FRIDAY REVIEW: Human Rights and the Narrowing of Politics
For many human rights advocates, perhaps the most incomprehensible moment of the war on terror was when Bush told New Yorker reporter Ken Auletta, "No president has ever done more for human rights than I have." Given a track record of secret detentions, extrajudicial kidnappings, and torture, the remark smacked of cynicism, egomania, or both. Yet, despite the disbelief of critics, Bush himself was completely serious and would no doubt say the same again. For him, the war on terror is nothing less than an attempt to make the world safe from the threat of violence, and to create a permanent condition of global peace. At his most grandiose, Bush hopes to ensure domestic security by eliminating disorder everywhere and by ending terrorism as a political tool.
In his commitment to keeping individuals safe from violence, Bush's goals mirror those of human rights activists. Both seek an international order in which no individuals are subject to unwarranted coercion, and strong safeguards are placed on the use of force. For Bush, the war on terror is simply the most aggressive tool available for human rights promotion. By contrast, groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch argue that the very means employed by the Administration necessarily corrupt the project. The Administration fails to appreciate how its own actions and support for foreign dictators perpetuates state violence and a climate of global insecurity. As James Bovard writes, "The United States should recognize that its bankrolling and support of governments that terrorize their own people make a mockery of Bush's promise to rid the world of evil." Bovard and others argue that one can't eliminate terror by employing terroristic instruments. The best tools for pursuing peace and security are global civil society and the courts. By naming and shaming those political leaders that commit acts of violence, the international community can slowly but surely eliminate local coercion. Moreover, by creating strong judicial norms, activists can enforce legal rights in international and domestic courts -- and expand the tools available for individuals to achieve security.
As suggested in a previous post, the human rights critique of the war on terror devolves into a critique about the means appropriate to ending violence. In essence, the Administration argues for a revolutionary break, in which military force and "the long war" can once and for all achieve permanent peace. The human rights critics respond with a pragmatic defense of piecemeal action through non-coercive means. For Amnesty and company, revolutionary breaks and the terroristic violence they produce will never succeed in protecting individuals from oppression. But, the fact that this tactical disagreement constitutes the primary debate over the war on terror suggests how much has been evacuated from our political conversation.
To begin with, each side imagines rights solely in terms of safeguarding personal security -- protecting the isolated individual. For HRW and for the Administration, to be free is simply to avoid being subject to acts of violence. In a sense, both remove meaningful collective goals and ideological commitments from their place at the center of political life. If our disagreements were once motivated by the great "isms" (liberalism, nationalism, communism, fascism), today they merely concern how best to keep our bodies safe.
This is not a trivial point. It means that the prevailing human rights paradigm is gravely limited as a tool of political critique. It has no way to respond to the obvious fact that sometimes ends do justify the means. Violence may be terrible, but aren't there political objectives worthy of going to war over? HRW, of course, concedes this fact through its own support for humanitarian interventions that seek to halt ongoing or imminent mass killing. For various reasons the invasion in Iraq failed to rise to their standard of humanitarian intervention: principally due to the lack of immediate acts of violence by Saddam and the willingness to resort to force before all other options were exhausted. Despite such views, HRW still refused to take a stand explicitly opposing the initial invasion. The official explanation was that wars are matters of state policy whose support or opposition are beyond the mandate of the group. Taking the point at face value, one should be skeptical of how critical a group can be if it won't participate in life and death debates over war.
Yet, the silence also tells us that human rights groups have been struggling to figure out what exactly sets their interventions of the 1990s apart from those of the war on terror. Ken Roth wrote at the beginning of the 2004 HRW World Report of his concern that, "the Iraq War and the effort to justify it even in part in humanitarian terms risk giving humanitarian intervention a bad name." Once war had been accepted in principle as a legitimate tool to protect individuals from violence, very little intellectual space separates the human rights stance from that of the Administration. At root, the basic criticism expressed by HRW and others already takes the parameters of political debate as given. Since wars are not within the "mandate of HRW" states can fight terrorism, promote free markets, etc., so long as the means aren't self-defeating or morally unacceptable. But, if the groups themselves have justified and championed wars to end coercion and insecurity what remains of the critique? Is it now only the very pragmatic claim that criminal prosecution should have been tried first or that the U.S. should have waited for a large enough act of violence? The fact that many human rights groups equivocate on the basic substance of their opposition to the Administration -- the illegitimacy of war and coercion as useful tools -- makes it impossible for them to articulate a clear opposition. It means that the rhetoric of protecting "faraway victims" not only can be appropriated by the war on terror, but actually becomes its moral cover.
