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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PPSS - Polity Political Sociology series
- Sprache: Englisch
Why do powerful states like the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia repeatedly fail to meet their international legal obligations as defined by human rights instruments? How does global capitalism affect states’ ability to implement human rights, particularly in the context of global recession, state austerity, perpetual war, and environmental crisis? How are political and civil rights undermined as part of moves to impose security and surveillance regimes?
This book presents a framework for understanding human rights as a terrain of struggle over power between states, private interests, and organized, “bottom-up” social movements. The authors develop a critical sociology of human rights focusing on the concept of the human rights enterprise: the process through which rights are defined and realized. While states are designated arbiters of human rights according to human rights instruments, they do not exist in a vacuum. Political sociology helps us to understand how global neoliberalism and powerful non-governmental actors (particularly economic actors such as corporations and financial institutions) deeply affect states’ ability and likelihood to enforce human rights standards.
This book offers keen insights for understanding rights claims, and the institutionalization of, access to, and restrictions on human rights. It will be invaluable to human rights advocates, and undergraduate and graduate students across the social sciences.
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Seitenzahl: 370
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
1 The Human Rights Enterprise and a Critical Sociology of Human Rights
Introduction
Dominant approaches
Toward a critical sociology of human rights
Why we need a critical sociology of human rights
Why focus on the US?
What is to follow
Notes
2 Power and the State: Global Economic Restructuring and the Global Recession
Getting started – human rights and the state
Sociological theories of the state
State theory, social movements, and human rights
Neoliberal economic globalization “from above”: the human rights implications of global economic restructuring in greater detail
Human rights and resistance in the face of recession and owning class impunity
Notes
3 The Human Rights Enterprise: A Genealogy of Continuing Struggles
Social movement scholarship and some key definitions
Anatomy of a human rights struggle in the US:
anti-racism and civil rights
Racial justice in the twenty-first century
Struggle for racial justice: concluding comments
Notes
4 Private Tyrannies: Rethinking the Rights of “Corporate Citizens”
Who counts?
Corporate power and “personhood”
Corporations and the further corruption of democratic governance
At what cost? Shrinking constitutional and human rights for real people
Opportunities for action
Notes
5 Current Contexts and Implications for Human Rights Praxis in the US
US policy confronts civil and political rights in the world
Let’s get our priorities straight
Engage on all fronts
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Political Sociology series
William T. Armaline, Davita Silfen Glasberg, and Bandana Purkayastha, The Human Rights Enterprise: Political Sociology, State Power, and Social Movements
Daniel Béland, What is Social Policy? Understanding the Welfare State
Cedric de Leon, Party & Society: Reconstructing a Sociology of Democratic Party Politics
Nina Eliasoph, The Politics of Volunteering
Hank Johnston, States & Social Movements
Richard Lachmann, States and Power
Siniša Malešević, Nation-States and Nationalisms: Organization, Ideology and Solidarity
Andrew J. Perrin, American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter
John Stone and Polly Rizova, Racial Conflict in Global Society
The Human Rights Enterprise
Political Sociology, State Power, and Social Movements
William T. Armaline, Davita Silfen Glasberg, and Bandana Purkayastha
polity
Copyright © William T. Armaline, Davita Silfen Glasberg, and Bandana Purkayastha 2015
The right of William T. Armaline, Davita Silfen Glasberg, and Bandana Purkayastha to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8818-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
We would first like to thank all of the thinkers, teachers, artists, revolutionaries, students, activists, journalists, whistleblowers, agitators, and organizers – famous and nameless – who gave their lives and freedom so others could have a shot at a decent world.
This book is our attempt to place a critical sociology of human rights and sociological concepts (“human rights enterprise,” “human rights praxis”) in the canon of human rights scholarship. More importantly, this book is meant to inform a human rights praxis that might directly confront oppression and threats to collective human survival.
Very special thanks are owed to Roseanne Njiru and Erika Del Villar for their work copy-editing and compiling the index. If our work meets the critical standards of an academic readership, it’s because of their tireless efforts to clean and finalize our manuscript. Similarly, we’re indebted to our many reviewers for their guidance and constructive criticism. Scholarship should be tempered – worked and reworked for strength and aesthetic. This is never done alone.
