Past Issue Article Abstracts
Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2022
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ARTICLES
The Major Humanitarian Dilemma of Neutrality: The International Committee of the Red Cross and Prisoners of War in Korea, 1950–1953
Jean-Michel Turcotte
This article examines how the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) addressed the complex issue of the 150,000 North Korean and Chinese prisoners of war (POW) detained by the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) during the Korean War (1950–1953). Based on the 1949 Geneva Convention, the treatment of POWs raised serious concerns regarding one of ongoing challenge for the ICRC: neutrality. As suggested in this article, delegates faced a major dilemma in providing humanitarian aid and protection to prisoners while preserving their neutrality. Examining the daily work of the ICRC reveals the scope of its humanitarian action in the conjuncture of the Korean War as well as their complex efforts to ensure that the captivity of POWs met the standards of the 1949 Geneva Convention.
A Managerial Humanitarianism: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Risk Management of Armed Violence in Greater Rio de Janeiro
Pedro Silva Rocha Lima
This paper analyzes an International Committee of the Red Cross program that instructs public service workers, and the municipal bureaucracies overseeing them, on how to assess and mitigate risks related to armed violence in their daily work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I argue that this initiative represents a form of managerial humanitarianism primarily concerned with shaping the state's management of lives and with preparing groups of people to protect themselves. Here, armed violence is turned into an object of (risk) management, something to be addressed through risk assessments, behavioral protocols, and reporting mechanisms rather than through emergency relief.
Epistemics of Aid: Toward a Liminal Critique of Resilience in the Syrian Crisis
Malay Firoz
Humanitarian actors since the Syrian crisis have acknowledged that traditional emergency relief cannot meet the growing challenges of mass displacement. This article traces the political contradictions of the Resilience Agenda, a novel approach to humanitarian aid which claims to offer an integrated developmental solution to the needs of both Syrian refugees and vulnerable host communities in Jordan and Lebanon. The article shows how resilience draws aid organizations into paradoxical relationships of cooperation and conflict with the very asylum states that undermine Syrian resilience, intensifying the structural clash between the rights of refugees and citizens as mutually exclusive categories of political concern.
Dossier: Cultural Renditions of Guantánamo and the War on Terror
Cultural Renditions of Guantánamo and the War on Terror
Alexandra S. Moore
This essay examines the Guantánamo Bay detention facility as a site and subject of intellectual and cultural production which can address aspects of the war on terror foreclosed by law and politics. The essay begins with prisoner Abu Zubaydah's recent petition to the US Supreme Court and arguments there about state secrets privilege to shield evidence of the CIA's Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program (2002–2009) from disclosure. Drawing on Bonnie Honig's theory of democratic deliberative processes and "public things," the essay then turns to Scottish creator/actor Freda O'Byrne's one woman play, Rendition, for its efforts to make the public secret of the RDI program into a forum for public deliberation. Rendition's blend of evidentiary and imaginative discourses introduces the dossier's larger themes of how prisoners used cultural expression to resist and survive abuse; cultural production as a window into Guantánamo's situatedness in the Global South; and the obligations that come with cultural production for those who survive their Guantánamo imprisonment.
The Beautiful Guantánamo
Mansoor Adayfi
In "The Beautiful Guantánamo," Mansoor Adayfi, who was imprisoned for fourteen years there without charge, refutes the narratives and images carefully curated by the US government about its captives. Adayfi describes how men and boys speaking eighteen different languages and representing fifty nationalities shared their different cultures with one another and, through communal experiences, generated their own distinctive Guantánamo culture from 2002 to 2010. Beginning with the fear, estrangement, and abuse prisoners experienced upon their arrival, the author details how forming a common language and traditions in greetings, poetry, song, and dance created a brotherhood among those held and helped them to survive. From learning how to greet one another in their own languages to devising classes and cultural competitions, the prisoners forged a unique set of cultural practices to sustain themselves. The essay demonstrates how Guantánamo culture evolved as a mode of communication, self-expression, resistance, and survival and, in the process, as the author writes, ensured prisoners held on to the humanity that the prison sought to destroy.
The Detainee's Two Bodies: Intellectual Property and Fugitivity at Guantánamo Bay
Kalyan Nadiminti
The article argues that the denial of detainee intellectual property rights at Guantánamo Bay calls attention to new modalities of fugitivity and postcolonial citizenship. Examining paintings created by current and former detainees as well as Mohamedou Ould Slahi's redacted memoir Guantánamo Diary (2015/2017), the article poses two key questions: How do we understand the status of post-9/11 art made in captivity? And what is the significance of the claim of US state ownership over such art? Following Stephen Best's argument that US intellectual property laws were heavily influenced by Fugitive Slave Laws, the article theorizes "detainee copyright" to spotlight the political significance of detainees' artistic and cultural work against the state's fear of fugitive meaning. The triangulation of intellectual property, art and life-writing, and state censorship produces the detainee's two bodies: the material body shackled in indefinite detention and the metaphorical body demanding public circulation.
From Guantánamo to the Global South: Mohammed el-Gharani in Literature and Art
Esther Whitfield
This article discusses a poem, a performance, and a comic book related to the life of Mohammed el-Gharani, a Black Muslim citizen of Chad held at Guantánamo for seven years beginning at the age of fourteen. It argues that while the fragmented authorship and dispersal of these creative pieces distinguishes them from a more established corpus of detainee memoirs, they perform important work alongside this corpus in highlighting solidarities between detainees and residents of Cuba, on the one hand, and Black members of the US military who guard Guantánamo's cellblocks, on the other.
This Is What It Looks Like: Searching for Law's Afterlife in Guantánamo
Safiyah Rochelle
This article considers the role of visual materials in the afterlife of extraordinary state violence. It locates a series of drawings by Guantánamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah as embedded within and counter to the camp's existing visual grammar, where images of the camp and detainees work alongside state and legal violence to form the complex of forces that mark detainees as subjects to and subjects of (legal) death. Within these relations, detainee-produced drawings are vivid reminders of the tortured and forgotten bodies of state violence, and also the matter against which legal and political limits are both withdrawn and extended.
My Guantánamo Writing Seminar
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
In this essay, Mohamedou Ould Slahi reflects on how fifteen years of indefinite detention, torture, and abuse in the war on terror contributed to his development as a writer. He discusses the ways in which solitary confinement and other rules governing his captivity in a prison in Jordan and for fourteen years at Guantánamo forced him to keenly observe his surroundings and to conjure characters and stories from the smallest of details in his material life, from the most mundane interactions with guards, interrogators, and other prison personnel, and from dreams. Stitching these bits into narrative came about through listening to guards and other detainees tell their stories and from consuming approved television and film, often alongside the guards. For the author, writing both fiction and nonfiction provided an outlet for mental torment, but also created intense feelings of freedom, of imaginative life beyond cell walls. At the same time, he reflects on his role as a writer who survived Guantánamo as one of obligation to the memory of the many other young men who were disappeared and sometimes killed in the war on terror.
Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2022
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ARTICLES
The World Won’t Listen: The Mande “Hunters’ Oath” and Human Rights in Translation
Gregory Mann
Two texts have recently been hailed as examples of an autochthonous tradition of Human Rights and constitutional government in West Africa. Associated with thirteenth-century Mali empire, both the “Hunters’ Oath” and the better-known “Kurukan Fuga” have been referred to as “the Mande Charter.” Focused on the Hunters’ Oath, this article offers the first full translation of it from the original into English. It recounts the history of the Oath in print, highlighting the work of two late Malian intellectuals, Youssouf Tata Cissé and Wâ Kamissoko. It argues the Oath merits recognition as an emancipatory text, irrespective of its age.
Humanization as Money: Modern Monetary Theory and the Critique of Race
Diren Valayden, Jakob Feinig
In this article, we build on the work of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire to develop a relational understanding of dehumanization and humanization through money. We first show that Fanon and Freire share a critical normative vision of humanization, which they conceptualize as that which occurs when people reject dehumanizing practices that deny their agency, begin to grasp their world-in-common, and emerge as historical agents who remake it. In a second step, we advance Fanon’s and Freire’s vision by identifying the constitutive and dehumanizing role of money in liberalism’s ontological commitments, and develop a humanizing monetary ontology. We show how John Locke’s theory of “monetary individualism” is also a monetary theory of race that constitutes the liberal ontology and propose an approach to humanization grounded in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
“Ambulances of the Sea”: The Terracization of Maritime Aid
Imogen Dobie
Humanitarian agencies assisting migrants and refugees at sea have historically described search and rescue ships as “floating hospitals” or “ambulances for the sea.” This strategy of terracization has allowed them to dial down the political rhetoric that pervades discussions of rescue. However, more contemporary aid workers have come to reject the tactic, criticizing the use of land-based idiom as a neutralizing tool. Based on archival research and in-depth interviews conducted between 2019 and 2020, this article charts such a volte-face of humanitarian thinking. It argues that, in the wake of this shift, the terracization of aid work has become less viable—not only for relief workers but also for academics.
The Human Community of Fate: A Conceptual History of China’s Ordoglobal Idea
Ryan Martínez Mitchell
Since 2012, advocacy of a “community of shared future for mankind” or “human community of fate” (人类命运共同体) has become China’s most important foreign relations principle. The platform has become synonymous with Beijing’s positions on global governance, along with its related initiatives. This article traces the concept’s genealogy from the early twentieth-century European notion of Schicksalsgemeinschaft, through its varying invocations in corporatist as well as ordoliberal discourse in Europe and East Asia, and into the present. Pairing stable market order with insulation from democratic pressures, the “human community of fate” seeks less to challenge today’s status quo than entrench its core features.
Counting Conflict: Quantifying Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan
Christiane Wilke, Mohd Khalid Naseemi
Civilian casualty counts are products of specific methods, epistemologies, standards of proofs, and definitions. This article analyzes how the US military and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan assess civilian casualties. These counts are based on different and contestable concepts of who counts as a civilian, what counts as conflict violence, and what counts of evidence of civilian casualties. We illustrate this argument with four examples: the distinction between direct and indirect deaths, the boundary between civilians and non-civilians, the boundary between conflict violence and criminal violence, and hierarchies in the visibility of civilians.
Coordinating Care and Coercion: Styles of Sovereignty and the Politics of Humanitarian Aid in Lebanon
Samuel Dinger
This article explores how participatory planning on the Syrian refugee response in Lebanon has transformed the localized relationship between humanitarian care and state coercion. I argue that the Lebanese Crisis Response Plan (LCRP) has yielded a form of practical coordination between state and humanitarian actors that unintentionally increases the vulnerability of the country’s Syrian population. As the Lebanese government uses legal means to crack down on and re-displace impoverished refugees––most notably through mass evictions and business closures that began in 2017––they generate repeated small emergencies that engage the core competencies of their UNHCR and NGO partners. The LCRP enables this coordinated exercise of divergent rationalities of governance by establishing formal avenues for state-humanitarian coordination while holding the question of refugee rights in abeyance through the simultaneous use of multiple classificatory registers for Syrians.
Human Rights Populism
Frédéric Mégret
Human rights are typically thought of as the anti-thesis of populism, a precarious bulwark against majoritarian political passions and their sometimes toxic brand of anti-elitist demagoguery. This tends to neglect the extent to which certain Western populist movements have themselves increasingly instrumentalized human rights to better feed into racist and xenophobic discourses. This raises uncomfortable questions for the human rights movement and has a tendency to radicalize unresolved tensions that go to its very intellectual foundation. The article suggests that the human rights response to populism cannot be content with simply doubling down on the sanctity of rights.
Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2022
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ARTICLES
This article contends that important scripts for US-led modernization were trademarked not by political and academic elites of the Cold War era, but rather by low-brow cultural producers of the New Deal period. It pinpoints key characterizations, motivations, plotlines, and settings associated with international development in the long-running pulp magazine series starring “Doc Savage” (1933–1949). Through historical analysis and close readings, the article offers a fresh account of how US audiences came to imagine technical assistance as a proper course for American power while also revealing paradoxes underpinning the modernization agenda's overt commitments to race neutrality and self-determination.
This article examines the shifting dynamics between policing and warfare as reflected in the War on Drugs over the twentieth century. Despite the UN’s international drug control treaties being written in language of humanitarianism, the drug prohibition that emerged from these laws exemplifies the growth of “New War.” The drug war, with its violent methods of armed combat, lethal force, incarceration, asset seizure, and land dispossession, was a continuation of familiar warfare. But it also marks a shift away from the traditional structure of war, providing a key, often overlooked early example of how contemporary warfare blurs the lines between surveillance, policing, and military action. Through an analysis of prohibition, this article points to a broader trend of war mutating from conflicts between rival sovereign states to the collective assault upon a threat or poison within the universal.
Agents of Sacrifice: Victims and Human Rights in North India
Whitney Russell
This article identifies a kind of victim-subject in North India that defies what is known about victimhood. On one hand, human rights literature offers a victim who negotiates narratives into a coherent biography of victimization. On the other, are helpless victims who cannot do the same. “Rita,” however, lies outside both understandings. The role of kinship and family, combined with her community’s status as both tribe and caste, create a context in which Rita’s decision to engage in sex work becomes an act of gendered sacrifice that produces an entirely new human rights subject.
Dossier: New Histories of the Global South and the UN
Introduction: Shaping a Global Horizon, New Histories of the Global South and the UN
Alanna O’Malley, Vineet Thakur
This introduction lays out the agenda for this special issue. We argue for more inclusive histories of the UN system which incorporate the role of the Global South in shaping its past and present. In general, we ask: how have the Global South actors and coalitions/formations critiqued, interrogated, nuanced, and advanced the principles and practice of liberal world order? In order to set up the conceptual context for the essays in the collection, we argue that the “Global South” is neither a place nor a project. Instead, our methodological engagements with this idea ought to configure it as an assemblage of multifarious actors, motives, methods, and means.