Ultimately, the rise of human rights language, employed by both Bush and his critics, underscores how liberty is now increasingly indistinguishable from security. When the Administration and NGOs debate balancing "liberty" and "security", security really exists on both sides of the equation. This has not always been the case with rights talk, and human rights talk specifically. Activists like to imagine that human rights have been with us since the beginning of time, or at least since the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Yet, reading that declaration tells us just how far we've drifted from earlier conceptions. For them, rights belonged to men as citizens: members of a political community. Such rights were forged through collective action and articulated a guideline for how state power could embody the interests of all. This may be a bit abstract, but it does emphasize what the relationship between rights and liberty once was. Rights weren't just limits on what states and terrorists could do to an individual. Instead, they provided a roadmap for how citizens acting together could liberate social and political life from hierarchy and inequality.
The human rights paradigm we see today really draws inspiration from the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its focus on securing the individual from violence. But even after its creation, there remained an alterative approach linking rights and liberty -- one often articulated by colonial independence leaders and those at the margins of Western society. Malcolm X famously said that, "The common goal of 22 million African Americans is respect as human beings, the god-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans." For him, human rights meant achieving the equal inclusion of all individuals, regardless of race, into the political community. Such rights were inherently political, and embodied the hope that through their own efforts African Americans could democratize society and alter the basic distribution of power. As Malcolm X said 'nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you are a man you take it.'
The fact that human rights today have been reduced to security-speak, easily coopted for endless war, is disconcerting to say the least. It suggests that the kind of liberty articulated by the French in 1789 and by Malcolm X in 1964 is no longer even part of our political imagination. Today we're left to debate which strategies are more likely to eliminate threat, rather than to think about the goals that might justify taking risks. To put it grandly, the transformation of human rights from a language of collective self-determination to one of risk management perfectly captures the narrowing of American politics and social possibility. If critique has any value, it has to begin by resisting this move and reclaiming the progressive potential inherent in politics.
In his commitment to keeping individuals safe from violence, Bush's goals mirror those of human rights activists. Both seek an international order in which no individuals are subject to unwarranted coercion, and strong safeguards are placed on the use of force. For Bush, the war on terror is simply the most aggressive tool available for human rights promotion. By contrast, groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch argue that the very means employed by the Administration necessarily corrupt the project. The Administration fails to appreciate how its own actions and support for foreign dictators perpetuates state violence and a climate of global insecurity. As James Bovard writes, "The United States should recognize that its bankrolling and support of governments that terrorize their own people make a mockery of Bush's promise to rid the world of evil." Bovard and others argue that one can't eliminate terror by employing terroristic instruments. The best tools for pursuing peace and security are global civil society and the courts. By naming and shaming those political leaders that commit acts of violence, the international community can slowly but surely eliminate local coercion. Moreover, by creating strong judicial norms, activists can enforce legal rights in international and domestic courts -- and expand the tools available for individuals to achieve security.
As suggested in a previous post, the human rights critique of the war on terror devolves into a critique about the means appropriate to ending violence. In essence, the Administration argues for a revolutionary break, in which military force and "the long war" can once and for all achieve permanent peace. The human rights critics respond with a pragmatic defense of piecemeal action through non-coercive means. For Amnesty and company, revolutionary breaks and the terroristic violence they produce will never succeed in protecting individuals from oppression. But, the fact that this tactical disagreement constitutes the primary debate over the war on terror suggests how much has been evacuated from our political conversation.