On that note, we would like to express our endless gratitude to our editor Jonathan Skerrett and production editor India Darsley at Polity Press, and to copy-editor Helen Gray, for the editing, stewardship, promotion, and production of this book. We are fortunate to have met such fine, talented, and hard-working professionals in this process. Additional gratitude is owed to our friends and colleagues at San José State University and the University of Connecticut for their continued support.
We would also like to acknowledge our friendship and mutual support over several years working together on two books, journal articles, and several conference presentations. We have each become better teachers and scholars from our friendship, and highly recommend that others in academe take advantage of opportunities to do the same.
Davita would like to thank her ever-growing family: her children Morgan, Gillian and Scott, Irwin’s children Alan and Julie, Terri and Rich, Aaron, and Liana, as well as her grandson Scottie and Irwin’s grandchildren Jarrod, Sammie, Eli, and Jonah. They continue to inspire her, teach her so much about humility and humanity and all that truly matters in this life, and enrich her existence beyond measure.
Bandana would like to thank her family and friends across India, France, the USA, South Africa, England, and Australia, but especially Indra and Aheli Purkayastha who have to live through endless nights and weekends of work, and who continue to cheer every book and every achievement as they take on all the work left undone. A special acknowledgment of the memory of all the family members on whose shoulders she stands today.
Finally, William would like to thank his wife Nicole Steward and dog Chomsky for reminding him of everything worth living for. He would also like to thank Blake, Asa, and Donaisha for their laughter and joy.
1The Human Rights Enterprise and a Critical Sociology of Human Rights
Introduction
As teachers, we share the experience of students asking about the “point” of human rights in the United States, since no one seems to know or talk about them, and since they carry little weight in US courts. While we disagree with the notion that formal international human rights are irrelevant, we owe our students and readers the courtesy of honest reflection. The United States is far from internalizing and employing international human rights practice, and has a contradictory relationship to human rights as a body of international law.
This book goes into production as a leaked Senate Intelligence Committee report now details the extent and highly illegal nature of the CIA’s use of “harsh interrogation techniques” – torture – at Guantánamo Bay and other secret “black sites” across the world, following the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York City. The Guantánamo Bay detention facility is in itself a direct challenge to the civil and political human rights to due process1 and protection from arbitrary arrest and detention.2 Of the 154 people still imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay from 22 different countries, 76 of them have long since been cleared for release by the US government, and 45 of them are being held even though the US government admitted that it lacked the necessary evidence to bring formal charges of any kind. In total, the US has imprisoned 779 people there – at least 21 have been children, the youngest of whom was only 13 years old (ACLU 2014). Techniques of torture used on suspects and detainees at Guantánamo and other detention/rendition sites “included waterboarding, which produces a sensation of drowning, stress positions, sleep deprivation for up to 11 days at a time, confinement in a cramped box, slaps and slamming detainees into walls” (Watkins, Landay, and Taylor 2014). The international community has repeatedly condemned CIA torture programs as a violation of international law (UDHR, Article 5; ICCPR, Article 7), but up until this point the US Justice department, CIA, and Department of Defense have argued vehemently that the interrogation techniques were legal, and did not amount to torture (“cruel and unusual punishment”) as defined by the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution. Previous arguments by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel stated that methods like waterboarding were not torture because those carrying out the interrogations “didn’t have the specific intent of inflicting severe pain or suffering” (Watkins, Landay, and Taylor 2014).
