Race, Rights and Rebels

Alternatives to Human Rights and Development from the Global South

Julia Suárez-Krabbe

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783484621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

Human rights and development cannot be understood separately. They are historically connected by the idea of race, and have evolved concomitantly with the latter. As the tools of race, human rights and development have been forged in the effort to legitimize and maintain coloniality. While rights and development can be used as tools to achieve protection, specific political goals, or access in the dominant society, they limit radical social change because they are framed within a specific dominant ontology, and sustain a particular political horizon. This book provides an original analysis of the evolution of the overlapping histories of human rights and development through the prism of coloniality, and offers an important contribution to the search for alternatives to these through the lens of indigenous and other southern theories and epistemologies. In this effort, Julia Suárez-Krabbe brings new perspectives to discussions pertaining to the decolonial perspective, race, knowledge, pluriversality, mestizaje and identity while elaborating on original philosophical concepts that can ground alternatives to human rights and development.

Chapter One Bad Faith and the Death Project

Coloniality underlies western knowledge production, western-centric political practice and notions of common sense. These ways of knowing, being, and political practice produce and reproduce racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and the depredation of nature. They have multiple expressions: in both left and right political positions, in conservative and critical dominant academic thinking, and in the minds and hearts of many people. They are the dominant frameworks of thinking, which have been established as truth through the historical processes of colonialism and coloniality, and as such are rarely questioned. Rather, the main tendency is that these truths are reinforced. The problems emerging from this can be exemplified through the folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes. In Hans Christian Andersen’s classic version of the story, the emperor’s vanity and his subjects’ complicity with the illusions of power lead to the emperor being cheated by two tailors who make him a dress of a supposedly fine fabric, so sublime that only the rich and powerful can see it. The fable’s point is that there is no such fabric—only the claim to its existence and the privileges that come with affirming its existence. This nonexistent fabric leads the emperor and his subjects to pretend that the emperor is indeed wearing exquisite dress, and to praise his attire. The emperor, however, is naked. The force of colonial discourse lies in how it succeeds in concealing how it establishes and naturalizes ontological and epistemological perspectives and political practices that work to protect its power. Indeed,

In colonialism, there is a very peculiar function to words, words do not designate, but conceal. . . . The words are a fictional record, full of euphemisms to veil reality rather than to designate it. Public discourses are ways of not saying. And this universe of meanings and un-told notions, of belief in racial hierarchy and the inherent inequality of human beings, are incubated in common sense. (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, 19, translated from Spanish)

But discourses do not fashion themselves independently, and neither do ontological truths. The example of The Emperor’s New Clothes serves to highlight that those verities are not true. Rather, they are presented as true by global elites, and many defend them as true ignoring the perceptible facts and social actors that tell them that they are false. Lewis Gordon calls this bad faith. Bad faith implies choosing to believe and defend comfortable lies about other groups of people and about one’s own group. Choosing the lie is, at the same time, giving up freedom (Gordon 1999, 75). Bad faith is also important in understanding how the power of colonial discourse operates, and how it succeeds concealing its own establishing of ontological truths from itself. We all share responsibility in the defense of these truths—or rather falsehoods—and in choosing to work against these. When the people in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes pretend that the emperor is wearing a suit, they are defending the emperor, and reinforce the lies of power. There is another significant aspect in this regard—it is not simply a matter of choosing to reject the lie to work towards the truth. The problem is that colonial discourse is not just a story. It is also material, political, social, existential, and powerful. Among other things, it has the power to offer privileges to those who engage in defending it. Colonial power is not something outside of our everyday lives, it is also part of our everyday—and through this, it is complex, but never abstract. It is key to understanding the problems we face globally.

