humanizing militarism: amnesty international and the tactical polyvalence of human rights discourses
TRANSCRIPT
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The poria
of
Rights
Explorations in Citizenship in the Era
of
Human
Rights
Edited y
nna Yeatman and Peg irmingham
LOOMS URY
NEW YORK • LON ON • NEW ELHI • SY NEY
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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint
of
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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New York
NY 1 18
USA
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London
WC1B 3DP
U
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury is a registered
trade
mark of Blooms bury Publishing Pic
First published 2014
© nna Yeatman Peg Birmingham and contributor s 2014
All rights reserved. No part
of
this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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of
the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6977-8
ePDF: 978-1-6235-6560-2
ePub: 978-1-6235-6876-4
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Chennai India
Printed and bound in the United States of America
f
t
I
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Introduction to the Aporia of Rights: Explorations
in Citizenship in the Era of Human Rights
nna
Yeatman
2 "Perplexities of the Rights of Man'': Arendt on
the Aporias of Human Rights yten Giindogdu
3 The Multivocity of Human Rights Discourse JeffMalpas
4 Neither Here nor There: The Conceptual Paradoxes
oflm migr ant and Asylee Resistance Robert
W Glover
5 Acts of Emancipation: Marx, Bauer, and
"The Jewish Question'' Charles
Barbour
6 Must Democratic Rights Serve the Rights-Bearer?
The Right to
Vote
of People with Severe
Cognitive Impairments
Ludvig
Beckman
7 Performing Human Rights: The Meaning of Rights in
the
ASEAN
Intergovernmental Commission on
Human Rights
nthony
f
Langlois
8 The Politics oflndig enous Human Rights in the Era of
Settler State Citizenship: Legacies of the Nexus between
Sovereignty, Human Rights, and Citizenship
Danielle Celermajer
9 Revolutionary Declarations: The State of Right and
the Right of Opposition Peg Birmingham
vii
X
l
l
7
5
77
9
115
137
59
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vi
ontents
1 Humanizing Militarism: Amnesty International
and the Tactical Polyvalence of Human
Rights Discourses jessica Whyte
11 Rival
Doctrines the
Politics of Human Rights
Anna Yeatman
12
Afterword-A Double Aporia: Citizenship, Sovereignty,
and Resistance in t he Era
of
Human Rights
Peg
Birmingham
Bibliography
Index
183
2 5
227
239
259
Contributors
Charles
Barbour
is senior lecturer
in
philosophy at the University
of
Western
Sydney. He has written over two dozen articles and
book
chapters, and works
primarily
in
the fields
of
social, political, and legal theory. His monograph
The Marx
Machine
was published in 2012.
Ludvig Beckman is professor and deputy head at the Department of Political
Science, Stockholm University (Sweden). His recent books include
The
Frontiers
o Democracy The
Right to Vote and
its
Limits (Palgrave 2009), and
The Territories o
Citizenship (Palgrave 2012) (edited with Eva Erman). He has
published widely on democratic boundaries, climate change and collective
responsibility, democracy between generations, immigration and democratic
rights, the rights of children, bodily privacy and genetics. He is editor-in-chief
of Scandinavian Political Studies (together with Maritta Soininen) and series
editor of Palgrave Studies in Citizenship Transitions (together with David
Owen an d Michele Micheletti).
Peg Birmingham
is
professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago.
She
is
the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (Indiana University
Press, 2006) and co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of
Dissensus
Communis
Between Ethics andPolitics (Koros 1995). In addition to her work on Arendt, she
has published numerous articles
on
Hobbes, Rousseau, Heidegger, Foucault,
and Agamben, as well as on the relation between law and violence. She is the
editor
of
Philosophy
Today.
Currently, she is finishing a manuscript tentatively
titled, Hannah Arendt and Political Glory: Bearing the Unbearable:'
Daniel le Celermaje r is an associate professor in sociology and social policy at
the University of Sydney and director of the Faculty's Human Rights Program.