However, the newly leaked report punches holes in these already questionable legal claims. It includes evidence that “The CIA used interrogation methods that weren’t approved by the Justice Department of CIA headquarters. The agency impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making regarding the program. The CIA actively evaded or impeded congressional oversight of the program. The agency hindered oversight of the program by its own inspector general’s office” (Watkins, Landay, and Taylor 2014). In addition, the report calls into question the thesis of former Bush administration officials and award-winning film Zero Dark Thirty – what comedian Bill Maher rightfully called a “despicable product placement for torture” – that techniques like waterboarding were somehow effective in the pursuit and prosecution of Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. Indeed, the defenders of US torture programs in pursuit of the disastrous “war on terror” in the Middle East and North Africa cannot argue their efficacy, even on the now tired basis of “national security” and “keeping people safe.” These programs, and the efforts of Bush and Obama administration officials to passionately defend their legality and legitimacy, at the same time refusing to even consider criminal indictments of program architects, embody the completely contradictory and hypocritical stance of the US government with regard to the “rule of law,” international law in particular. They also demonstrate a central flaw in how we go about “doing” human rights in the world – where state governments are assumed to reasonably represent the interests of their people (rather than, say, the interests of capital or the elite), and states are structurally positioned as the guarantors of human rights practice in the world.
Further, the international legal system designed to facilitate universal human rights through the actions of member states currently struggles to keep pace with threats to collective human survival, let alone rights practice (Chomsky 2007a; Schellnhuber 2012; Parenti 2011; IPCC 2013). Beyond such blunt responses, it’s difficult to engage the common questions of our students in our professional roles since sociologists in the US have yet to engage fully with academic or applied work explicitly dedicated to human rights.
With all that in view, we have two goals for this book. We first aim to identify the potential contribution of (political) sociology to the studying and realizing of human rights, and to define a “critical sociology of human rights” as a maturing, relatively new3 concentration. Second, we’ll demonstrate the utility of political sociology to interpret, critique, and re-envision contemporary human rights praxis. Human rights praxis refers to the process through which theory, scholarship, and/or cultural practice inform social action to realize human rights, and, in turn, how the empirical history of human rights struggles can and should inform scholarship. We hope our work provides a provocative and convincing argument on how to inform and participate in human rights struggles, while demonstrating in some detail how sociologists make significant contributions to contemporary human rights scholarship.
Political sociology is a strong and vibrant specialty in the broader discipline of sociology and social science. Political sociology evolved through investigations of power, particularly in describing the relationship between the state,4 the economy, and society. This specific body of political sociological literature is referred to as critical state theory, the subject of chapter 2. Simply speaking, political sociologists are concerned with understanding how power works in, through, and between human societies. Specifically, political sociologists tend to examine various forms of domination and resistance, measures of inequality, and the ways that ruling relationships between people and between societies are affected by social movements, as is demonstrated by social movement theory, the subject of chapter 3. Political sociologists have a great deal to offer human rights scholarship in that: (1) as sociologists Freeman (2009, 2011) and Woodiwiss (2005) suggest, laws and (human) rights are ultimately expressions and embodiments of state institutionalized power, which is a central concept for political sociologists; (2) international human rights law is a product of treaties and agreements between states, and conceptualizing the state is a primary goal of political sociologists; and (3) efforts to define and realize5 human rights have often taken the form of social movements. Indeed, the history of human rights can and should be seen as a history of social struggle over very real matters of power, resources, and political voice.6 These realizations should have significant implications for how one goes about doing intellectual and applied human rights work, and should place certain demands on previously dominant approaches.
Dominant approaches
Traditionally dominant human rights scholarship from the fields of law and political science has tended to focus primarily on: (1) formal legal approaches to defining and realizing human rights in our world (international law and international relations); (2) the various legal and philosophical traditions that provide the foundation for what we now understand as international human rights and humanitarian law (political theories); and (3) the relationships between state policy and politics at the national and international levels (international relations and comparative politics).7 In other words, the story of human rights is often focused on the story of the United Nations (UN), and the origins and evolution of human rights as a legal concept and body of international law.
From a legal standpoint, human rights are defined and articulated by human rights instruments, formal agreements between participating UN member states that sign (agree in principal with) and ratify (enter legally binding agreement with) the instrument. The most basic, original, legally fundamental set of human rights can be found in the cluster of instruments called the International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR), consisting of the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its binding Covenants, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). International human rights are further articulated through “single issue” instruments such as the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Many but not all of these instruments are legally binding as international treaties. The international obligations of most states under multinational or bilateral treaties are found in and articulated by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties established in 1969 (Goodhart 2009). Specifically, states that sign and ratify binding human rights instruments are bound to respect (not directly violate the treaty), protect (prevent others, such as private corporations, from violating the rights defined in the treaty through the rule of law), and fulfill (create an environment in which people can reasonably enjoy their rights) the rights defined in the instrument (Donnelly 2003, 2010). These instruments ultimately codify human rights as legal obligations of member states, subject to the ability, will, and resources of states and state actors (governments) to fulfill these international legal obligations.