This article examines the West Papuan campaign for independence in the lead up to the agreement signed between Indonesia and the Netherlands in 1962, leading to the recolonization of West Papua. West Papuan leaders argued for decolonization separate from Indonesia, based on their interpretations of United Nations principles and claims to a distinct ethnic identity. However, West Papuan claims were rejected because their understanding of self-determination clashed with international norms as well as Cold War and Afro-Asian political imperatives. This case study reveals the tension between recognizing the self-determination of peoples and the state-building imperatives of the UN.
Fighting an Illiberal World Order: The Latin American Road to UNCTAD, 1948–1964
Stella Krepp
Even though Latin American diplomats and economists played a crucial role in the formulation and the theorising of development economics, Latin American contributions to development debates in the United Nations have often been relegated to the margins. Based on sources from Brazilian and Cuban archives, the Organization of American States, as well as the UN archive, the paper relates the Latin American road to the creation of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in a struggle to fight what they perceived as an illiberal and unfair global economic order.
“Colonialism on trial”: International and Transnational Organizations and the “Global South” Challenges to the Portuguese Empire (1949–1962)
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, José Pedro Monteiro
The United Nations was a dynamic “force field” for international and transnational cooperation and a forum for consequential, transformative interactions between the “West” and the “Global South.” This article focuses on the role played by alliances and solidarity networks, formed by a plurality of actors with diverse agendas, that systematically questioned the Portuguese empire-state’s legitimacy and mobilized the languages of self-determination, human rights, and non-discrimination. As the article concludes, these historical dynamics concurred for important legal and political changes within the Portuguese imperial formation but also shaped the procedures, norms, and languages employed within the UN system to address distinct imperial and colonial situations.
Volume 12, Number 3, Winter 2021
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ARTICLES
Raymond Aron, Friedrich Hayek, and "The Third World": An Alternative History of the End of Ideology Debate
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
This article explores the differences and similarities between neoliberalism and Cold War liberalism by looking at the decade's long relationship between two of its chief representatives: Friedrich Hayek and Raymond Aron. It argues that the key to understanding their differences concern's Aron's notion of an "end of ideology": the perspective that the post-War welfare state had made obsolete the need for something like a revolutionary workers party. Hayek, contra Aron, believed that such welfare states were inherently ideological and thus potentially totalitarian. What kept the differences between Aron and Hayek at bay was the early Cold War, and namely fears over Soviet expansion and Communist Party electoral victories in Western Europe. Their relationship became antagonistic in 1955 when Aron suggested that the North Atlantic Community had achieved an end to ideology. Yet at this time the political fate of the Third World remained undecided—a reality made sober to Aron and his fellow members of Congress for Cultural Freedom in light of the Bandung Conference which took place in April 1955. This larger international context, it is argued, explains the antagonism between Aron and Hayek after 1955, as the latter's thinking came to be seen as detrimental to the Congress's mission of fighting global communism.
This article explores why the figure of the child soldier as an abused and exploited victim of war erupted to the forefront of humanitarian and human rights advocacy in the 1990s, arguing that a humanitarian calculus of concern constructed this "child soldier crisis." It analyzes the structural and contingent factors that drove the development of transnational advocacy from initial concerns in 1969–71 to the 2000 Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. The article highlights the successful campaigning tactics of these networks, showing how the object figure of the child soldier as victim was framed by racialized and paternalistic tropes of global south societies and shifting constructions of childhood itself. It is based on extensive research across UN agency and INGO archives, private papers, media sources, and human rights reports
Dossier: Deexceptionalizing Displacement
Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction
Heath Cabot, Georgina Ramsay
Displacement is often framed as exceptional to a presumed norm of national sedentism. However, displacement can be seen as an increasingly ubiquitous experience, deriving from conditions that throw into question the sustainability and flourishing of lives and accompanying experiences of struggle and uncertainty. Historically deep forms of dislocation and contemporary global projects of accumulation by dispossession structure how displacement is experienced by diverse populations—including many with the privilege of citizenship. This article argues for a more expansive utility of the framework of displacement (thus deexceptionalized), while attending to how specific forms of displacement unfold on the ground.
Methodological De-nationalism: De-exceptionalizing Displacement, Re-exceptionalizing Citizenship
Bridget Anderson
Exchanging the lens of migration for one of displacement can help move away from assumptions about migrant exceptionalism, but it does not necessarily trouble the idea that some people are "out of place" and others are "in place." This is bound up with nationally specific ways of encoding and remaking race. I examine this with reference to the UK's Windrush Scandal and consider the class dimensions of displacement which are imbricated with race. This points to the importance of attending to citizenship and its inequalities, and demanding we re-exceptionalise citizenship at the same time as de-exceptionalising displacement.
Locating Refuge: Racialized Displacement and the Spatial Politics of Belonging
Michelle Munyikwa
From the vantage point of Philadelphia and the surrounding region, this article situates refuge within a framework attentive to settler colonialism and imperialism. Through the example of Fort Indiantown Gap, a space of both temporary refuge and colonial war, I note that making refuge in the United States entails a demarcation of those deemed non-human through practices of dispossession and displacement. By articulating displacement not as a past phenomenon of nation-building but an ongoing project, this article argues for the centrality of displacement to the making of the United States; not an event, but an overarching structure which continues to endure. Such an analytic opens up the potential to articulate forms of spatial justice and repair beyond current projects of refuge-making.
Simultaneous Citizen and Noncitizen: Displacement, Precarity, and Passports in Hong Kong
Nicole Constable
Arguing against the reification of a citizen-noncitizen binary, and drawing on the example of economically precarious Indonesian workers and worker-activists in Hong Kong, I argue that simultaneous citizenship and non-citizenship (botha politico-legal citizen of one state and a non-citizen of another) can contribute to existential displacement in the form of disrupted lives and futures. The severe displacement of Indonesian workers, despite heroic mitigating efforts of migrant worker activists after a new passport renewal policy was introduced in 2015, illustrates how their displacement is tied to the inability of their Indonesian citizenship or their Hong Kong status to provide the necessary legal and social protections. Indonesian displacement is compounded by their economic precarity, but their displacement as citizen-noncitizens resembles that of Hongkongers who opposed China's encroachment after the 2019-2020 protests.
Shapeshifting Displacement: Notions of Membership and Deservingness Forged by Illegalized Residents
Susan Bibler Coutin, Jennifer Chacón, Stephen Lee, Sameer Ashar, Jason Palmer
This paper considers how accounts produced by illegalized residents in the United States shapeshift US immigration enforcement regimes by defining narrators and their communities as "belonging." Anthropologist Aimee Cox develops the notion of "shapeshifting" to refer to how groups that are deemed "social problems" redefine the institutions within which they are embedded. The illegalized residents interviewed for this paper redefined US immigration law and policy as arbitrary, racially biased, and exploitative, even as they argued that they deserved status in the United States. Such critiques and definitions of deservingness perform a politics of displacement, redrawing boundaries of belonging.
