The Politics and Antipolitics of Human Rights

At the beginning of the course we discussed the fact that you do not usually find revolutionary language in the language of human rights.  Wendy Brown takes up this point in her article, “Human Rights and Politics of Fatalism,” explaining that human rights activism “presents itself as something of an antipolitics—a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals” (4/453).  She makes a compelling and convincing argument that human rights is not apolitical or antipolitical, but is in fact a thinly veiled politics of neoliberalism.  Under this view, human rights narratives can be seen as propaganda rather than simply humanitarian. 

When Brown explains that “the point is that there is no such thing as mere reduction of suffering or protection from abuse—the nature of the reduction or protection is itself productive of political subjects and political possibilities” (11/460), I take this to mean that the campaign to focus on suffering is in and of itself political and cannot be otherwise. Human rights deals with the distribution of power in society by raising up suffering and abused bodies and setting up binary power relations of the powerless, who are suffering, and the powerful, who have the means to abolish suffering.  Within the paradigm of human rights, the ones to alleviate this suffering are those who believe in individual rights.

The U.S.’s political agenda makes Brown’s point for her -- even more explicitly -- in cases like the CIA’s fake vaccine program that was organized in order to get DNA from Osama bin Laden’s family.  The U.S. is operating on a double standard in which it says that it believes in human rights and purports to be involved in many Middle Eastern countries to improve individual freedoms, but it has used human rights as a shield for its agenda.  They are perverting the mission of human rights by using it as a front for sinister and underhanded political purposes, which undermines the effectiveness of human rights organizations in alleviating mass suffering.  In the minds of many Americans, blaming the CIA for attacks on polio vaccine workers in Pakistan and Nigeria may seem far-fetched, but the case is true, which suggests that the U.S. itself has invited terror on aid organizations by using them for espionage.

Brown argues that human rights "is a politics and it organizes political space, often with the aim of monopolizing it" and it can be seen as a "relatively unchecked globalization of capital, postcolonial political deformations, and superpower imperialism combining to disenfranchise peoples in many parts of the first, second, and third worlds...." (12/461)  The example of the CIA at work in countries where it seeks ideological and political power seems to corroborate the evidence that Brown provides in her article.  

The question I am left with in this specific conversation is one regarding the "other international justice projects" (461/462)  that she believes would be better suited to addressing issues that human rights organizations seeks to address.  Are these other organizations less political or do they simply represent a greater diversity of political interests that would loosen the grip of neoliberalism?  Or is this a more revolutionary stance that she is taking?