She is the director of a European Union funded program exploring effective
approaches to torture prevention, focusing
on
the military and police in
Sri Lanka and Nepal. Her publications include
Sins o
the Nation and the
t r ~ m h r i c i p e
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1
Humanizing Militarism Amnesty
International and the Tactical Polyvalence
o
Human Rights Discourses
Jessica Whyte
1
umanitarians and military officers now speak the same pragmatic
language o egitimate objectives and proportional means. We have met
the
empire
and it
is
us.
Kennedy 2006,
5
In the lead-up to the Chicago NATO summit in May2012, Amnesty International
USA found itself embroiled
in
a controversy that burst and ricocheted across
social media like a cluster bomb. As NATO leaders and antiwar protestors
prepared to converge on Chicago, the city's bus shelters displayed striking
posters of Afghan women shielding young children in the draping fabric
of
their burqas. The headline of the poster, "Human Rights for Women and Girls
in Afghanistan'' was what one would expect from a human rights organization.
The controversy arose from the bold message addressed to the
US
dominated
military alliance: "NATO: Keep the Progress Going " Unsurprisingly, this was
interpreted as an endorsement of those who had been occupying Afghanistan
for more than a decade, and was greeted with incredulity and anger. Long
time Amnesty supporters announced they would discontinue their donations
and others asked whether Amnesty had become a pro-war organization.' In a
response with the revealing title "We get it;' Amnesty USXs Vienna Colucci
(2012) argued that the poster did
not
suggest that Amnesty believed NATO
should remain
in
the country. Rather, it was designed to "remind NATO
of
the conversation it should
be
having on women's
human
rights:' According
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184
The
poria
o Rights
to Colucci {2012), while the poster was admittedly "confusing;' to see it as an
endorsement of the occupation was to misinterpret it.
Given the role that the question of the suffering of women h d played in
justifying the original invasion, however, this particular interpretation could
have been predicted (see Abu-Lughod 2002). The Amnesty International
posters recalled nothing so much
as
Laura Bush's campaign for the rights of
Afghan women, waged while wearing a r ibbon made from a shred
of
burqa
sold by the Feminist Majority Foundation.' Laura Bush,
of course, happened
to be married to the US president who was then waging war on the country,
and the cynicism of her new concern for its women and children did not pass
unnoticed. In contrast, Amnesty International is a respected human rights
organization, which is renowned for its work in documenting the human
rights violations produced by wars, rather th n for supporting those who
wage them. This makes it difficult to dismiss its position
as
mere cynicism,
or
to portray it
as
simply a distortion
of
all that "human rights" stands
for.
Rather, it raises important questions about the transformation
of
the human
rights movement over the last 50 years,
as
it has become enmeshed in Western
military operations. Today, the line between human rights organizations and
the militaries of Western states
is
blurred, and the hum n rights movement
has "entered the thick
of
organized mass violence" (Weizman 2012, 116).
While groups like Amnesty formulated a new conception
of
hum n rights that
trades on a moral transcendence of politics, this new conception has since
become central to the legitimating discourses of Western states and to the
framework of global governance. As a consequence, human rights discourses
are increasingly wielded not to challenge wars and occupations but to mobilize
support for them. "Humanitarian militarism ·
as
David Chandler (2001,
698) puts it, "would have been an oxymoron before the 1990s; today it has
ecome
a tautology:
Among those who are critical
of
the increasing militarization of human
rights, it
is
common to hear calls for them to be reclaimed from those who
would instrumentalize the language for their own purposes (see Douzinas
2007 and Wall2011).