"Not a cozy dwelling": Exploring Aspirational Anxieties and the Politics of Displacement in São Paulo's Squats
Heike Drotbohm
In São Paolo's ancient center, squats provide protective spaces to thousands of residents who cannot or do not want to access the formal and highly gentrified housing market. At the same time, these formerly abandoned buildings are also a site of the political struggle and claim the right to decent communal living. This paper traces the motives and aspirations of different types of squatters, such as activists, internal and international migrants as well as refugees. Through the notion of "aspirational anxieties" it concentrates on the uncomfortable emergence and recognition of power asymmetries inherent in the affective dimensions of solidarian future-making. By showing how dis- and emplacement are experienced by actors with contrasting and eventually irreconcilable biographical experiences, this paper warns against a normative understanding of the notion of displacement.
Displacement and the Capitalist Order of Things
Georgina Ramsay
One of the problems with the term "displacement" is that it is often mapped onto seemingly bounded groups—the "refugees," the "homeless"—whose displacement is considered distinct. The effect of this bounding is twofold: displacement is treated as an exceptional experience, and the structural forces of displacement are obscured. In this article, I collapse the conventional bounding of displacement by bringing the experiences of disparate groups into the same analytical frame. These experiences prompt us to consider displacement from a political economy lens, showing that—far from an exceptional experience—displacement is caused by and realized through vulnerabilities within the "capitalist order of things."
Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2021
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ARTICLES
Refugees and the Rise of the Novel: Trespass, Necessity, and Humanitarian Casuistry in the Long Refugee Crisis
Sharif Youssef
The present-day legal theory of the refugee relies on Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, "the right to have rights." Yet Arendt also pointed to an earlier tradition of asylum-seeking. In this article, Professor Youssef explores early English novels' historical association of refugees with the necessity that drives trespass. Examining the early Anglo-American novel in light of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the essay tracks morally involuntary trespass in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) to argue that the novel models an early theory of the refugee by way of the examination of the affect of defendants who raise the defense of necessity. Viewing the novel as a device that investigates the motivation of those in distress places imaginative fiction at the convergence of defenses of morally involuntary conduct and theories of asylum.
The Balfour Declaration's Territorial Landscape: Between Protection and Self-Determination
Karin Loevy
Famously declaring British support for the establishment of a Jewish 'national home' in Palestine, the Balfour declaration (November 1917) is commonly understood as the first international instrument recognizing the right to self-determination for the Jewish people in Palestine. But the territorial framework that the drafters of the declaration envisioned drew on nineteenth-century practices of imperial protection that sustained both rule and expansion in multi-national empires. Reframing the Balfour declaration as an instrument of protection, the article contributes to the study of the colonial context of international norms such as self-determination, and illuminates the international law context of Palestinian dispossession that the declaration instigated.
This paper argues that the trajectory of late-Soviet economic thought must be understood in the context of a larger global discourse on the proper role of state planning in the context of development. This debate was born out of a disappointment with the development planning that had dominated prescriptions of economists and policy entrepreneurs on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Faced with the failures of economic development in the "Third World" and a socio-economic crisis in "industrial societies" these intellectuals attempted to invent a "new planning" that derived sources of growth from a "human factor" rather than industrial development. To further this agenda, these figures established international organizations such as the Club of Rome and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Proponents of new planning saw it as a way reorganize the global economy during the turbulent 1970s. As well, these same ideas informed the development of Perestroika.
European Media Coverage of Brazil's New Human Rights: 1964–1985
Anna Grimaldi
Drawing from a study of Brazilians' interactions with the transnational human rights movements and advocacy networks of the 1960s-1980s, this paper discusses the channels through which Brazilians' concerns for rights and development during their military dictatorship reached audiences of national newspapers in Belgium, France, the UK, and Switzerland. It reveals, to a previously unacknowledged degree, the significant role played by Brazilian Liberation Theology in framing the country's human rights struggles, and points to various ways that local environments and institutions influenced the framing of solidarity and news reporting on Brazil.
The Promises of Standing Rock: Three Approaches to Human Rights
Benjamin P. Davis
Any appeal to a right raises the question of a corresponding duty. If one bears a right, then who bears the duty to respect, protect, and enforce that right? In this essay, I contend that human rights claims need not be oriented to or reliant on the state. I start from and conclude with lessons from the 2016 protests at Standing Rock. Standing Rock, I argue, exemplifies critical theory that organizes communities through the language of human rights.
REVIEW ESSAY
Critiquing Human Rights
Ben Golder
This essay reviews three recent books which each provide a different account of human rights and their critics. Jean-Yves Pranchère and Justine Lacroix's Human Rights on Trial constructs a genealogy of critiques of human rights discourse from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Joe Hoover's Reconstructing Human Rights proposes a critically redemptive approach to human rights, pushing human rights further leftward through the resources of pragmatism and agonistic theories of democracy. But it is ultimately Ratna Kapur's Freedom in a Fishbowl that articulates the most profound, and radical, challenge to human rights by indicting its Eurocentric notions of freedom and challenging us to engage with non-European conceptions of freedom.
Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2021
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ARTICLES
Removing the International from the Refugee: India in the 1940s
Ria Kapoor
This essay explores the reasons why India’s leaders removed it from UNRRA, and refused to join the IRO, even before the refugees of the Partition of India and Pakistan were excluded from the definitions of the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees. As the world transitioned from war to a new peace in the 1940s, India passed the 1946 Foreigners Act, which dealt with all aliens including refugees in India. This essay places an Indian understanding of refugees within global currents of the transformation of the international order as the first wave of decolonisation was taking place, highlighting the iron grip of self-determination in the discussion of all rights, including refugee-related ones, as the starting point for its alternative conception of the refugee.
Germany and Colonia Dignidad:: Colonial Entanglement, Medical Humanitarianism, and Human Rights Abuses in Chile
Katharine White
In the early 1960s, West German émigrés established the religious colony of Colonia Dignidad (the Colony of Dignity) in central Chile. This article chronicles the violence and atrocity that occurred at the Colony during the roughly quarter century of Augusto Pinochet’s military rule. At the same time, it demonstrates how Germany’s longer history of colonial entanglement and the Nazi practice of torturous medicine served as the underpinnings of the human rights violations that occurred. The Colony’s existence was only possible due to the long-standing ties between Germany and Chile. These same connections have rendered the legacy of the Colony intertwined with failures on both sides of the Atlantic to uphold human rights.
Dealing with Difference: Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth-Century World of Empires
Valeska Huber, Jan C. Jansen
Arguing that cosmopolitan ideas and practices have to be included in a joint matrix, this introduction puts emphasis on the situatedness of cosmopolitanism in specific periods, regions, and political contexts. It highlights nineteenth-century empires as central frameworks and breeding grounds of cosmopolitanism and identifies imperial and anti-imperial thinking as crucial to various conceptions of world citizenship. The introduction points to the campaigning for and enactment of rights and to the related conceptions of humanity as crucial elements of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism. Seeing cosmopolitanism through the historical prism of the Age of Empire with all its contradictions and ambivalences also provides a framework for thinking about how to deal with difference in the present.