The United Nations and human rights instruments evolved out of the observation that states could not always be trusted to ensure the rights of their citizens, as made clear in the acts of genocide and nuclear destruction that characterized World War II (Lauren 2011; Ishay 2008). These same states granted themselves the authority and responsibility of designing and implementing human rights and humanitarian law through the newly minted United Nations. One might note the seemingly obvious contradictions of such an expectation, while noting the repeated inability since the inception of the UN to persuade states – powerful ones in particular – to meaningfully ratify key human rights instruments in full, let alone abide by their stated legal obligations. Scholars have for some time pointed out the simultaneous near universal acceptance of fundamental human rights and the legitimacy of international bodies of law, and the equally common tendency for these same states to excuse non-compliance with international law due to state sovereignty (Donnelly 2003; Ishay 2008; Stammers 1999).8
Powerful states like the US often undermine the binding nature of ratified instruments through inserting “fine print” or reservations – most commonly, the claim that instruments are “not self executing” (Hertel and Libal 2011; Blau and Frezzo 2012; Armaline, Glasberg, and Purkayastha 2011). In so doing, the global hegemon takes great care to define its role as a chief architect of legal instruments, without any of the pesky responsibilities or obligations outlined in those instruments (Chomsky 2007a, 2007b).
Absent straightforward enforcement mechanisms that are more common at national and regional levels (such as the European Union), international human rights instruments are often bolstered by oversight organizations whose purpose is to monitor and, to whatever extent possible, encourage the implementation of human rights by member states. These oversight committees are typically established through optional protocols – additional agreements that can supplement instruments with a variety of tools or provisions meant to facilitate compliance. Common examples would include the United Nations Human Rights Committee, established by the First Optional Protocol (114 member states) to oversee compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), or the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) established to oversee compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).
The collectivity of these international legislative bodies, oversight organizations, and the growing number of officially partnered non-governmental organizations (NGOs) vested with the task of ensuring human rights, are called human rights regimes. These regimes can be found at various levels: global (UN), regional (such as the Council of Europe/European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)), or local (such as “human rights cities”9). The assumption of human rights regimes is that they have the authority and ability to hold states – or the appropriate level of state government – to the letter and intent of human rights instruments. Although theoretically the establishment of international human rights instruments and human rights regimes would seem to introduce a powerful agreement among nations as to the meaning of human rights and their obligation to ensure them, in practice this is simply not the case. For instance, research suggests that the ratification of human rights instruments does not seem to have a “normative” effect on human rights practices within the member state, particularly for less democratic states (Hathaway 2002). This is not to suggest that ratification is meaningless. It’s to suggest that ratification isn’t the end of the story – we cannot assume that legal rights in theory translate to practice. Indeed, we live in a world that is incredibly far from reflecting universal human rights practice with any consistency. We will return to this point full force in coming chapters, controversial for some dominant scholars but seemingly obvious to everyday people struggling under neoliberal capitalism, war, state surveillance, incarceration, foreign refugee status, and impending ecological collapse.
Without delving too deeply into the large and well-represented body of literature in political science and legal studies concerning human rights instruments and human rights regimes, it can be said that “legal scholars and political scientists have dominated the study of human rights and, as a result, these studies focus on the courts and governments, almost as if the state alone were responsible for human rights innovations” (Clement 2011: 128). This is not to suggest that formal, legal approaches to defining and realizing human rights are somehow unimportant, illegitimate, or completely ineffective; nor that scholarship on the legal aspects of human rights work has no place. In fact, we join others (Blau and Frezzo 2012; Hertel and Libal 2011) in urging powerful and resistant states like the US to ratify and internalize any number of international and regional instruments, such as the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR). To be fair, for traditional scholarship out of law and political science, the focus on states and legal regimes is as much a feature of disciplinary necessity as of intellectual choice.