4
This view was manifested in a letter signed by numerous
individual peace activists and antiwar groups that was addressed to the board
of directors of Amnesty International USA in the wake of the NATO summit.
umanizing Militarism
185
The letter protested the organization's "decision to portray NATO as defending
women's rights in Afghanistan'' and drew attention to the way in which
Amnesty's campaign dovetailed with US foreign policy priorities (Benjamin et
a . 20 12). For these signatories, the Amnesty International USA campaign, and
its willingness to depict a military alliance like NATO as n agent
of
progress
was a betrayal
of
all that an organization like Amnesty International should
stand for and a corruption
of
the language
of hum n
rights. In the increasing
integration
of global hum n rights NGOs with the militaries of Western states,
the signatories saw a new mask behind which the most powerful states hide
their geopolitical interests in order to make their milit ary campaigns acceptable
to Western publics. Pointing to the proximity of Amnesty
USA:s
then Director
Suzanne Nossel to the US State Department, the signatories argued "loyalty
to powerful government players can only be a hindrance to the true work and
mission of Amnesty" (Benjamin eta . 2012). According to such a position, the
use
of
the language
of
human rights by Western militaries is the abuse
of
this
language, and betrays the "true"
hum n
rights discourse to which such critics
remain faithful.
Yet,
as
a particularly sta rk example of the struggle to define human rights
in an era of humanitarian militarism, Amnesty International's Afghanistan
campaign suggests the difficulty
of
separating a "true" hum n rights discourse
from a "false" one. The attempt to construe it
as
a betrayal
of
human rights
ignores the successes
of
the human rights movement
in
generalizing its own
language. "When President Bush drops bombs for hum n rights:' David
Kennedy (2005, 135) writes, "we accuse him of misusing the concept. But
we have worked hard to make human rights
as
user-friendly as possible:' For
Kennedy, the blurring of humanitarian and military concerns should be seen
as
a victory for the hum n rights movement, which must now embrace its
own power. Approaching the question from the perspective
of
antiwar politics,
Wendy Brown too highlights this difficulty in cleansing the language
of
human
rights of its more militaristic uses. When Donald Rumsfeld declared that "the
War on Terror is a war for human rights;' Brown (2004, 460) suggests, this
was a reminder of how difficult it is to simultaneously pursue a hu man rights
agenda and oppose imperialist wars. The problem, as Brown continues, is not
only that Rumsfeld co-opted the language of rights to justify both imperialist
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186
The
poria
o
Rights
foreign objectives and antidemocratic domestic ones. More importantly,
insofar
as
the 'liberation' ofAfghanistan and Iraq promised to deliver human
rights to those oppressed populations it
is
hard both to parse cynical from
sincere deployments
of
human rights discourse and to separate huma n rights
campaigns from legitimating liberal imperialism:'
In what follows, I suggest tha t this discursive convergence raises questions
about critical defenses of human rights like that displayed in the open letter
to Amnesty. While such defenses recognize that the language of human
rights has become central to the legitimation of contemporary warfare,
they nonetheless stress that there are other forms
of
human rights to be
affirmed, reclaimed, or perhaps invented (see Douzinas 2007 and Wall2011).
Consequently, more radical critiques that call into question the adequacy of
the language of human rights for resisting warand injustice are often met with
the charge that their object ofcritique is simply one version ofhuman rights-
and often a false'' version at that. It is undoubtedly true that the language
of
human rights
is
contested, malleable, and multivocal, and it
is
also true
that today this language is used to articulate a dizzying array of competing
political positions. Moreover, recognizing the contingency
of
any particular
conception of human rights
is
an importa nt antidote to the naturalizing move
that would depict such conceptions as flowing necessarily from the nature
of the human. Here, however, I focus less on possibilities for re-signification
and reclamation and more on the historical limits that condition any attempt
to wrestle human rights from their militarized incarnation. While human
rights discourses are contested, they are not simply tools to be utilized by
sovereign subjects who can use them to mean anything they would like them
to mean. Instead, the belief that the language
of
human rights is infinitely
reversible may be the only form of utopian belief allowed in a time marked
by a profound incapacity to imagine political alternatives (Douzinas 2007,
293). That is, the belief in the possibility of reclaiming and re-signifying
human rights may be the oth er face of the ideological closure tha t asserts that
there is no alternative to huma n rights. Here, I examine some key moments
in the history
of
the human rights movement, in order to illuminate the
contemporary militarization of human rights.
n
doing so, I wish to suggest
that, in the face
of
the increasing hegemony
of
a militarized form
of
human
umanizing Militarism
187
rights, those who remain interested in contesting contemporary wars may be
better served by formulating political alternatives to human rights than by
attempting to re-signify
or
reclaim them.
