Human rights and power amid protest and change in the Arab world

Abstract

The stunning popular uprisings in the Arab world in 2011 inaugurated an era of protest, revolutions and political transitions, on the one hand, and heightened repression, civil war and renewed authoritarianism, on the other. During this era the human rights paradigm was often at the fore of political and social contests, repeatedly being claimed, co-opted and appropriated. This paper argues that within the Middle East’s uprisings and transitions, deployments of human rights had notable emancipatory effects; yet invocations of the discourse continued to emerge from, converge with or (re)produce various power-laden domestic and international political dynamics. The human rights paradigm served as a primary discourse of the most serious challenge to Arab authoritarianism and its Western sponsorship in contemporary history, with the outcome in Tunisia exemplifying its potential to influence both the processes and substance of genuine political change. The period’s events and ethos also created openings for rights claims to be made by marginalised groups and facilitated local actors’ agency in driving the region’s human rights politics and agendas after decades of ‘human rights in the Arab world’ being a discourse largely driven by foreign actors. Yet the paradigm was also frequently curtailed or instrumentalised by local rulers and Western powers clinging to longstanding authoritarian arrangements, as well as by emergent political actors vying for power.

Keywords:

• human rights
• Arab world
• Middle East
• Arab uprisings

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this volume, and Anthony Chase and Mahmood Monshipouri, for reading and offering their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Blakeley, “Human Rights, State Wrongs,” 599–619.

2. See Ropp et al., The Power of Human Rights; and Ropp et al., The Persistent Power of Human Rights.

3. Examples are provided by Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue; Mutua, “Savages, Victims, and Saviors”; and Souter, “Emancipation and Domination.” Following Souter, this paper is concerned with harmful deployments of power and domination.

4. Souter, “Emancipation and Domination.”

5. Consistent with the views of the ‘Protest School’ discussed by Dembour, “What are Human Rights?,” 3.

6. Often ‘rights’ and ‘human rights’ are used interchangeably in the discourses considered in the paper. This is because conceptions of the rights at stake in the uprisings are in many ways shaped by those promoting the human rights paradigm, be they local human rights activists, foreign human rights activists, UN initiatives or Western governmental initiatives.

7. Sally Merry has written about the way individuals can come to view their predicament as a violation of rights once exposed to the discourse in the context of women’s rights. Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism,” 43–44. Engel finds rights consciousness to be related to the degree to which rights enter into individuals’ everyday identity-constructions, discourses and ‘stories they…tell to make sense of their lives’. Engel, “Vertical and Horizontal Perspectives,” 425–427.

8. “Meet Asmaa Mahfouz.”

9. Al-Haq and Abdelhameed Hussein, “The Slogans,” 35–58.

10. “14 February Statement.”

11. Interview with Mihad Aboud, Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression, Cairo, June 2012.

12. Zunes, “Bahrain’s arrested Revolution,” 156.

13. Interview with Ziad Abdel Tawab, Deputy Director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Cairo, June 18, 2012.

14. This reflects what has been termed the ‘logic of rights’, the dynamic of the recognition of some rights claims leading to rights claims by other excluded groups. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 150.

15. “Girl in the Blue Bra.” Iskandar has referred to the ‘Blue Bra’ incident as having ‘Nailed the Coffin’ of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Iskandar, Egypt in Flux, 94.

16. “Founding Statement.”

17. Interview with former Egyptian MP Mohammad Morid, Cairo, June 2011. Representatives from several NGOs also reported having received calls from and meeting with Salafist MPs interested in learning more about their ‘Right to Know’ campaign. Interview with Kholoud Saber, Association for Freedom of Expression and Thought, Cairo, 2011.

18. Interview with Lotfi Azzouz, Director of Amnesty International Tunisia, Tunis, May 2013.

19. Jetschke and Liese discuss the role of competing norms, counter-discourses and contestation on human rights promotion. Jetschke and Liese, “The Power of Human Rights,” 26–42.

20. National security discourses and terrorist labels serving as a justification for human rights violations against Islamists are hardly new. Jetschke and Liese cite examples from Indonesia and Turkey, while Mokhtari has discussed the phenomenon in relation to the US-led ‘war on terror’. Jetschke and Liese, “The Power of Human Rights”; and Mokhtari, After Abu Ghraib.

21. See, for example, “Non-peaceful Assembly.”

22. Both Merry and Engel speak of the shifting nature of rights subjectivities and consciousness. Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism”; and Engel, “Vertical and Horizontal Perspectives.”

23. In a sense these activists become experts involved in a form of knowledge production. Applying a Foucauldian analysis, while their diffusion of rights discourses may be considered a form of ‘conduct’ through its disciplining, governing or normalising effects, depending on how these rights discourses are constructed and deployed, they can also be viewed as ‘counter-conduct’, which questions, disrupts or contributes to the dislodging of other forms of dominance. Cadman, “How (not) to be Governed,” 539–556; and Sokhi-Bulley, “Government(ality) by Experts,” 251–271.

24. As Blakeley convincingly contends, some of the emancipatory potential of human rights relates to the collective rather than individual agency that may be exercised. Blakeley, “Human Rights, State Wrongs.”

25. Chase, Human Rights, Revolution, and Reform, 11.

26. For example, Bahraini Islamist MP Matar Matar states: ‘what the Pentagon needs to understand is that it is unnecessary for America’s interests to come at the expense of our citizens’ basic rights’. Day, “Radical Allies and Moderate Subversives.” 

27. “Strategic Dialogue.”

28. Interestingly, as Egypt’s and Tunisia’s transitions progressed, activists sometimes criticised the USA for its willingness to overlook the Islamists’ problematic stances on women’s rights and freedom of religion, attributing this to adherence to US interests, a charge which stood between accurately capturing the contradictions of the US treatment of human rights and indulging in the same sensationalist accounts of Islam, Islamists and cultural and religious rights violations traditionally put forth by Western actors.

29. Interview with Bahraini human rights activist, Washington, DC, December 2013.

30. “Foreign Intervention in Syria?”

31. Mokhtari, After Abu Ghraib, 10–13.

Additional information

Funding

Field research presented in this paper was funded through grants from the School of International Service at the American University and the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University.