As Foucault (1977) suggested of disciplines such as criminology in relation to modern forms of punishment and social control, scholarly disciplines often form and evolve in many ways to reify uncritically the very institutions, policies, and practices under investigation. In this sense, traditional disciplines are at a loss to explain the central problems and contradictions that continue to plague efforts to achieve universal human rights practice via international law and the duties of states. Unlike political sociologists, the fields of law and political science tend to treat the state and its legitimate authority as somehow assumed and unquestionable, where the state and its legal authority are social facts that elude critical reflection or thorough conceptualization in real (particularly political economic) contexts. Further, these often-positivistic analyses of human rights work begin and end with the creation of legal rights and mechanisms.
A similar critique was levied by anthropologists representing the ethnographic turn since the late 1990s, who suggested that human rights scholarship failed to analyze whether or not – let alone why – any number of human rights instruments and legal mechanisms had any effect on the ground, in the lives of actual people. In this vein, they (Wilson 1997, 2001, 2006; Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001; Goodale 2006) investigate the “social life of rights,” insisting that the success or failure of any international or national law meant to facilitate human rights practice would ultimately depend on how real people in real socio-cultural contexts come to interpret and then interact with state mechanisms and state policy. Similarly, sociologists since the 1990s have entered the human rights stage motivated by the gap between legal discourse and social realities, particularly exacerbated and brought to light during the height of social conflict over neoliberal economic globalization.
Toward a critical sociology of human rights
Sociological analyses of human rights offer a welcome and muchneeded addition to a body of scholarship long dominated by other fields. This should come as no surprise given the legacy of scholarship for the explicit purpose of social justice and social change that defines even classic critical sociology (e.g., Karl Marx, W. E. B. Du Bois) as a body of intellectual and political work (Feagin and Vera 2001). Sociological work explicitly dedicated to the concept of human rights seems to have most recently emerged when social problems such as skyrocketing global wealth disparities and disastrous neoliberal development plans came to the forefront in conflicts over economic globalization in the 1990s. This body of literature illustrated the usefulness of classic sociological theory and method for the analysis of human rights as a concept, legal regime, and broader body of social movements (Turner 1993, 2006; Waters 1996; Stammers 1999). Sociologists and some critical anthropologists immediately set themselves apart from dominant human rights approaches with their social constructivist approach (Waters 1996; Morris 2006) while questioning the notion that rights practices could be achieved through responsibly acting governments rather than the social movements so often needed to keep them in check (Stammers 1999). This would seem readily apparent from the anti-globalization movement at the time that openly targeted corporate and state power represented by new, powerful, non-democratic, unaccountable international decision-making bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO). At the height of the anti-globalization movement, well-documented, high-profile street battles and sustained civil disobedience erupted in cities like Seattle to resist the unchecked power yielded by solidarity between corporations and powerful military states (McNally 2006; Klein 2000, 2010). Contemporary forms of public demonstration, resistance, and organized disobedience, as well as the police and military strategies to confront them, have all arguably been shaped by this period of political conflict.
Critical sociologists, also informed by the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements of the past 20 years, go further to conceptualize human rights as a contested terrain and product of social struggle (Clement 2008, 2011; Armaline and Glasberg 2009; Armaline, Glasberg, and Purkayastha 2011). They work from an historical observation: the struggles that ultimately define and realize human rights are often against or in spite of the states charged with the protection of rights in the first place. Further, human rights struggles are increasingly shaped by and targeted toward systems of privilege and oppression and their social and ecological effects – neoliberal economic globalization (capitalism) in particular. This recent body of critical sociological work should be seen as a precursor to what follows here, as it built the beginnings of a consistent critique of human rights as a legal project and shed light on the implications of critical sociological inquiry – how human rights can and should be “done.” That said, there is still no easily identifiable, theoretically consistent sociology of human rights that offers both a fundamental critique of dominant approaches to human rights, and uniquely sociological concepts with clear applications for public intellectuals in the field of human rights.