The polyvalence of human rights
In 2010, a research unit within the US Central Intelligence Agency produced
a strategy paper about the war in Afghanistan with the revealing title
''Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission
WhyCount ing on Apathy Might NotBe Enough'' (ClA 2010). The confidential
report, which was recently released by WikiLeaks, provides an unusual ins ight
into the way in which the language
of
rights can be used to rationalize and
legitimize violence. Under the subheading Public Apathy Enables Leaders
to Ignore Voters:' the report (2010,
1
warns that a spike in Afghan civilian
casualties could result i n demands for an immediate withdrawal
of
Western
European troops. If some forecasts
of
a bloody summer in Afghanistan come
to pass:' it reads, passive French and German dislike of their troop presence
could
turn
into active and politically potent hostility:' In order to prevent
public antiwar mobilizations, the report suggests that the war needs to be
sold to Western European publics as a principled and humanitar ian endeavor.
Focusing on the possible adverse consequences of a NATO defeat for Afghan
civilians, it (2010, 2 urges, could leverage French (and other European)
guilt for abandoning them;' while an emphasis
on
the humanitari an aspects
of
the mission could help to overcome allergy to armed conflict;' and win
support for the war. Although the rhetoric of the report
is
superficially
humanitarian, it is clear that its key concern
is
to make war acceptable by
undercutting the capacity of civilian casualties to generate antiwar sentiment.
Noting the prospect that increasing deaths could see the European public turn
against the war, the paper suggests that drawing attention to the threat that
the Taliban poses to hard-won progress on girls' education could provoke
French indignation and become a rallying point for France's largely secular
public, and give voters a reason to support a good and necessary cause despite
casualties (ClA 2010, 2; emphasis added). The final words are crucial. The aim
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188
he
Aporia o Rights
of
the paper is not to caution against the excessive (and unpopular) killing
of
civilians, but to develop a humanitarian justification for it that
w ll
leave
Western European publics better prepared to tolerate a spring and summer
of
greater military and civilian casualties (CIA
2010, 2).
t is
easy to criticize the cynicism
of
the
CJA:s
concern with human
rights, especially as reports
of
torture in CIA black sites;' including sites in
Afghanistan, continue to emerge (see Hajar
2009).
And yet, placing such a
report alongside Amnesty International's NATO Summit campaign, it
is
less
easy to distinguish the effects
of
the two mobilizations
of
the discourse
of
human rights. Discourses:· as Michel Foucault stresses, are not once and
for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more
than
silences
are (Foucault
1990, 100-l .
In the first volume
of he
History
o
Sexuality
Foucault famously warned that
we
should
not
imagine the world as divided
into dominant and dominated discourses,
but
must instead recognize the
extent to which discourses are enmeshed in multiple and diverse strategies
of
power. Significantly, this means that identical formulas can be used
for contrary objectives, and that the same discourse can circulate from
one strategy to an opposing one without changing its form. In the case of
NATO's Afghanistan campaign, Amnesty International uses the language
of
human rights for women in an attempt to hold NATO to account, while the
CIA uses the same language in order to undermine public criticism
of
the
military alliance's violence against civilians. Foucault's account highlights
the possibilities for recuperation and reclamation to which any discursive
formation is subject, and leads in the direction
of
a concern with the
effects
of
a discourse, and the strategies it
is bound
up with. Discourses,
he
stresses, are always enmeshed in power relations, and the effect
of
identical
formulations will differ according to who is speaking, his position
of
power,
the institutional context in which he happens to be speaking (Foucault
1990,
100).
This means it cannot simply be assumed that the mobilization
of
the
language
of
human rights by the
US
military has the same effect as the use
of
that language by Amnesty International.