Dossier: Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth Century: Empire, Humanity, Rights
Cosmopolitanism and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British India
Claude Markovits
In this essay, I examine the link between cosmopolitanism and imperialism in colonial India. In the late eighteenth century, colonial rulers redefined Britishness as a racial category, excluding from it all those who were not of pure white British stock. This racial regime led a growing group of Western-educated Indian literati to adopt cosmopolitanism as an alternative strategy of empowerment. But their cosmopolitanism took different forms: some opted for imperial cosmopolitanism and sought a form of imperial citizenship; others found political models outside Britain, to inspire them in a struggle against empire.
Postcolonial Cosmopolitan Republicanism: A Conceptual Approach to Nineteenth-Century New Granada/Colombia
Francisco Ortega
This article employs a conceptual approach to understand the place and importance of cosmopolitanism for Colombians between independence from Spain (in 1819) and the ensemble of liberal reforms that were designed to end enduring social and economic colonial structures (1846–1863). While the concept of cosmopolitanism did not play a conspicuous role during the first fifty years of the country’s independence, it constituted an ineludible component of its early republican vocabulary and practices. Furthermore, Colombian cosmopolitan republicanism is best understood as structurally ambivalent in that it promoted inclusive citizenship while embodying a civilizing mission directed toward its own Indigenous, African, and mestizo populations.
Respect!: Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Cosmopolitan Challenge
Martin Rempe
Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1913) is regarded as a pioneer of Pan-African ideas and Afrocentrism. Blyden’s concept of the “African personality” supplied Africans with a history, an identity, and original skills, supposed to counterbalance Western ideas of superiority. Nor did he shy away from the propagation of racial segregation. Many accounts even denounce him as a Black racist. Against this backdrop, this article re-evaluates Blyden’s ideas about education, religious encounter, and humanity. I argue that his main drive was a struggle for respect: he campaigned to endow Black Africans with self-respect and gain recognition from Western people. Thus, Blyden’s struggle exemplifies the challenges in promoting cosmopolitanism from the marginalized position of the colonized. At the same time, ideas of a Black intellectual come to the fore that are no less illuminating than the European blueprints before and after Blyden that never lived up to the reality.
The Family of Man: Cosmopolitanism and the Huxleys, 1850–1950
Alison Bashford
This essay considers the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and his twentieth-century grandson Julian Huxley as cosmopolitans. Perhaps their foundational shared question was how to comprehend human unity and human difference, both biologically and politically; how to comprehend humans as one. Both Huxleys insisted on the singularity of the human species, but as evolutionary theorists insisted also on individual biological variation and distinction. For this reason, they offer the opportunity to consider the history of cosmopolitanism alongside the intellectual history of thought on species, and on the species: Homo sapiens. They were both deeply engaged with the idea of human unity—variously biological, cultural, political—while remaining confident about their own epistemological privilege and capacity to pronounce on humanity as a whole. The history of cosmopolitanism is ill-served by attempts to pinpoint the truest, purest, exponents. The Huxleys’ flawed metropolitan cosmopolitanism was perhaps the commonest sort in practice.
Concluding Essay: Cosmopolitanism as Doctrine, Attitude, and Practice
Jürgen Osterhammel
This concluding essay engages with the basic conceptual ideas underlying the entire dossier on cosmopolitanism in a way that combines a historical with a sociological perspective. It distinguishes between alternative ways in which histories of cosmopolitanism can be narrated. It also comments on the normative consequences resulting from a concept of cosmopolitanism as “practice.” Further reflections are devoted to cosmopolitanism’s close connection with marginality, mobility, and exile. The relationship between cosmopolitanism and empire is seen as paradoxical. While imperial ruling classes have often sported universalist ideologies, their authority tends to be challenged in the name of rival universalisms.
Volume 11, Number 3, Winter 2020
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ARTICLES
The Contradictions of Sovereignty: Development, Family Planning, and the Struggle for Population Control in Postcolonial Morocco
Jennifer Johnson
This essay examines the origins of family planning programs in postcolonial Morocco and demonstrates a dynamic relationship between the Moroccan leadership, population experts, and global health programs. While introducing the initiative in Morocco, King Hassan II and the Population Council, the chief architect and supporter of population control efforts in the 1960s, negotiated, adapted, and balanced competing agendas in order to achieve their respective goals. The Moroccan case reveals innovative methods of state building but it also highlights how population control created contradictions of sovereignty and agency for independent regimes. This study, therefore, contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay and mutual dependence between newly sovereign states in the global south and international organizations in the post-independence era.
Making Human Rights Effective? Amnesty International, “Aid and Trade,” and the Shaping of Professional Human Rights Activism, 1961–1983
Michelle Carmody
This article takes Amnesty International’s “Aid and Trade” debate during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a window onto the ways that human rights activists thought about their work and how they understood their organization. It examines the way they grappled with their relationship in to expanding governmental action on human rights, and the meaning of the concepts “effectiveness” and “impartiality,” which were central to Amnesty’s founding.
Earwitnesses and Transparent Conduits of Voice: On the Labor of Field Interpreters for UN Missions
Laura Kunreuther
This essay considers the labor of field interpreters who worked for the UN during two critical missions in Nepal—the UN High Commission of Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) during and after the Maoist civil war. Interpreters negotiate two different ethical stances that resonate with contrasting ethical approaches in human rights and humanitarian work. As conduits of voice, an interpreter seeks to be neutral and impartial, a non-autonomous figure of mediation within the work of human rights. Field interpreters are also earwitnesses, who bear subjective responsibility for the knowledge they convey, through their work of listening to often-traumatic testimonies. To get at the paradoxes of between being both a neutral conduit of voice and a subjective earwitness, I explore several moments that interrupt the ideology of invisible transparency within which interpreters work. Despite these constant interruptions, the ideology of transparency continues to prevail, and interpreters’ embodied labor helps preserve such ideals.
Building a Bed for the Night: The Parisian “Yellow Bubble” and the Politics of Humanitarian Architecture
Tom Scott-Smith
The past decade has seen the expansion of architecture with an explicitly humanitarian purpose. This article examines the politics and functions of this movement by looking in detail at the humanitarian center at Porte de la Chapelle in Paris (the “Yellow Bubble”). Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation during 2017, the article shows how the center provided migrants with a bed for the night while at the same time serving the political imperative to clear informal settlements from the streets of Paris. The design, like many others, therefore replicated both the compassionate discourse of humanitarianism and its deeply political functions.
INTERVIEW
“A Deep and Ongoing Dive into the Brutal Humanism that Undergirds Liberalism”: An Interview with Jasbir K. Puar
Oishik Sircar
This interview with Jasbir K. Puar marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of her influential book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007). With powerful candor and an erudite lightness of touch, Puar responds, among others, to questions that inquire into the life-worlds and aesthetic-political-scholarly inheritances that found their way into the writing of the book; the ways in which the neologism in “homonationalism” has travelled and mutated outside of the context in which it was produced; the struggles with de-exceptionalizing grief in her work with help from friends; the rethinking that she has brought to understanding the relationship between intersectionality and assemblage in the light of criticism that the book received; the limits and possibilities of queer theory today; what fueled her interest in Israel/Palestine as a Sikh; and the affective intensities between disability and debility in her new book The Right to Maim (2017).