We aim to join others in changing that here. Drawing from recent scholarship (see, for example, Stammers 1999; Sjoberg, Gill, and Williams 2001; Blau and Frezzo 2012; Freeman 2011; Blau and Moncada 2005; Brunsma, Smith, and Gran 2012; Clement 2011; Armaline and Glasberg 2009; Armaline, Glasberg, and Purkayastha 2011), we will generally define the critical sociology of human rights as an approach with at least five unique characteristics: (a) law and legal discourse is seen as socially constructed and understood as an expression and source of institutionalized power; (b) the state and other formal bodies of institutionalized authority, such as the United Nations or International Monetary Fund, are approached critically and are fully conceptualized in appropriate structural context(s); (c) civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights are seen as inextricably linked (rather than exclusive categories of rights from which states can successfully pick and choose), particularly at the level of human rights practice or implementation; (d) sociologists, if public intellectuals, are presumably concerned with formal human rights regimes and international law – or human rights scholarship for that matter – to the extent that they tend to inhibit or facilitate human rights practice,10 however substantively defined;11 and (e) sociologists share the historical perspective that human rights as a concept and practice are ultimately the product of social movements and social struggle.
Why we need a critical sociology of human rights
If we apply political sociology to analyze the relative success or failure of human rights as an intellectual and legal pursuit (Are human rights working? Why or why not?), a fundamental critique of dominant human rights scholarship and formal, legal human rights regimes emerges. We see that often states – especially powerful states like the US, Russia, or China – cannot or will not meet their international legal obligations as defined by human rights instruments (Armaline and Glasberg 2009; Clement 2008, 2011; Blau and Frezzo 2012). This is largely because of conflicts over state sovereignty, “national” (read: dominant) interests, and the lack of necessary resources and/or political will to meet such obligations.
Political sociology helps us to understand the relative failure of states to realize universal human rights practice in real political economic contexts. State theory and empirical research on the connections between state and capital suggest that states, particularly within the context of neoliberal global capitalism, are far more constrained by the wishes of capitalists and the shifting structural necessities of the capitalist system than by the material and political needs of the vast majority of people. Seen in context, human rights are “one of the few countersystems available for critically evaluating, for example, the neo-liberal political and economic model, which has attained almost total global dominance” (Sjoberg, Gill, and Williams 2001). The instrumental and structural limitations placed on states by capital directly confront the expectations and model put forth by formal human rights regimes and traditionally dominant human rights scholarship. States are defined as the primary responsible mechanisms and “duty-bearing” parties for achieving universal human rights practice. For these instruments to work, state governments must choose human rights practice over the accumulation of capital for the corporate owning class, wherever these interests conflict. Unfortunately for proponents of classic Western liberal theory, such rights protection is far from the norm. What deeper understanding of states and modern institutions of rule can be gleaned from what seem to be such obvious, but often overlooked, observations? What if states commonly cannot or will not provide the most fundamental dignities to their people?
Moreover, the question of whether and how well states recognize and enforce human rights is not simply one of motivations and intentions of political leaders: these leaders function in an institutional setting where non-governmental actors from powerful institutions (particularly economic actors like corporations and financial institutions) affect the state’s ability to do so. For example, even a well-meaning state will be hard-pressed to provide for human rights to food, shelter, healthcare, education, and adequate employment in the face of corporate decisions to export jobs or international aid regime impositions of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) as the conditions upon which aid is secured. Such was the case when Mexico was forced, in 1981, to accept a structural adjustment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the expense of the state’s ability to provide for a wide range of social welfare expenditures. This loss of domestic policymaking power in the face of powerful non-governmental actors has been repeated around the globe as a feature of neoliberal capitalism and “development.”
Further, the state itself is not a separate, independent entity when it comes to other social institutions; it enables and supports various institutions (education, for example) that in turn confine and affect the state’s range of discretion. Perhaps most importantly, the capitalist political economy affects the state, even as it is structured, made possible, enhanced, and encouraged by the state. For example, as we will see in chapter 2, the US Congress deregulated the US banking industry in the 1980s. This empowered financial institutions to engage in highly risky and at times illegal practices that ultimately undermined the national and international economies, while enriching the banks and their leaders. In so doing, the state’s ability to address increasing hunger, homelessness, and unemployment were consequently and willfully constrained. Similarly, corporate interests in the military-industrial complex12 escalate fears of international terrorism that in turn coerce state policymaking to engage in unjustified and illegal wars (e.g., the second US invasion of Iraq) and to compromise the right to privacy,13 among a myriad of other constitutional and human rights, in the name of national security.
