discourse is intricately intertwined with the management of political conflicts. Rights discourse , of course, has always been a political instrument for defining, limiting, and categorizing rightsâ abuses , despite the fact that it was created, generated, and negotiated almost as a form of antipolitics . However, in a world that is no longer viewed through the lens of the Cold War , rights discourse has arguably become even more embedded in the management of political conflicts, particularly in the ways it responds to and is shaped by the dominant economic logic of late capitalism , functioning both as a proponent of and in opposition to a system that is seldom named in rights discourse , but whose contradictory impulses haunt its logic. 4
Constructing Human Rights Discourse
Having briefly discussed the specificity of âour time,â let me now clarify how I will approach the âdiscourse of human rightsâ or ârights talk .â This discourse generally refers to discussions of injustice and ways to redress it, or, in the words of the United Nations Declaration, âa recognition of the inherent dignityâ of all. By the âdiscourse of human rights,â I refer to rights identified in this Declaration (see Chapter 2)âand in such cultural forms as literary works, Non-Governmental Organizationsâ (NGOs) manifestos, international declarations, government statutes, critical histories, and a documentary film. In this book, I both critique the mainstream discourse of human rights and draw upon and interrogate othersâ critiques of it. For example, I embrace the spirit of Elizabeth Ankerâs point about the evolution of human rights but do not accept her entire approach. As she points out, âthe languages of human rights have grown unmoored from their formal legal statements as well as their philosophical origins to take on scattered and abundant lives of their own, preventing their arrest either by theoretical analysis or within the machinery of law â (7). She argues further that a âcentral feature of human rights discourse is to be itself âdoubled,â or to be captive to centripetal forces while yet ceaselessly regenerative and dispersingâ (7). My analysis of rights language in the post-9/11 age draws on this notion of doubling but, unlike Ankerâs approach, resists any neutral idea of centripetal or centrifugal forces operating outside the logic of capitalâs dictates.
I also draw on the work of Wendy Brown , another prominent critic of mainstream rights discourse . Brown uses Foucaultâs elaboration of governmentality , 5 to describe a process through which rights subjects are incorporated into a particular mode of a Western âcivilizationalâ regime and rendered governable within that regime. In Brownâs estimation, then, rights âare not just defenses against social and political power, but are, as an aspect of governmentality , a crucial aspect of powerâs apertureâ (âThe Mostâ 459).
Brownâs understanding of rights discourse as a function of power is a useful one, but no discourse can ever simply be a tactic of âgovernance and domination,â producing merely compliant subjects as victims (459). Indeed, subjects in the dual meaning of the word are both subject to authority and ...