REVIEW ESSAYS
Anti-Slavery and Indentured Labor in the Age of Global Empire
Lasse Heerten
Slavery and anti-slavery were key motifs of political imagination in the age of global Empire. This review essay discusses Amalia Ribi Forclaz’s Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880–1940, Richard Huzzey’s Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, and Ashutosh Kumar’s Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 to explore the multifaceted ties between slavery, abolitionism, humanitarianism, and colonial Empire. The essay goes on to argue that anti-slavery emerged as an idiom for globalization in an imperial age—defined by the anxieties engendered by a massively accelerating mobility and the frictions underlying the colonial civilizing mission.
The Conundrum(s) of Political Violence
Christof Royer
The purpose of this review essay is not so much to dwell on the numerous virtues of Mathias Thaler’s Naming Violence and Elizabeth Frazer’s and Kimberly Hutchings’ Can Political Violence Ever be Justified?, but rather to enter into a critical discussion with the authors and to carve out some major points of disagreement. In both cases I am not entirely convinced by how the authors conceptualize potential responses to political violence. After discussing the two books in isolation from each other, the essay’s conclusion brings some of the previous arguments together and opens a space in which we can develop a theory of judging and responding to violence.
Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2020
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ARTICLES
Live-Tweeting and Distant Suffering: Nicholas Kristof as Global Savior
Leslie Barnes
This essay interrogates Nicholas Kristof’s reporting on sex trafficking in Cambodia, examining the New York Times columnist’s narrative self-fashioning in the context of the neoimperialist rescue fantasies his writing perpetuates. It explores the intersections between Kristof’s writing and the various media he employs, and considers the effects of both on the audience he wishes to interpellate in the name of action. In his reporting, Kristof disseminates a set of truth claims about sex, work, and mobility; he presents himself as a global savior figure and encourages the “ironic” participation of his reader, who is moved less to take part in a cosmopolitan morality centered on justice for the Other than to identify with the savior and contemplate their own narcissistic performance of solidarity.
Beyond Humanitarian Logics: Volunteer-Refugee Encounters in Chios and Paris
Ludĕk Stavinoha, Kavita Ramakrishnan
Since 2015, grassroots volunteers have emerged as key actors in the humanitarian response to Europe’s “refugee crisis.” Based on ethnographic research on the Greek island of Chios and in Paris, this essay explores how volunteers navigate the ethical and political dilemmas inherent to humanitarian action in their everyday encounters with refugees. We argue that while volunteers sometimes mimic disciplinary humanitarian practices, the exchange of “biographical life” in and beyond camps allows volunteers to reimagine a more dignified provision of care and for creative solidarities to emerge. The presence of volunteers, we conclude, thus plays an important role in re-humanizing and re-politicizing refugee spaces, thereby challenging—even if momentarily—dominant humanitarian logics.
Dossier on the Moral Economy
Introduction: The Moral Economy, The Careers of a Concept
Jeremy Adelman
This essay explores the history of the idea of the moral economy—and the moral economy as an idea. It shows the ways in which debates about the market since the eighteenth century have been shadowed by debates and concerns about the ethical foundations of economic life. The history of capitalism has contained within it an internal tension between a romance with the market and nostalgia for worlds it dissolved. Moral economy has been a concept with many, global origins and different temporalities, depending on when the “transition to capitalism” ignited social movements and social ideas. In India and Mexico, as well as France and England, a plenitude of ideas about moral economics emerged to flow into a single, varied language of opposition and anxiety about market life.
The Moral Economies of Early Modern Europe
Francesca Trivellato
Scholars as diverse as E. P. Thompson and Thomas Piketty posit a clear break between pre-industrial, status-based economies and modern, contract-based capitalism. This essay revisits this standard account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism by focusing on a central and yet rarely discussed tenet of economic justice in early modern Europe: the need to balance individuals’ contractual freedom with the privileges assigned to different groups in any hierarchical society of status. In so doing, it reconstructs the pre-history of contemporary debates about the tension between consent and identity-bound inequality in liberal economies.
R. H. Tawney
Tim Rogan
R. H. Tawney is readily mistaken for an uncompromising moralist for whom the return of a Christian ethics of medieval intensity was the only way forward. Tawney never used the term “moral economy,” but he initiated the critical tradition that later gave that term currency. The term today bears the marks of these origins and is frequently seen as doctrinaire and retrograde. What put Tawney ahead of his own time, however, was his perception that the economists’ spiritual blindness was spreading. His concern was not to fill the ensuing vacuum with some prescribed content, but rather to make the deepening void notorious.
The Imperfect Promise of The Gift
Marion Fourcade
This essay analyzes the moral economy of the gift in the seminal and eponymous work by Marcel Mauss. I present Mauss’s argument and discuss the gift as a moral, or psychosocial, achievement. I conclude on the promises and pitfalls of the gift as an anchor to social solidarity.
Are the Two Approaches to Moral Economy Irreconcilable?
Didier Fassin
The concept of moral economy stems from two theoretical traditions: that of E. P. Thompson, which corresponds to the norms and obligations involved in traditional economies, and has nourished the works of social historians and political anthropologists; and that of Lorraine Daston, which characterizes the values and affects regulating the activity of a given group in a given time, and has inspired historians and anthropologists of science. This essay offers a third reading attempting to reconnect these irreconcilable approaches by considering a moral economy as the production, circulation, appropriation, and confrontation of values and affects with regard to a significant social object, such as immigration or punishment, rather than to a social group. This new approach allows us to address some of the issues raised by R. H. Tawney’s analysis of religion and by Marcel Mauss’s interpretation of the gift. Particular examples are drawn from the capitalist devaluation of human lives and the humanitarian asymmetrical relation of obligation.
On the Mexican Ejido
Emilio Kourí
Mexico’s indigenous villages (pueblos) have long been held as examples of functioning moral economies, spaces governed by principles of relative equity, reciprocity, communal landholding and collective responsibility. Guided by this enduring representation, the massive agrarian reform that followed the Revolution of 1910 created thousands of collective land grant communities (ejidos). This essay argues that the conception of pueblos and ejidos as natural, culturally-bound moral economies is founded on a longstanding historical mischaracterization of village social relations, and it outlines the complex intellectual and historiographic roots of that persistent and romantic image.
In an age of egregious inequality and rising authoritarian, many call for a new “moral economy” and turn to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation for inspiration. Yet Polanyi’s great insight is that those who cannot reckon with the moral economy of “market justice”—the claim that market outcomes, however unequal, are morally just—fail to understand the power of capitalism. Justified by its original claim to rest on natural science, market justice laid the predicate for democracy as mortal threat. Polanyi reveals market justice as based not on natural law but on predistributive political power, and builds his democratic socialist vision on the “reality of society.”