Finally, states do not exist in a vacuum, disconnected and isolated from the rest of the world. This is why political sociologists speak of political economy, to demonstrate the inextricable link between states and capitalism, and between owners and rulers – if and when they aren’t the same people (Parenti 2010). How do global capitalism and neoliberal approaches to global economic development, for example, affect states’ ability to implement human rights, particularly in the contemporary political economic climate of global recession and state austerity? Global economic restructuring14 refers to the reorganization of international economic policies and practices since the 1970s, including public and private relations and processes of production and finance capital, by existing economic and political elites. That is, powerful corporate actors such as major corporations and commercial banks, along with key state actors, strongly influence international policies and practices to ensure that these policies and practices remain consistent with their interests. This reorganization continues to have enormous effects on the political, economic, social, and cultural relations within and among societies, and shapes human rights as a terrain of struggle. While human rights instruments and human rights regimes focus on states and their compliance with international human rights standards, what happens when private economic relationships and practices create obstacles? How do human rights regimes exert authority over powerful private economic actors to seek compliance with the standards enumerated in human rights instruments?
We will explore the questions posed so far through what we call the human rights enterprise: the process through which human rights are defined and realized, including but not limited to the legal instruments and regimes often authored by international elites. The human rights enterprise includes both legal, statist approaches to defining and achieving human rights through agreements among duty-bearing states, and social movement approaches that manifest as social struggles over power, resources, and political voice. The human rights enterprise offers a way to conceptualize human rights as a terrain of social struggle, rather than a static, contingent legal construct. In an examination of human rights as a terrain of social struggle, the contradictory role of states becomes more clear: while states are the primary duty bearers under international law, social movements most responsible for realizing human rights – from the civil rights movement to modern anti-globalization, anti-war, environmental, and anti-capitalist movements – almost always form against or in spite of the states (and often partnered private interests) charged with rights protection. The role of states in the broader human rights enterprise is further complicated by their tendency to appropriate and apply international law and the legal discourse of human rights to legitimate self-interested policies and practices (Peck 2011).
An analysis of the contemporary human rights enterprise makes clear that human rights are often developed and forced into practice through the struggles of grassroots organizations and non-elites from below – not so much from the compassionate actions of states to respect their international agreements. Efforts to achieve human rights practice should be understood as struggles over power and resource that are often waged against or in spite of states and other powerful interests. Finally, the specific history of struggles to achieve rights practice suggests that grassroots organizing and direct action, including forms of open resistance and disobedience, typically involving networks of non-governmental (NGO), social movement (SMO), and community organizations, are the most commonly successful approaches (see also Clement 2008, 2011) to realizing human rights in any lasting, meaningful way.
Why focus on the US?