To begin with, each side imagines rights solely in terms of safeguarding personal security -- protecting the isolated individual. For HRW and for the Administration, to be free is simply to avoid being subject to acts of violence. In a sense, both remove meaningful collective goals and ideological commitments from their place at the center of political life. If our disagreements were once motivated by the great "isms" (liberalism, nationalism, communism, fascism), today they merely concern how best to keep our bodies safe.
This is not a trivial point. It means that the prevailing human rights paradigm is gravely limited as a tool of political critique. It has no way to respond to the obvious fact that sometimes ends do justify the means. Violence may be terrible, but aren't there political objectives worthy of going to war over? HRW, of course, concedes this fact through its own support for humanitarian interventions that seek to halt ongoing or imminent mass killing. For various reasons the invasion in Iraq failed to rise to their standard of humanitarian intervention: principally due to the lack of immediate acts of violence by Saddam and the willingness to resort to force before all other options were exhausted. Despite such views, HRW still refused to take a stand explicitly opposing the initial invasion. The official explanation was that wars are matters of state policy whose support or opposition are beyond the mandate of the group. Taking the point at face value, one should be skeptical of how critical a group can be if it won't participate in life and death debates over war.
Yet, the silence also tells us that human rights groups have been struggling to figure out what exactly sets their interventions of the 1990s apart from those of the war on terror. Ken Roth wrote at the beginning of the 2004 HRW World Report of his concern that, "the Iraq War and the effort to justify it even in part in humanitarian terms risk giving humanitarian intervention a bad name." Once war had been accepted in principle as a legitimate tool to protect individuals from violence, very little intellectual space separates the human rights stance from that of the Administration. At root, the basic criticism expressed by HRW and others already takes the parameters of political debate as given. Since wars are not within the "mandate of HRW" states can fight terrorism, promote free markets, etc., so long as the means aren't self-defeating or morally unacceptable. But, if the groups themselves have justified and championed wars to end coercion and insecurity what remains of the critique? Is it now only the very pragmatic claim that criminal prosecution should have been tried first or that the U.S. should have waited for a large enough act of violence? The fact that many human rights groups equivocate on the basic substance of their opposition to the Administration -- the illegitimacy of war and coercion as useful tools -- makes it impossible for them to articulate a clear opposition. It means that the rhetoric of protecting "faraway victims" not only can be appropriated by the war on terror, but actually becomes its moral cover.
Ultimately, the rise of human rights language, employed by both Bush and his critics, underscores how liberty is now increasingly indistinguishable from security. When the Administration and NGOs debate balancing "liberty" and "security", security really exists on both sides of the equation. This has not always been the case with rights talk, and human rights talk specifically. Activists like to imagine that human rights have been with us since the beginning of time, or at least since the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Yet, reading that declaration tells us just how far we've drifted from earlier conceptions. For them, rights belonged to men as citizens: members of a political community. Such rights were forged through collective action and articulated a guideline for how state power could embody the interests of all. This may be a bit abstract, but it does emphasize what the relationship between rights and liberty once was. Rights weren't just limits on what states and terrorists could do to an individual. Instead, they provided a roadmap for how citizens acting together could liberate social and political life from hierarchy and inequality.
The human rights paradigm we see today really draws inspiration from the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its focus on securing the individual from violence. But even after its creation, there remained an alterative approach linking rights and liberty -- one often articulated by colonial independence leaders and those at the margins of Western society. Malcolm X famously said that, "The common goal of 22 million African Americans is respect as human beings, the god-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans." For him, human rights meant achieving the equal inclusion of all individuals, regardless of race, into the political community. Such rights were inherently political, and embodied the hope that through their own efforts African Americans could democratize society and alter the basic distribution of power. As Malcolm X said 'nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you are a man you take it.'
The fact that human rights today have been reduced to security-speak, easily coopted for endless war, is disconcerting to say the least. It suggests that the kind of liberty articulated by the French in 1789 and by Malcolm X in 1964 is no longer even part of our political imagination. Today we're left to debate which strategies are more likely to eliminate threat, rather than to think about the goals that might justify taking risks. To put it grandly, the transformation of human rights from a language of collective self-determination to one of risk management perfectly captures the narrowing of American politics and social possibility. If critique has any value, it has to begin by resisting this move and reclaiming the progressive potential inherent in politics.