T. H. Marshall, the Moral Economy, and Social Rights
Samuel Moyn
At a crucial juncture in his famous lectures on “Citizenship and Social Class,” English sociologist T. H. Marshall explained that the new social rights he associated with the invention of the twentieth-century welfare state were in fact a blast from the past—a bequest from the moral economy to a later age grappling with political economy run amok. Marshall’s celebrated theory of social rights that followed provides one aperture from which to intervene in a dispute brewing between starkly alternative views of the relevance today of the moral economy tradition he invoked.
“I Am No Longer Answerable for Its Actions”: E. P. Thompson After Moral Economy
Timothy Shenk
E. P. Thompson’s classic 1971 article “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd” turned a forgotten locution into a cottage industry. But Thompson was surprisingly ambivalent about this academic success story. As discussion of “moral economy” burgeoned within the humanities, he watched grimly as talk of the “market economy” flourished in the wider world. His language had survived, but he took little consolation in the popularity of a concept that, stripped of its context, threatened to become a catchphrase.
Moral Economy in Its Place: The Contribution of James C. Scott
Joel Isaac
Despite appearances, James Scott doesn’t have much to tell us about the concept of moral economy. When he invoked the idea in his famous book The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Scott used it as a label of convenience, and he found it easy to drop in later work. Scott wanted a theory of peasant behavior that tracked actual peasant beliefs about fairness, reciprocity, and legitimacy. Only a genuine attempt to interpret peasant beliefs about their situation could hope to explain peasants' acceptance or (in extremis) rejection of the power of elites. Judgments of fairness concerning subsistence goods provided a kind of focal case, a threshold at which judgments of legitimacy could be expected to vary sharply. Scott derived this idea from sociological theories of exchange and reciprocity, not from Thompson, whose famous idea he grafted on to his already-completed book.
Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2020
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ARTICLES
Introduction: Technologies of Stateness
Nehal Bhuta, Guy Fiti Sinclair
The Introduction provides an overview of the dossier and its main themes. It situates the contribution in a wider literature and points towards new research horizons on the relationship between state-making and international organization.
The League of Nations, Ethiopia, and the Making of States
Megan Donaldson
This article uses the case of Ethiopia to illustrate how the League of Nations refracted approaches to statehood. It shows the League 'making' states in multiple ways, formulating new standards for admission, but also changing the context in which such standards could be debated, applied, and contested. The article looks beyond intellectual debates about the nature of the state, into exchanges within foreign ministries and League committees, as well as state-making projects pursued in Addis Ababa. This illuminates the fragility of interwar definitions of the state, and challenges narratives that locate the pathologies of 'peripheral' statehood in the post-1945 era.
Imperial Internationalism: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930–1932
Stephen Legg
The India Round Table Conference (London, 1930-32) is presented here as a site of imperial internationalism, at which radical anti-colonialism was subsumed within the liberal technology of the conference. First, the influence of the League of Nations on the conference is examined, through exploring its role as model, precedent, potential arbiter and training ground. Second the paper explores the influence of other (Pan-Islamic, labour and spiritual) forms of internationalism at the London conference. New theorisations of the international are brought to bear on significant new archival and prosopographical material, making an original contribution through revisiting a founding moment in Indian political history.
Forging Modern States with Imperfect Tools: United Nations Technical Assistance for Public Administration in Decolonized States
Guy Fiti Sinclair
This article examines the UN's programs of technical assistance for public administration as a "technology of stateness" during the postwar period of decolonization. Drawing on original research in the UN Archives, the article shows how these programs connected with a larger network of actors interested in promoting public administration reforms in decolonized states. Additionally, the article analyzes the assemblage of governmental rationalities and technologies advanced by UN technical assistance, finding both a tendency towards the centralization of state power and an effort to decentralize and disarm state bureaucracies. In doing so, the article suggests new lines of research connecting the colonial concept of "good government" to the more recent discourse of "good governance."
Development Projections: The World Bank in Calcutta in the 1970s
Corinna R. Unger
This article studies the World Bank's Calcutta Urban Development Project (CUDP) in the 1970s through the lens of institutional projection. Specifically, it focuses on the World Bank's effort to strengthen the administrative capacity of the state of West Bengal as part of and as a condition for the success of urban development. The article critically engages with the characterization of the World Bank as an 'anti-politics machine' and argues that case of the CUDP shows that the organization, rather than trying to depoliticize India's development problems, acknowledged the distinctly political nature of these problems and tried to solve them with managerial means.
Inscribing the State: Constitution Drafting Manuals as Textual Technologies
Sara Kendall
The rise of expert knowledge in constitutional matters marks a turn toward "constitutional technicity," where constitution drafting is regarded as a domain of technical expertise inhabited by neutral and politically divested actors. This article considers the constitution drafting manual or handbook as a genre in which technical expertise confronts the political. These documents consolidate a view of what constitutes "best practice" in the production of contemporary state identity, yet they also act into the field of state-building, naturalizing particular understandings of the state that reflect liberal legalist norms. In this sense the constitution-drafting manual is a consequential legal material that enlists values and actors in the production of contemporary stateness.
The State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South
Luis Eslava, Sundhya Pahuja
In this essay we re-describe the relationship between international law and the state, reversing the usual imagined directionality of the flow between the two. At its most provocative, our argument is that rather than international law being a creation of the state, making the state is an ongoing project of international law. In the essay, we pay particular attention to the institutionalised project of development in order to illuminate the ways in which international law gives form to, and actualises, states, and then recirculates from a multiplicity of points "within" them.
Afterword: International Organizations and Technologies of Statehood
Ole Jacob Sending
The afterword discusses the contributions to the symposium by drawing links to cognate fields such as international relations, international law, and organisational studies. It reflects on the many insightful observations and arguments in the different contributions, and points to areas for future research, but also to areas where more extensive engagement with cognate fields may have been warranted.
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Volume 10, Number 3, Winter 2019
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ARTICLES
Beyond and Against the State: Anarchist Contributions to Human Rights History and Theory
Mark Bray
Scholars of human rights have grappled with tensions between universal rights and state sovereignty. By incorporating the turn of the century anarchist conception of human rights against the state into the broader history of human rights, we gain an alternative vantage point to assess this fraught relationship. This article briefly surveys transnational anarchist activism against state atrocities before focusing on the implications of anarchist conceptions of natural, equal, universal rights for our understandings of freedom and autonomy.
Saving the Slaving Child: Domestic Work, Labor Trafficking, and the Politics of Rescue in India
Vibhuti Ramachandran
In recent years, anti-trafficking NGOs in New Delhi have highlighted the exploitative aspects of domestic work in India, rescuing impoverished young rural migrant girls brought by unregulated “placement agencies” to work in urban homes. This article examines how these donor-driven NGOs employ the U.S.-driven, globally pervasive frameworks of human trafficking and “modern-day slavery,” while working within the provisions of postcolonial Indian laws, and conducting rescues with the local police. Through ethnographic observations of a rescue operation, the article explores what it means to save a slaving child from domestic labor. It argues that the tensions between and among those subjected to exploitative work conditions and those rescuing them reveal conflicting constructions of slavery, trafficking, child labor, and childhood itself.