The US is the sole global hegemon and military superpower, while also perhaps one of the worst actors when it comes to direct and indirect involvement in the violation of human rights instruments and the undermining of international law, as illustrated through the sizeable literature on American exceptionalism (Hertel and Libal 2011; Ignatieff 2009) and the chapters to follow. The United States, with little criticism (if not support) from some of the most dominant US-based human rights NGOs (Peck 2011), at times coopt human rights discourse to pursue more narrow interests – the Iraq War is the most glaring contemporary example. Scholars have for some time criticized the Western dominance of human rights law and discourse since their inception (Ishay 2008). As a related point, it seems necessary to mention how a powerful Western nation like the US can simultaneously fail in its own human rights obligations while employing human rights discourse to achieve unrelated ends – both undermining the success of the human rights enterprise and illustrating the questionable role of states in that process. Human rights discourse is appealing for such purposes in that:
[For] the United States, which is more forthright than today’s Europe in proclaiming its national interest, the ideology of Human Rights serves to endow foreign interventions with a crusading purpose that can appeal to European allies and above all to their domestic opinion, as well as to the English-speaking world in general (Canada and Australia in particular). It is the tribute vice pays to virtue, to echo LaRochefoucauld. (Johnstone 2014)
With all of that in mind, this work focuses on the United States for several reasons. Since the sphere of economic and military influence of the US is so deep and vast, arguably without historical precedent, and since the US is also home to many of the most powerful corporations on earth, US domestic and foreign policy has massive effects on the human rights prospects of everyone else. Further, unlike students and public intellectuals elsewhere, those of us in the United States arguably have the greatest capacity to resist and affect the actions of the US government and related business interests (see also Chomsky 2007a,b). In this sense we advocate that human rights scholars and activists in the US focus inward, to accompany and inform resistance against the most powerful corporations and military state the world has ever known. Such a position should also be seen as in line with the traditions of public intellectualism and liberation sociology (Feagin and Vera 2001), where one openly studies society in order to engage, change, inform, and improve it. Though the human rights enterprise and other concepts offered here can be employed to any number of global contexts, we apply them to the United States in order to reiterate the importance of this reflection and focus inward.
What is to follow
In addition to the academic task of conceptualizing a critical sociology of human rights, this book is intended to address what we see as the most pressing questions facing the broad efforts to define and realize human rights practice in the lives of people and in the lasting structure of our communities. What are the fundamental problems with dominant approaches to defining and realizing human rights through the formal, legal agreements between nation-states and international legal regimes? What can we as scholars learn from the history of struggles to define and realize human rights in order to ensure mutual human survival and the protection of basic human dignity in the world? How can critical sociology and concepts like the human rights enterprise contribute to our understanding of human rights and their realization?
The following chapters provide the scholarly tools for unpacking these important questions. Chapter 2 examines the question of power and the state using state theory, with a specific emphasis on global economic restructuring and the global recession of the twenty-first century. We will trace the history of US state policy relative to finance capital that set the table for the crisis in 2008, and examine its global reach. We will also explore questions fundamental to political sociologists and any critical sociology of human rights. What is “the state”? How is the state defined in international law (human rights instruments)? What is the role (including and beyond stated “duties”) of the state according to the formal international human rights regime in the effort to realize human rights practice? What does critical state theory suggest about states’ likelihood to successfully play their intended role, given (for example) the context of global neoliberal capitalism? Do theoretical concepts of the state and empirical studies of actual human rights struggles suggest that states are positioned to facilitate the achievement of human rights practice as expected?
Critical state theory and political sociological work on the process of global economic restructuring suggest that states may not be the appropriate mechanisms to protect and provide for human rights in the face of other interests. If we are critical of states’ willingness or ability to meet international obligations, how can we explain or interpret the relative success of many human rights campaigns?
In chapter 3, we apply sociological research on social movements to suggest how we might interpret the collective local and global efforts, employing formal and/or informal means, to define and realize human rights in people’s everyday lives. That is, social movement theory will help us understand how people challenge states and powerful economic actors to define and achieve fundamental human dignity, however articulated. We explore this issue through an analysis of anti-racist struggle in the US, focusing specifically on the civil rights movement. Our discussion of resistance to white supremacy threads through struggles for political, civil, economic, cultural, and social rights, and examines the intersections of struggles within nation-states with those in the international arena. We also document how the fact of rights won in one era does not ensure their permanence in future eras. Without persistent resistance, rights protections can regress as dominant interests leverage control over the state and public policy discourse, as is arguably demonstrated by current threats to voting rights established in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.
Chapter 4 examines the very meaning of human rights in the context of contemporary definitions of corporations as citizens with rights. A great deal of scholarship demonstrates the historical processes through which corporations became the most powerful mechanisms in modern global capitalism, primarily through gaining the rights of people with few of the responsibilities (“limited liability”) (Bakan 2004). Private corporate interests and their legal obligations to maximize profit for shareholders often pose significant threats to human rights practice. As we will suggest, the boundaries of rights, seen through a political sociological lens, include conversations about to whom/what such rights do not