9 Comments:
I may have to squabble with a few things here -- neither HRW nor Amnesty ever supports any specific war, humanitarian or a la Bush -- they are supposed to be agnostic on the subject(see their mission statements). That is an institutional position, likely due to a compromise within the organizations given that human rights advocates/activists are not of one mind as to whether war is an appropriate vehicle for protecting people from human rights violations. You do however have your finger on what has been problematic with HRW’s position but more b/c some in prominent posts at HRW actually do favor so-called humanitarian intervention and made their views known (re: K. Roth) about the Iraq war such that it became confused as to what the organization‘s position is. (Let it be known that HRW actually did an internal report reviewing its pre-Iraq war materials to see if it could be "perceived" as pro-war. You can guess what the conclusion was!)
I also question what you mean by the prevailing HR paradigm. Do you mean that HRW is THE representative of HRs, just bc it has access to the press and maybe even likes to think of itself that way? Nonetheless, I agree that sometimes HRW employs too often a pragmatic defense of civil liberties, but I doubt very much that human rights critics' (there is more than HRW!) positions collapse as easily as you say to "imagin[ing] rights solely in terms of safeguarding personal security -- protecting the isolated individual." Perhaps the central problem though is that what used to be taboo -- things like torture etc., -- are now part on the table as to what is acceptable state practice. Hence, HR organizations are essentially trying to redraw the line back to where things like torture were unacceptable and lamented state practice.
So HRW and the like, are left asking the question -- how can you shame a government that is unshameable?
HRW, like the human rights community generally, ordinarily takes no position on whether states should go to war. But on rare occasions it has -- unlike other groups -- advocated intervention to stop mass killing (i.e. Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia). By the way, this is mentioned in the 2004 World Report found in the Friday Review. Such advocacy has been very controversial, both within the group and the larger human rights community. It goes against the general wariness of using violent means as an instrument of individual protection. After the Cold War, there was an increasing sense as you point out that naming and shaming wasn't effective in extreme cases. This fact helped create a kind of crisis over appropriate human rights strategies and opened space for academics like Samantha Powers and Michael Ignatieff to place more emphasis on intervention. Today, especially after the Iraq war, most activists are quite uncomfortable with intervention. But the bigger point is that their own ambiguity over the role of violence in human rights promotion helped produce an environment in which Bush and others could make human rights claims in defense of the war on terror.
As for your point about liberty, I would say that the tactic of naming and shaming ultimately shaped the scope of how groups imagined what constituted "rights." It cast rights as checks on the worst forms of violence perpetrated against "victims" -- and accessible primarily through the courts. Unfortunately, this helped transform rights as a language of collective political action into one principly about protecting individuals and bodies from terroristic violence. It's this development that dissolves the distinction between rights-talk and security-talk.
I agree with the overall point re the limits of HR as a tool of political critique but some refinement is needed here.
The idea that human rights boils down to the protection of bodily security is incorrect. The UDHR does more than "focus on securing the individual from violence." It also stipulates political participation and democratic governance (broadly construed) as human rights. And it goes far beyond the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen in placing _positive_ obligations on the state like right to health, right to housing, right to paid vacation, etc. While things like torture and arbitrary killing get more media play, economic/social/cultural rights are a vast part of the work of the human rights community and have arguably been _more_ significant to legislation, jurisprudence, and policymaking in some places like the EU.
What IS true is that human rights is incapable of constituting (pun intended) political communities, including those in which (as you put it to nicely) "citizens acting together could liberate social and political life from hierarchy and inequality." But that is because it is a legal discourse. And just as you point out with overreliance on courts and rule-of-law arguments elsewhere, the law is indeed not a substitute for politics. Attempts to use human rights as such as are either naive and confused (HRW: we can never oppose a war b/c that would be 'political' but we can call for one if it is 'humanitarian') or cynical (Ignatieff: since human righs have never been respected without a strong state, the respect for human rights requires establishing strong states, by invasion if necessary).
