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Abstract
What should we make of appeals to human rights in the context of struggles against dispossession or armed repression? After the ‘death of man’ as transcendent ground of all right, critics have highlighted the disciplinary effects and absolutist tendencies of human rights discourse. However, attempts have been made to ‘rescue’ human rights – and wider forms of humanistic advocacy – as an immanent, self-grounding ethical practice. Drawing on analysis of struggles over natural resource extraction and indigenous rights in Latin America, this paper argues that such accounts mirror the assumptions of a predominant mode of international humanitarian activism. By reifying humanistic ideals, without sufficient attention to the effects of practices within which rights are invoked, both obscure entanglements between humanist interventions and logics of dispossession. This is particularly significant at the current juncture. Through these interventions rights have been absorbed into a neoliberal regime of truth in which the subjects of rights are interpellated as parties to private contract, such that rights themselves become tools of exception. Taking struggle as a starting point, by contrast, highlights not only the indeterminacy of rights but also the potential of human rights discourse to disrupt these logics. Through ethnographic engagement with ‘people’s hearings’ into ‘Multinational Corporations and Crimes against Humanity’ in Colombia, I revisit the questions of ‘the human’ and ‘rights’ and propose a more dialectical approach to the relation between normative principle and immanent critique.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Independent Social Research Foundation for enabling me to pursue this project by means of an Early Career Fellowship. I am also grateful to Louiza Odysseos and Anna Selmeczi for inviting me to write this paper, to Louiza for helping me work out what it was about with her comments on an earlier draft, and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights. The paper has also benefited from conversations for co-authored work with Doerthe Rosenow, from bickering with Stefanie Ortmann and from discussions with those attending a panel at which it was presented at the 2014 Critical Legal Conference at the University of Sussex. An earlier version of the discussion of ‘ethical dispossession’ was presented as a plenary talk at a workshop on ‘Neoliberal Legality’ at the University of Oxford, June 2013. Thanks to Honor Brabazon for the invitation and to Illan rua Wall and other participants in the workshop for conversations that led me to pursue the ‘positive’ aspects of human rights further. As ever, all shortcomings remain my own.
Notes
1. Cárdenas and Marín, La Biodiversidad, 19.
2. Campbell, “Why Fight”, 505.
3. A monograph discussing more fully the ethnographic research upon which this article is based is forthcoming.
4. Habermas, “Questions,” 282–284.
5. Hyder, “Foucault,” 107–108.
6. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 42–46.
7. Campbell, “Why Fight”.
8. Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent,” 179–183.
9. Ibid., 177–179
10. Interview, November 2007.
11. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 13.
12. Golder, “Foucault’s Critical (yet Ambivalent) Affirmation.”
13. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 3. For discussion of this sort of deployment of Foucault’s methodological orientation (and the differences from accounts adopting concepts like ‘biopolitics’ as if they provided a theory of power or rule), see Coleman and Hughes, “Distance,” esp. 147–149.
14. Golder, “Foucault’s Critical (yet Ambivalent) Affirmation,” 290ff.
15. Osborne, “What is Neo-enlightenment?”
16. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 254–258.
17. Cited in Osborne, “What is Neo-enlightenment?”, 527.
18. Osborne, “What is Neo-enlightenment?”, 528.
19. Amnesty International, Justice and Impunity.
20. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 26, 90.
21. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii.
22. Brett, “Peace Stillborn”; and Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 252–253.
23. Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 254–255.
24. Amnesty International, Justice and Impunity.
25. Hale, “Resistencia para qué?,” 191ff.
26. Ibid; and Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 246ff.
27. Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 256.
28. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition.
29. Hale, “Resistencia para qué?,” 195.
30. Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” 232.
31. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 33.
32. Abello, Violencias y Culturas, 17–19; and Jahn, “One Step,” 630–631.
33. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, 175.
34. Foucault, Biopolitics, 4–21.
35. Brown, “Right and Identity,” 89.
36. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 29–39.
37. Brown “Right and Identity,” 96; and Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, 110ff, 175.
38. Marx, “On the Jewish Question.”
39. Rancière, Dissensus, 67.
40. Ibid., 69.
41. For example, Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, 115ff; and Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights.
42. Rancière, Dissensus, 72, 184–185.
43. Ibid., 190–191.
44. Harvey, The New Imperialism, Chap. 4.
45. Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent,” 174–177.
46. Santos, Towards a New Legal Commonsense, 451–454. See also Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 243–245.
47. Ibid., 244–245.
48. Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent,” 182.
49. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 247.
50. Abello, Violencias y Culturas, 17–19.
51. Brown, “Neoliberalism,” 56.
52. ILO, 1999 .
53. Coleman, “The New Social Pact and Histories of Violence.”
54. Ibid.
55. See, inter alia, Amnesty International, A Laboratory of War; Gill, “‘Right there with You’”; and Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent.”
56. Aeberhard and Coleman, “Accused,” 9.
57. Interview with member of the rotating leadership of the Committee for the Social Integration of Catatumbo (CISCA), June 2008.
58. Interview with popular educator from the Social Organisations of Arauca, June 2008.
59. Ibid.
60. Interview with CISCA leader, June 2008.
61. Bloch, The Principle of Hope.
62. This is far closer to Foucault’s own critical attitude toward the present than those accounts that have taken up the ethical dimension of his work. However, a discussion of the differences between this framing and that of Foucault himself is beyond the scope of this paper.