Human Rights and Social Movements - Softcover

Stammers, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074532911X ISBN 13: 9780745329116

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2009

Synopsis

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About this title

About the Author

Neil Stammers is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of Human Rights and Social Movements (Pluto, 2009), and co-editor of Global Activism, Global Media (Pluto, 2005).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Human Rights and Social Movements

By Neil Stammers

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2009 Neil Stammers
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2911-6

Contents

List of Figures, 
Acknowledgements, 
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
1 Getting Beyond the Hall of Mirrors, 
2 The 'Sociality' of Natural Rights, 
3 The Lost Nineteenth Century, 
4 The Paradox of Institutionalisation, 
5 New Movements? Old Wrongs?, 
6 Expressive and Instrumental Dimensions of Movement Activism, 
7 Analyses of Globalisation and Human Rights, 
8 Renewing the Challenge to Power, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

GETTING BEYOND THE HALL OF MIRRORS

To explore the significance of the relationship between social movements and human rights it is necessary to embark on a journey that traverses territory perhaps unfamiliar to some working in the field of human rights. It takes us beyond the specialist literature to draw from a range of academic disciplines and to re-examine some fundamental questions underpinning all forms of social analysis. The journey also requires some willingness to acknowledge and engage with complexity and ambiguity. The regurgitation of familiar assumptions and arguments – no matter how authoritative, established or theoretically well-honed – will not do. In particular, simplistic claims that human rights are necessarily and entirely either 'good' or 'bad' only serve to confuse and distort the debate about the origins, potential and limits of human rights. Yet much work that specifically focuses on human rights implicitly or explicitly tends towards one of these polar positions. I will use the terms 'uncritical proponents' and 'uncritical critics', sometimes shortened simply to 'proponents' and 'critics', as a way of referring to work that exhibits such tendencies. To understand why the literature on human rights is shaped in the way it is, we have to examine the ways in which assumptions and positions underlying much of that work are themselves patterned. To do this, I employ the metaphor of a hall of mirrors. My argument is that this underlying patterning has effectively hidden the link between human rights and social movements, so much so that understandings of human rights drawn from this literature are typically and systematically distorted.

While it may be relatively easy to demonstrate how the link between human rights and social movements has been obscured, to then go on to assess this link requires us to engage with specific approaches to social analysis. While these approaches are now well-recognised and well-respected within the social sciences generally, they have rarely been applied to the study of human rights. Thus to make these explicit and transparent, the second part of this chapter begins by looking at three of them: the relationship between actors, structures, agency and power; the nature of social change and social transformation, and the configuration of the relations between the social, the political, the economic and the cultural. Having set out my stall on these topics, I then look at the concept of social movements and explore how social movements impact on historical and social change. My argument here is that social movements can be innovative and creative and that, historically, ideas and practices in respect of human rights have been persistent and important constructions arising from the creative praxis of social movements.

The Hall of Mirrors

By suggesting that we can get beyond the hall of mirrors, I am not claiming that the authentic version of human rights will then somehow be magically revealed. Clearly, ideas and practices in respect of human rights do not just emanate from social movements praxis and there is no doubting that the scholarly literature has provided and developed many crucial insights in our understandings of human rights. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that we will find another story of human rights: one that is no less authentic and one which, moreover, provides us with ways to develop a new analytic framework through which the potentials and limits of human rights can be critically reassessed.

The sort of hall of mirrors I am talking about here is the type found at funfairs and carnivals: those that produce distorted, often grotesque, reflections of their subject matter. By the hall, I mean the entire range of contemporary social praxis around human rights worldwide. That includes all those ideas and practices connected to human rights whether these come from academic scholarship, non-governmental organisations, states, international institutions or social movements. The mirrors in the hall refer to that specialist scholarly literature whose specific and central focus is on human rights. This is the sort of literature that most human rights scholars would see as being 'within the field' and which is likely to appear on reading lists for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on human rights. Below I identify two ways in which those mirrors have been shaped and polished, firstly through academic disciplinarity and secondly through the ideological predispositions and commitments of authors and the institutions they are involved with. As will become clear, there are strong links between them but there are also important distinctions, not least because it is through academic disciplinarity that claims to intellectual rigour, objectivity and truth are often made.