This gets us to a more interesting issue. In our little corner of the political world we tend to attribute the evacuation of the political realm to both the inflation of security as well as the overreliance on law, courts, etc. Yet law and security seem to be opposing discourses -- one is based on rights, processes, equality, etc. whereas the other is about risks, results, raison d'etat, etc. (I realize these are caricatures but hear me out). This difference is what makes the position of HRW and others rights-based groups that embrace security-talk so incoherent and weak. What to make of this? I don't read the blog every day, but has there been an attempt to synthesize these two antipolitical approaches? Or am I just exaggerating the divergences here?
Both aspects of your comment require a more extensive response that can be provided here, and will be the basis for future posts. The point in the Friday Review about the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not that it included no language on social and economic rights. In fact, reading the declaration from today's vantage point can be quite striking given the list of positive state obligations. Yet, such a reading would deeply anachronistic. We should recall that the Declaration was drafted at the very beginning both of the cold war and of anti-colonial struggles. There was a great deal of disagreement over the substance and purpose of human rights claims.The final document represented the victory of the U.S. State Department over alternative voices calling for far greater emphasis on self-determination and economic improvement. Besides eliminating some of the more stringent obligations on states, one of the primary ways Western policy elites limited the content of such rights was by creating enforcement language devoid of "teeth." The Declaration asks individuals and governments to "keep these rights in mind": notoriously fuzzy language for international law.
Kirsten Sellars in her excellent book, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Sutton Publishing, 2002), provides a useful overview of the internal drafting debates that led to the document. The fact that the document looks progressive to our eyes speaks to just how far we've come from the available arguments of 1948. But, we should realize that this was a principle step in the reduction of rights talk to the very thin liberal account -- with its emphasis on protecting isolated individuals from acts of coercion. It was the beginning of a political process we see culminating today.
As for the link between the legal realm and the security realm, your point is an excellent one, which we plan to explore. In a nutshell, American political life has witnessed the evacuation of meaningful ideas -- leading to the increasing sense that politics has little to offer by way of transformative potential. This view has many corrosive implications, perhaps most of all the belief that all politics can do is limit risk. As a result, political debate in the U.S. has been captured by a disagreement between law and security. To put it with little subtlety, one side seeks to limit risk through the enforcement of juridically protected rights and the mechanisms of law generally. The other claims that law itself is an obstacle in facing the threats to social life, and calls for the discretionary power of the state. The larger problem is that both approaches are deeply truncated, as well as inherently limited on their own terms. Moreover, increasingly the disagreement is less about the principles and goals of politics and more about the appropriate means to secure individual safety. The question we should be asking is why has the law-security dynamic become the primary language of politics, and what would it take to displace it? These ideas will be discussed in greater depth on the blog.
On the 'thinning' of the liberal account of rights which the editors raise and then on dar's tricky question...
The economic and social rights in the UDHR may seem relatively progressive from the standpoint of the contemporary obsession with 'human security'. But there is continuity between the two aspects of HRs as well as difference. The economic and social rights of postwar welfare states were also referred to as a system of 'social security', and for good reason.
They are formally similar. Like the human security aspect of HRs, the economic and social components of HRs pose access to certain goods as rights. These necessarily take the form of positive rights or 'claim rights' implying a duty on the state to do something to provide the goods concerned. This form of right looks like a contractual right which makes positive rights open to the demand that the rights bearer also bears reciprocal duties to the state, say to look for work in the case of economic rights, or to reassure government that they are not a threat to public safety in the case of rights of human security.
Shared political content between the two is also suggested by the sharing of the term 'security'. The social and economic rights were intended to secure society against its own potential incoherence and breakdown(the preamble to the UDHR explicitly warns states about this danger if they do not respect HRs). The decline of postwar welfarism has resulted in the political drift that your blog rightly refers to in relation to the War on Terror, and 'human security' seems to provide some ideological direction while perhaps deriving some limited authority from the afterburn of welfarism.
