Globalising the Indigenous: The Making of International Human Rights From Below
Files
Description
The human rights field finds itself at a critical juncture. In addition to facing a formidable combination of challenges—the climate emergency, resilient populist-authoritarian governments, the impact of a global pandemic, rising socioeconomic inequalities, and polarising and invasive digital technologies—human rights have come under increasing scrutiny from scholars who view the current era as the ‘end times’ of the movement. Although critiques come from very different angles—from conservative social thought to postmodern critical legal studies—a distinctively progressive critique of human rights has been developed by some of the most influential contributors to this debate. According to this line of argument, the simultaneous global expansion of neoliberalism and the rise of international human rights over the last five decades is not a historical coincidence. In this view, by focusing on civil and political rights rather than on socioeconomic rights and rising inequality, human rights actors have provided political and legal ammunition to neoliberal capitalism. Given this diagnosis, critics tend to see little role for human rights in twenty-first-century progressive theory and politics. A striking feature of this line of criticism is that it is based on a highly limited view of the actual practice of human rights. It is a perspective whose eyes are directed largely at the most visible actors in the Global North. For Hopgood, for instance, ‘Human Rights are a New York–Geneva–London-centered ideology focused on international law, criminal justice, and institutions of global governance. Human Rights are a product of the 1%. Moyn’s criticisms are almost invariably focused on international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) such as Human Rights Watch, as if they were a proxy for the movement writ large. Therefore, paradoxically, the critics adopt a North-centric view of the field that is akin to that of the staunchest defenders of the traditional approach to human rights advocacy. This is the approach taken by some of those INGOs and other human rights actors that continue to operate along the lines of the intellectual, organisational and strategic paradigm of the second half of the twentieth century, which privileged the role of North-based NGOs in naming and shaming governments (mostly in the Global South) before receptive audiences (mostly in the Global North) in order to pressure the former to comply with international human rights norms. For defenders of this paradigm, naming and shaming is ‘still the human rights movement’s best weapon’, regardless of the facts that today’s populist authoritarian leaders are both shameless and eager to be named and that the world is undergoing epochal geopolitical, technological, ecological and economic transformations that render the traditional paradigm increasingly ineffective. Critics like Hopgood are right to call out persistent inequalities within the movement—for instance, between Northern versus Southern organisations, professional NGOs versus grassroots movements, white-led versus non-white-led organisations. However, the practice of the human rights movement is considerably more heterogeneous, dynamic and contested than the views of both critics and defenders of the status quo would suggest. Documenting and engaging with the everyday life of human rights requires broadening the field of vision well beyond Geneva, London or New York. This, in turn, calls for two conceptual and methodological moves. First, it entails tracking how the international standards developed in those sites are translated, implemented, indigenised, contested and even transformed at the national and local levels. Second, it involves looking into the active role of subaltern subjects, from racially oppressed communities to impoverished classes, women, undocumented migrants, indigenous peoples and other actors that are lumped together as ‘victims’ in the traditional view of rights. This expanded view creates analytical and empirical space to capture the myriad ways in which subaltern actors not only adopt or contest, but also often transform, create and re-export new human rights norms and frames that challenge not only the traditional paradigm of international human rights, but also the rules of neoliberal globalisation and capitalism themselves.
Source Publication
The Complexity of Human Rights: From Vernacularization to Quantification: Essays in Honour of Sally Engle Merry
Source Editors/Authors
Philip Alston
Publication Date
2024
Recommended Citation
Rodríguez-Garavito, César, "Globalising the Indigenous: The Making of International Human Rights From Below" (2024). Faculty Chapters. 1113.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1113