One of the lies rarely questioned in dominant society concerns the idea of what defines a human being. The idea of the human being seems to refer to all beings on this planet that descend from monkeys. But we are all human is a well-known adage, that is, it is an utterance that pretends to state an overcoming of racism through a methodological abstraction from the very historical fact from which the deep inequalities that we continue to face today on a global scale have emerged. This is not to deny that we descend from primates. It is to highlight, among other things, that the idea that this is the only important defining factor concerning humans is part of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The term human being as it exists today is a colonial category that claims to be neutral, but is in fact formulated on the basis of a series of historically constituted hierarchies of race, gender, and living beings. It does not refer primarily to our ascendance to primates. When discussing notions of the human being in relation to human rights and development, it is important to highlight how the colonial category human goes hand in hand with that of nature. As the spiritual authorities of the four indigenous peoples that live in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Colombian Caribbean teach, human and nature together are pivotal to understanding how the dominant practices of human rights and development cannot be understood as separate ideas: while human rights deals with human beings and their relationships as these are defined within the colonial ontology, development concerns humans’ relationship to nature, and also to the management and exploitation of nature in ways that privilege humans. This relationship is characterized by an important paradox, that is, while human rights negate colonialism and coloniality as intrinsic to it, the ideas of progress and development justify colonialism and coloniality. Both human rights and development are important axes in the defense of the death project. As I understand it, the death project is inherent to coloniality and contains a complexity of relationships. When employing the term coloniality, I primarily refer to the system of domination that emerged with the European expansion initiated with the Castilian colonial endeavor in the Iberian Peninsula—more specifically the conquest of Al-Andalus, the subsequent conquest of the Americas, the witch hunts in Europe and the Americas, and the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade (Grosfoguel 2013; Mignolo 2000, 2006; Suárez-Krabbe 2014b; Wright 2001). This system of domination is still in play. European colonialism generated a specific coupling between racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the depredation of nature that became globalized, and whose effects we still have to fight. This modern/colonial interlinking involves modes of production, living, political organization, spatial organization, relationships to other people and living beings, ways of thinking, modes of acting, practices of production and reproduction of life and death, sexuality, aesthetics, spiritualities and knowledge construction. Coloniality emerges as a local (European) colonial project, but becomes globalized in several ways. First, by territorial and economic expansion and political and social control—imperialism. Second, by the spread, mutual influence and institutionalization of these practices of domination among the colonizing powers. Third, it is globalized by racialization, sexual domination, and labor exploitation and, finally, through cultural, spiritual, and epistemic domination.

Significantly, although coloniality is a globalized system of oppression, it does not localize in the same ways. One of its crucial strengths is its capacity for adaptation to and assimilation of local social, political, cultural, and spiritual configurations. Following the lead of the indigenous Nasa people in Colombia, my understanding of the death project refers to the exercise of violence in coloniality, which targets the actual processes of life and the conditions for existence: in short, plurality. The Nasa describe the death project as such: ‘The conquerors brought with them their death project to these lands. They came with the urge to steal the wealth and to exploit us in order to accumulate [wealth]. The death project is the disease of egoism that turns into hatred, war, lies, propaganda, confusion, corruption and bad governments.’¹ In my understanding of the term, the death project is, like necropolitics, attached to the ‘power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (Mbembe 2003, 11), but is complemented by the ethics of war as ‘one of the characteristic features of European modernity [naturalized] through colonialism, race, and particular modalities of gender’ (Maldonado-Torres 2008a, 4). To highlight the ethics of the death project is to reject the idea that a politics of death, ‘consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus)’, as Mbembe states it (2003, 23). Indeed, as will become evident in chapters 3 and 4, it is insufficient to conclude that the colonies are ruled in ‘absolute lawlessness’ (24); quite the contrary, they are and have historically been ruled through thorough elaborations of law—this includes their philosophical basis (Ferreira da Silva 2014; Bogues 2012). The Code Noir from 1685 is an excellent example.² While Mbembe notes that colonial warfare is subject to legal and institutional rules (2003, 25), the notion of the death project follows Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s lead when emphasizing that legality is used to make people lawfully, as well as politically, inexistent, and is intimately linked to serve the interests of the past and present colonizers (Santos 2007). The notion of the death project refers to the exercise of coloniality; it is (as is Mbembe’s necropolitics) concerned with the power and capacity to dispose of life, but implies the death ethics of war, which underlie the legal systems that legitimate it. In this way, the death project is also concerned with the behaviors that accompany these systems, pointing to the international complicity in its continuation. Consequently, the death project involves the set of hegemonic practices, where racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and predatory behaviors against nature are closely linked. It adds a crucial aspect to Maldonado-Torres’s and Mbembe’s notions as it includes considerations about the negation of the Mother World and of spirituality. As such, the concept of the death project apprehends aspects and interrelations of reality and politics that are essential from within the thinking of the spiritual authorities of four different but interdependent indigenous communities. These four different communities, the Arhuaco, Kankuamo, Kogi, and Wiwa, share common name for their spiritual/political authorities: the men are Mamos, the women Sagas.