The civil rights of political freedom are different. They are negative rights or 'liberties' implying only the absence of a right of anyone else (including the state) to interfere with their exercise. They are suspect from the standpoint of social cohesion because they do not imply anything other than the duty to respect others' civil rights. They do not in themselves require any outward signs of loyalty.
Moreover it is only on the basis of civil rights or the struggle for them that citizens can in fact come together to act politically in a way that is genuinely democratic and not coerced by the elite. Of course if the struggle for civil rights is only pursued by legal means then it will reduce to an exercise in legal discourse, as dar points out. But the civil rights remain critical to democracy, and the legal guarantee of them is very significant however little citizens may be able to rely on judges to make it a reality.
Dar's other point - how to understand the convergence of two antipolitical but also apparently antithetical discourses (law and security) is a big one. My only tentative suggestion is that the substance of arguments for legal rights, even the traditional civil rights, is increasingly framed in the consequentialist language of positive right, ie, that civil rights should be upheld because of their risk-reducing effects. This indeed may be what the conversion of civil rights into human rights achieves.
I think it is possible to observe the decay of legal discourse, and even assert that there is an intrinsic link between democracy and the rule of law without becoming a legal fetishist.
As an aside to Don's post, there is nothing inherently paternalistic about positive state obligations, as expressed by social and economic rights. This depends entirely on the concrete relationship between citizens and states in a particular political community. If individuals find themselves confronted by a massive bureaucracy over which they have little control (perhaps the welfare state), then such provisions weaken rather than enhance autonomy. They create bonds not unlike those between a monarch and his subjects, in which the state would provide peace, food, and housing in return for obedience. But, if the state is itself a public instrument directed by citizens, then such obligations are expressions of collective self-assertion. They stipulate popular guidelines for how government power can be made consistent with liberty. They are fundamentally political rather than legal rights. Whether such obligations produce one outcome or the other cannot be decided in the abstract. It depends on the historical moment and the underlying vision of the state.
I agree with Aziz that social and economic rights need not be paternalistic. They may represent a democratic will that the 'social security' of all be protected by collective provision to all or at least to the relatively unfortunate. But that is not the historical moment we are in. On the contrary with the decline of democratic politics the social and economic rights become an inherited institutional form of state power which defines and regulates the unfortunate and the vulnerable. And in these circumstances their form makes possible the demand that the positive rights entail positive duties like workfare. Moreover this paternalistic protection of the vulnerable is the ideological basis of the positive right to human security.
My point was that although, as dar's post argues, legalistic arguments for civil rights may be as depoliticising as arguments for security, the negative civil rights are at least immune to one repressive aspect of the security consensus - the duty to conform. As the LA Times Op-ed piece linked by the editors today suggests, 'terrorist suspect' is a very broad category. One way to stay out of it is to reassure the executive that you are not a threat, at the very least to do nothing that might possibly raise suspicion. This duty to actively contribute to the public's security, which the broad definition of suspect effectively implies, is the reflex of a positive right to security.
It is in this sense that classical civil rights are opposed to the human right to security. The editors are right though to suggest that this is an opposition that can only have any liberating political effect once it is taken out of the courtrooms.
Don,
I have a question for you, but don't want to clutter the comment board. If you'd be willing, could you email me at ahg2102@columbia.edu Thanks.
I feel there's a distinction between human rights and classical liberal rights that has been missed in the above discussion. A crucial difference is the political institutions/context in which they arise and operate. The liberal (and liberating) thing about classical rights was that they envisioned and demanded a relationship between a citizen and a state. That is, the right was to be asserted by the rights-bearer. And the liberal state was structured in such a way that the citizen had a direct relationship with the state. In this context, even "rights to" could potentially be liberal. Human rights, in contrast, envision rights for individuals to be vindicated by institutions with which those individuals have, at best, a very indirect and attenuated relationship. The most democratic of international institutions, the UN, nonetheless has its only relationships with *states* not the individuals on whose behalf it purports to operate. I think this distinction is a critical one, because it calls into question whether the human rights paradigm could ever really further such liberal ideals as "political participation and democratic governance", whatever its intentions.
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