My various discussions of the human rights literature throughout this book could quite properly be seen as an analysis of discourse. So it is worth briefly explaining why I have chosen not to present it through the methods of discourse analysis. As my above references to mirrors and distortion indicate, there is – in part – a 'realist' underpinning to my approach to social enquiry. This contrasts with 'idealist' trajectories often found in poststructuralist approaches to discourse analysis derived, for example, from the work of Michel Foucault or as developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. So, while I insist that human rights are and can only be socially constructed, the whole point of this book is to argue that there are nevertheless 'realities' to human rights that are not properly recognised or given appropriate signification in the 'rhetoric' that is the specialist scholarly literature on human rights. Linked to the above are two further specific reasons why I have chosen to work outside a 'discourse analytic' framework. Firstly, influential theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) have expanded their use of the term discourse to cover the whole of what I call here social praxis (see also Howarth 2000:Ch.6) thus threatening to obliterate any analytical distinction between 'rhetoric' and 'reality'. Secondly, key approaches to discourse analysis are rooted in what, in my view, is an untenable episte-mological assumption that models and approaches drawn from structural linguistics and its various derivatives can be usefully and meaningfully applied to the study of social relations in general (for example, Howarth 2000:13).

Academic Disciplines

Let me start with the apparently obscure point that there are strong 'imperialist' tendencies in academic disciplines. Practitioners often regard their own discipline as the 'master' discipline; the discipline through which all other academic disciplines should be understood. There are frequent attempts by one discipline to subordinate or colonise another. Additionally, practitioners in disciplines perceived as 'subordinate' often try to ape supposedly 'superior' disciplines in attempts to demonstrate the virility of their own work. As the terminology suggests academic disciplines are also highly disciplinary, their boundaries policed and their subject matter and methodologies vetted in their disciplinary associations and through the process of peer review for the top academic journals (Sayer 2003; Moran 2006). The importance and impact of these two tendencies ought to be clear enough within academic scholarship itself (although often they are not) but the fact that practitioners outside the academy have been trained within particular disciplines means that they are also likely to take the assumptions of 'their' discipline out into the wider world if, for example, they are employed as a researcher by an international institution or non-governmental organisation.

While territorial claims and arguments over legitimacy are familiar themes of academic debate, disciplines are neither monolithic nor homogeneous. Indeed, historically it has often been the work of disciplinary dissidents that has proved the most interesting and innovative. One straightforward explanation for this relates to the gaps or spaces that can exist between different disciplinary boundaries, meaning that potentially important aspects of a particular topic will be ignored except by those willing to step outside of their disciplinary boundaries. As Susan Buck-Morss puts it in a fascinating article on 'Hegel and Haiti', '[d]isciplinary boundaries allow counterevidence to belong to someone else's story' (Buck-Morss 2000:822).

Human rights is an unusual field of study. It is not a discipline in its own right and neither can it be confined within one academic discipline. That said, just a few disciplines have historically dominated the scholarship on human rights. By far the most important are philosophy and law, each claiming the centre of gravity of human rights within their own traditions. Somewhat less central but of increasing importance in the last few decades have been the disciplines of international relations and political science. So what are the key characteristics involved in these various disciplines? Firstly, philosophical approaches to human rights typically focus on the internal logic and/or analytical rigour of a canon of celebrated texts. In many university departments and programmes, this canon exclusively comprises the work of male thinkers of European descent. More fundamentally, there is often no attempt to examine human activity beyond the realm of thought. Indeed, what many people do when they theorise from such perspectives is intentionally ignore the real world in an attempt to grasp a cleaner, more pure, truth or logic. In other words, they try to 'get beyond the fray' so as to access some deeper truth or meaning. While an admirable ambition, one manifest consequence is that social activism and social struggles are usually ignored, except in so far as they can be reduced to philosophical ideas found in those canonical texts. Switching attention to law, human activity does come back into the picture. But most evidently this is activity in judicial institutions and the interpretation of legislation by lawyers, judges and legal scholars. At the heart of the study of law are, once again, the study and interpretation of texts and another canon, this time 'the law' as it stands at any particular point in time within a specified jurisdiction. While institutional structures of legal systems are studied, all other forms of social activism and social struggles are typically ignored except in so far as they intersect with the law or related legal processes. In international relations and political science there has been a strong tendency towards state-centric approaches. In the case of international relations this has traditionally meant looking at the 'outside' of state activity, that is, what states do in the inter-state system (see Walker 1993; Bayliss and Smith 2005). In the case of political science this has meant looking at the 'inside' of state activity, that is, what goes on within a particular state (or in a number of states that are being compared with one another). Despite this important distinction, both disciplines strongly reinforce the view that human rights are, or should be, understood through the analyses of states, state policies and/or the inter-state system. Now there are critical traditions in all these disciplines. Indeed, it has often been scholars from those critical traditions who have posed questions about the link between social movements and human rights. Nevertheless, it remains clear that neither the orientations nor the perceived boundaries of these disciplines are hospitable to any sort of analytical focus on the relation between human rights and social movements. In the last decade or two an increasing number of anthropologists and sociologists have begun working on human rights, with some suggestions that an 'anthropology of human rights' or a 'sociology of human rights' would add new and significant understandings to the field (Wilson 1997; Cowan, Dembour and Wilson 2001; Turner 2006). In addition, interesting and significant work is emerging from crossovers and encounters between anthropologists and lawyers (Riles 2006; Dembour 2006; Cowan, 2006). While, clearly, anthropology and sociology also have their own disciplinary orientations and boundaries, their broader focus on 'the cultural' and 'the social' suggest that they ought to be more open to examining the link between social movements and human rights.