My collaboration with the authorities of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Colombian Caribbean, and especially our discussions on human rights and development, are decisive to the theoretical, epistemological, and ontological stakes in the discussions that follow. My main contact and advisor among the spiritual/political authorities of these four peoples is Mamo Saúl Martínez from the Kankuamo community. The Mamos and Sagas are experts in the Law of Origin. The Law of Origin, or law of Sé, is written on the very territory of Sierra Nevada, and contains both the principles of life, and the principles that allow for the continuity of life that are intrinsic to the Mother, that is, to being and becoming. This is why the law is never absolute or abstract; it does not fade, wither, or fail. As will become particularly clear in chapter 6, nor is it law in the western sense of the term. The Mamos and the Sagas are adepts of the world, of life, and its equilibrium. Their elder peers teach them to commune with spirits, with ancestors, with nature, and to mediate between the Law of Origin and people. At the same time, they are their peoples’ libraries, political advisors, spiritual leaders, and the guardians of the world. Simplistically put, human rights violations, climate change, illness, wars, earthquakes, and so on happen in terms of the Law of Origin because of the world’s disequilibrium. This imbalance affects all spheres of life, from the micro and intimate, to the macro structural and macrocosmic. It stems from a lack of reciprocity—more exactly, from some human beings’ unwillingness or inability to recompense the Mother for what She has given, and to attend to Her teachings. This inability to work with the Mother is part of that, which continues to give force to the death project. Indeed, the Mother is not simply translatable to the term nature. Rather, the Mother is one who has given life and She allows for the perpetuation of life; She is both a she and a he.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the highest coastal mountain in the world. Its location in the Colombian Caribbean connects this territory and its peoples culturally, socially, geopolitically, and economically both with the Andean region as well as with the Caribbean. The history of the four peoples of Sierra Nevada, of Latin America, and the Caribbean is also part of a history of globalization. The Spanish Hapsburg empire (that rose in the sixteenth century and fell in the eighteenth) paved the way for many of the traits that, by subsequent imperial domains, continue to be considered the exclusive terrain of Enlightenment thought in Europe. One of the first things that Mamo Martínez suggested in our collaborative work was that I critically review the common history of human rights and development. Following his counsel I found that, while the ideas and practices of human rights and development are obverse sides of the same coin, they have, nevertheless, seldom been studied together. While a possible exception to this rule is the relatively recent rights-based approaches to development (Mikkelsen 2005; Sano 2000), the general tendency within these approaches is to argue for the integration of human rights practices with development practices in development projects in the so-called Third World. In this manner, human rights and development are regarded as distinct phenomena from the outset. Similarly, historical approaches tend to center either on human rights (Ishay 2004; Douzinas 2007), or on development (Rist 1997; Escobar 1996). It is well known that human rights and development operate in conjunction and often in interventionist endeavors; proof for this abounds, and includes examples in Colombia, Bolivia, and Honduras.³ Beyond this conjunction, however, human rights and development are united by race as an idea and practice. Contextually, it is important to underline that while it is not possible to speak of human rights and development as such before they are named, formulated, and institutionalized as such after the Second World War, it is possible to trace the history of the globalization of the localisms that support them to the period around 1492.