Introduction: Human Rights and Economic Inequality
Daniel Brinks, Julia Dehm, Karen Engle
The introduction situates this dossier on “Human Rights and Inequality” within broader scholarly and policy debates about the relationship between human rights and economic inequality, specifically about the extent to which human rights do, can, or should attend to economic inequality. It draws out the key arguments of each of the contributions and puts them in conversation with one another by describing the different strands and traditions of human rights scholarship and practice with which the various authors engage. Along the way, the introduction specifies the various types of economic inequality that have too often been lumped together—inequality within countries, among countries, and among individuals from around the world—and identifies the questions of measurement that must be addressed for a fruitful debate to take place. It concludes by recognizing that, notwithstanding their differences, all the contributions share an outrage at the scandal of inequality in our present and a commitment to imagining paths towards a more egalitarian and just world. The dossier demonstrates the continued need for engaged, ongoing, conversations about the multiple forms of economic inequality and the potential roles of human rights in addressing them.
Inequality, Human Rights, and Social Rights: Tensions and Complementarities
Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes, Sergio Chaparro Hernández
Economic inequality is increasingly recognized as one of the main problems of our time. But what human rights have to say about it? Are human rights effective tools for tackling inequality, as human rights practitioners have argued, or are they powerless and inadequate tools to challenge inequality in the age of neoliberalism, as stated recently by Yale’s professor Samuel Moyn? This article examines the complex relations between economicinequality and human rights, especially economic and social rights (ESR), by exploring the arguments behind these two opposite views. We propose an intermediate position: while human rights and discussionsabout inequality predominantly take place in autonomous fields, it is not onlypossible but crucial to overcome some of the pitfalls ofhuman rights law in relation to inequality in order to use it as an equalizinginstrument. Extreme inequality poses not only strong empirical obstacles to the enjoyment of human rights but alsoundermines core tenets of human rights law, such as the principle of equality of opportunity.These links allow us to bridge the gap between the two fields and to speak of inequality as ahuman rights issue. We explore five pathsto reinforce the equalizing potential of human rights law: 1) moving towards ‘empirical based normative standards’, 2) advancing interpretations of human rights law more sensitive to economic inequality, 3) enhancing the equalizing potential of human rights accountability mechanisms; 4) incorporating human rights concerns across different regimes of internationaleconomic law, and 5) providing strategies and arguments for supporting redistributive policies between and within countries.
Human Rights in an Unequal World: Structural Inequalities and the Imperative for Global Cooperation
Radhika Balakrishnan, James Heintz
Efforts to realize social and economic rights are currently being exercised in a context of extreme inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. This question of the impact of global inequalities on the realization of rights and development objectives extends to inequalities in power dynamics and policy space. The economic interdependencies that structure the global economy mean that the actions of governments in influential economies frequently constrain the ability of other countries to fully support the enjoyment of rights. This essay explores the relationship between global economic inequality and human rights. It demonstrates how inequality affects the enjoyment of rights worldwide, and how the human rights framework has implications for how we think about global inequalities.
Global Inequality and Human Rights: An Odd Couple
Richard Falk
In the current phase of global and national economic development, income inequality has become a widespread concern. This article focuses on what it calls “toxic inequality” in the United States that is attributed to several elements including the underlying individualism associated with capitalism and the tendency of neoliberal globalization to exert pressures that minimize social protection of vulnerable parts of the population. International law has not been effective in protecting societies against the disruptive effects of inequality, including its de-democratizing effects brought about by the reaction of the state to social rage directed at the established order. The article argues for a revised human rights approach to overcome toxic inequality, including the conditions that bring it about. One aspect of such an approach would be more energetic efforts to implement the norms of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, taking political steps to persuade the Unitec States to become a party to the treaty regime.
The Imperative of Redistribution in an Age of Ecological Overshoot: Human Rights and Global Inequality
Jason Hickel
Legal scholars worry that the human rights framework offers little leverage against the problem of economic inequality. By contrast, I argue that Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the right to an adequate standard of living) does provide such leverage. Given the realities of ecological overshoot, if we want to ratchet up the incomes of the poor in order to satisfy their rights under Article 25, we can no longer rely on the usual strategy of aggregate economic growth. Instead, this objective requires shifting existing income from the global rich to the global poor.
Inequality, Human Rights, and the New International Economic Order
Antony Anghie
Redressing global inequality was one of the key concerns of the Third World campaign to create a New International Economic Order (NIEO). However, human rights played no role in the NIEO which focused instead on transforming the international investment and trade regimes. This essay argues that the Third World countries were largely correct in their analysis of the limits of human rights. It draws upon insights of the NIEO experience to suggest why, in more recent times, human rights have largely failed to address the problem of global inequality in the face of neo-liberal globalization.
Righting Inequality: Human Rights Responses to Economic Inequality in the United Nations
Julia Dehm
This essay examines how UN human rights bodies engaged with the problem of economic inequality at different historical moments. It considers how the question of economic inequality was taken up in three different periods: in the period of human rights standard setting and implementation (1945-1968); during a period of global contestation and demands for a New International Economic Order (1968-1989); and finally during a period of growing neoliberal hegemony (1990-present). It suggests that considering the ways in which institutional debates within the UN have grappled in different periods with the problem of economic inequality – among countries, within countries and among citizens of the world – often at the instigation of countries of the global South, can enable critical thinking about possibilities and limits of human rights in our starkly unequal present. Moreover, retrieving these forgotten struggles and alternative conceptions and formulations of rights might provide impetus for reimagining the more redistributive possibilities for human rights in contemporary debates.
Inequality, Debt, and Human Rights: What Can We Learn from the Data?
James Galbraith
What can we learn from the data on economic inequality? First, that comparisons should be made very carefully. That said, inequality connects to human rights in many ways that may elude precise measurement but not common sense. For example, oligarchy is the enemy of the demos, as the Athenians have known since Socrates. An inherent imbalance stems from the fact that wealth is power, which creditors exercise over debtors. In considering how to reduce this power, when it comes to mobilizing people, high theory has uses, but it is much better to offer specific measures that will affect their lives.
Taxation and Equality: The Implications for Redressing Inequality and the Promotion of Human Rights
Dennis M. Davis
This essay examines the relationship between national tax policy and inequality. Tax policy changed dramatically in the last two decades of the 20th century with the rise of neoliberal economic policy insisting on a dramatic reduction of maximum marginal rates of income tax and a lowering of corporate tax rates. The essay deconstructs the justification for these policies, and argues that they have helped to increase levels of inequality.It also addresses the tax problems that have arisen by virtue of the globalization of economic activity and proposes measures to bolster the ability of the nation state to protect and indeed promote its tax base.
This essay explores the rhetorical and genre differences between human rights arguments and inequality arguments, speculating that the former privileges narrative as a dominant mode of representation and that the latter frequently require a poetics—paradoxically the poetics of numbers. Two South African NGOs—the Treatment Action Campaign, whose rationale deployed a health and human rights framework, and Equal Education, an organization deeply invested in arguments about inequalities in education and opportunity—are presented as examples of the defining contrast between the ways that human rights and inequality arguments broach the question of justice.