One curious but important point to note here is the general absence of history as a discipline within the specialist academic scholarship on human rights. While some historians have worked on or around the subject (for example, Hunt 1996), histories of human rights are more likely to be written by scholars from the disciplines already discussed (see Ishay 2004). This absence of history as a discipline is particularly significant. Firstly, the relationship between human rights and social movements can only be fully grasped through historical, as well as social, analysis. Secondly, as we shall see below, especially in Chapter 2, there is a strong tendency by both proponents and critics to 'read history backwards' – that is, to confuse outcomes with processes and assume that history 'is' what history 'became'. While, of course, there are enormous historiographical debates involved here, the significant involvement of historians in the field of human rights could sensitise scholars from other disciplines to the importance of such issues.

In summary, while the field of human rights demands interdisciplinary scholarship, the mainstream literature on human rights has instead been dominated by the orientations and proclivities of particular disciplines largely inhospitable to the possibility of exploring the link between social movements and human rights.

Political Ideologies

The impact of ideological factors on the specialist scholarship on human rights can hardly be overestimated. Here I deal with political ideologies understood as 'world-views' or weltanshauung. It is important to stress that, in specifying the ideological groupings below, it is not my intention to homogenise them. Ideologies are typically diverse, sometimes contradictory, sometimes crosscutting and sometimes overlapping. Nonetheless, it is clear that each of these ideological groupings have had a substantive impact on the way in which ideas and practices around human rights are understood and regarded. Without going into detail, it is important briefly to sketch out key themes as they bear on human rights.

'Classical Liberalism'/Neo-liberalism

A foundational feature is a commitment to stark forms of individualism. Flowing from this is a privileging of an atomised individual pursuing her/his material interests which lies at the centre of a particular understanding of social relations. Freedom in 'the market' is taken to be the archetypal expression of freedom in general. Classical liberals/neo-liberals are not anarchists, they believe in a small but strong state. In other words, state power is regarded as both necessary but an ever present danger. Hence the almost exclusive focus on negative liberties and rights (that is, rights which protect the individual from state power). For classical liberals, only political power (in modern terms, state power) is identified as a problematic and dangerous form of power. There is little or no commitment to ideas and values of equality and solidarity

'Social Liberalism'/Social Democracy

Social liberalism/social democracy appears to make a significant break with the foundational individualism of classical liberalism and, in this sense, appears to work from a very different set of assumptions. Most importantly, the individual is recognised as a social individual not an atomised one. While the extent and depth of this recognition can be questioned (see Stammers 1995) it does lead to accounts of human rights that appear distinct from classical/neo-liberal versions. While social liberalism/social democracy remains committed to the capitalist market as a site of innovation, growth and allocation, it recognises the potential for markets to produce inequalities which can have serious adverse social consequences. Thus, rather than seeing markets as an expression of freedom, markets are seen as necessary but problematic. Social liberalism/social democracy thus emphasises some form of management of markets to ameliorate inequalities. Social liberalism/social democracy embraces notions of positive as well as negative liberties and rights but can be highly state-centric in its orientation to them. Social liberalism/social democracy is also much more sensitive and accommodating to issues around equality and solidarity but again state-centric, in most guises committed to elite rule and 'technocratic governance' (Stammers 2001a).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Human Rights and Social Movements by Neil Stammers. Copyright © 2009 Neil Stammers. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 074532911X
• ISBN 13: 9780745329116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296