Although ideas of rights and development existed before that date such as the Code of Hammurabi (1760 BC, Babylon) and the English Magna Carta (1215)⁴ in terms of rights (Ishay 2004, 15–61) and Augustine’s philosophy of history in terms of development (Rist 1997, 31–40), the arrival of the Spanish to what came to be known as America had a momentous impact in this regard. As we know, Columbus’s initial travels were aimed at finding an alternative access for Spain to the Asian commercial circuits and markets. With Amerigo Vespucci’s realization that the lands to which Columbus had arrived were not on the Asian continent but a different one in 1502, the formation of the Atlantic commercial circuit was initiated. The Atlantic commercial circuit connected the existing commercial circuits in the ‘Americas’, Anahuac (now Central America), and Tawantinsuyu (large parts of today’s South America) with the commercial circuits existing in Europe, Africa, and Asia. An additional circuit was established in 1571, which connected the Americas, especially from the Pacific coast of Mexico, with the Philippines and China. In this manner, Spanish colonialism had decisive effects in the integration of the world system, understood in a literal sense as encompassing all areas of the globe (Mignolo 2000; Bjork 1998). These two new commercial circuits, the Atlantic and the Pacific, connected the major channels of commerce in the world for the first time (Mignolo 2000). Of special significance for the history of human rights and development as globalized institutional practices of execution of the death project is the transatlantic connection; it played a crucial role in the embryonic stages of coloniality and the globalization of its rationality. As such, investigating the Hispanophone domain permits an expansion of modernity via the distinction between the first and second modernity (Dussel 1995). Such an investigation, however, cannot stay exclusively within the Hispanophone domain, inasmuch as this would amount to ignoring crucial developments that occurred in the Caribbean, which had a profound impact on modernity/coloniality. The Spanish imperial framework, and events in the Caribbean, are also part of a history of globalization, and prepare the way for changes in the second modernity, which are often thought to be the exclusive domain of Enlightenment thought in Europe. Many scholars have illustrated in detail some of the different dimensions of the impact that the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in America had in the hegemonic thought, and in the excluding practices that have characterized global history since then.⁵ The conquest meant that the European elites of the time had to rethink their established truths, for example, with regards to the nature of the different populations they encountered, in order to be able to make sense of the existence of what, to them until that time, had not even been a possibility—America. The subjugation of the Americas implied deep ontological change. As Sylvia Wynter (2003) has shown, before 1492 humanness was primarily determined through the idea of spiritual perfection among the Spanish Christian elites. This meant that being born Christian was regarded as the most human condition. Below the Christians were the converts who to some extent could be included into the category of human. Then there were those untrue others who, having had the chance to convert to Christianity, nevertheless, did not. America challenged this religion-based ordering of the world because the people whom the Spaniards met in the so-called new world had never had the possibility to convert to Christianity in the first place. These processes revolved around the idea of race and were pivotal to the emergence of human rights and development. As globalized institutions for the implementation of the death project, human rights and development are also continuous processes of ontological construction of the human. By separating the human and the natural and the spiritual from the secular, they also justify the destruction of the Mother World. Additionally, the dominant practices of human rights and development are linked to the Eurocentric secular rationality. Thus, to criticize human rights and development, as I do in this book, is labeled irrational by the same dominant logic and the likelihood of other futures is discredited precisely because of that likelihood’s supposed irrationality. Due to these problems, considering the critical thinking that comes from the global south is vital in working towards the formulation of strong proposals that operate against coloniality and the death project. As we will discuss later, however, it is not enough to include the thinking of the global south in writing if we thereby absolve ourselves from participation and complicity in the continued processes of colonization.

The politics of the death project advocate for a global order in which the life and wealth of the few is defended at the expense of the lives and good living of the vast majority of the world’s population, and at the expense of the Mother. When the possibility of existence of my people, the Mestizo populations in the Americas, became apparent over five hundred years ago, this political project simultaneously emerged and became globalized. The death project uses segregation as a tool to manage and neutralize its opposition. It is an essential part of coloniality (Quijano 2000b). In many ways, human rights and development function as institutionalized practices of implementation of the death project, and therefore it is necessary to understand their modus operandi well. This implies addressing the racial character of the social, economic, and epistemological divide that segregates the north from the south.⁶

OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE STRUGGLES

Like human rights and development, the university—particularly, in the social sciences and the humanities—is an institution linked to the defense and the practices of implementation of the death project. However, there are theories, practices, and perspectives that fissure the socially constructed walls generated through the exercise of coloniality. Transformative dialogue and change occur, and so part of our endeavor as intellectuals committed to decolonization must include pinpointing places where these divisions are reinforced, and also sites where they are being demolished. While the practices and ideas that reconstruct these social, economic, and epistemological barriers work as defenses of the death project, the practices and ideas that demolish these obstacles are offensive struggles.⁷ The offensive struggles oppose European modernity at least i...