Yet
neither can we assume that
Amnesty International's conscious commitment to preventing human rights
abuses is sufficient to prevent its campaigns from empowering militaries and
making such abuse more likely.
umanizing ilitarism
189
Foucault's account
of
tactical polyvalence leads us away from an approach
that would attempt to distinguish the true human rights discourse from
the cynical appropriations
of
it. If
we
accept that discourses are subject to
processes
of
reclamation andre-signification, then the relevant question about
any use
of
the language
of
human rights is not How
well
does it approximate
the truth
of
human rights? but, What are its effects? This focus on effects
is
at odds with a method
of
evaluation focused exclusively
on
intentions. Just
as discourses are not tools wielded by sovereign subjects, Foucault's account
is
not simply a voluntarism, according to which discourses can mean anything
we
want them to mean. Quite the contrary, his approach suggests that the
purposes
or
intentions
of
those who speak are no guarantee
of
he effects their
speech
w ll
produce. Thus, he stresses that
i we
wish to understand power,
we
should study it not at the level
of
intentions but at the level
of
effects. On the
level
of
intentions, it may be possible to uphold a distinction between cynical
and a sincere statements about the human rights of Afghan women. On the
level
of
effects, it
is
far less easy to distinguish the
CJA:s
proposed propaganda
campaign from the Amnesty International campaign. Thus, whatever Amnesty
International's intentions, there is no guarantee that its campaigns
w ll
not be
incorporated into a larger strategy that will make the killing
of
Afghan civilians
more acceptable to citizens
of
Western states.
In order to focus ou r intention on the contemporary effects
of
the language
of
human rights, we can learn much from methodological cautions provided
by Foucault in another historical context marked by the convergence
of
an
oppositional discourse with the legitimating discourse
of
large-scale state
violence. In
1977,
Foucault was faced with a political context in which the
language
of
Communism was still the key oppositional discourse in the West,
as well as
the discourse through which some
of
he world's most powerful states
legitimated their own violence.
To
deal adequately with the concrete reality
of
the Gulag, Foucault
(1980, 136)
suggested in
1977,
means giving up the
politics of inverted commas, not attempting to evade the problem by putting
inverted commas whether damning or ironic round Soviet socialism
n
order
to protect the good, true Socialism- with no inverted commas :·The only
Socialism deserving
of
these scornful scare-quotes;' Foucault continues, is
the one that leads the dreamy life
of
ideality in our heads:' Posing the Gulag
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190
he
poria o Rights
question;' Foucault argued, means refusing to question the Gulag only on
the basis of the texts of Marx and Lenin, and asking through what error,
deviation, misunderstanding
or
distortion their theories could have been
betrayed (Foucault 1980, 135). Rather, he suggests that it
is
necessary to return
to those old texts and reexamine them in the light
of
the Gulag,
not in
the
name of a theoretical reductionism, for which the Gulag would already be
contained in Marx's writings, but in order examine what in those texts could
have made the Gulag possible, what may still continue to justify it, and what
makes it acceptable today.
Foucault's remarks would equally apply to contemporary defenses of human
rights. To give up the politics
of
inverted commas would mean ceasing to treat
the use
of
he language
of
human rights to legitimate aggressive wars
as
a dis or
tion
of
a pure human rights discourse that remains unscathed by cynical mobili
zations of t. It also mean that instead of asking how the human rights movement
has been betrayed as did those signatories of the open letter to Amnesty USA)
we should ask what it was about this movement that made possible the kind
of appropriations of human rights that we are seeing today with increasing
frequency. It would mean asking not jus t after possibilities to re-signify human
rights, but also about the historical limits to such re-signification. It
is
doubtless
true that today human rights lacks a unitary meaning and that its mobilization
to legitimize militarism is subjected to contestation. And yet, as Susan Marks
(2008, 17) stresses in a related context, while such a proposition may be true,
to stop there is silently to signal that these phenomena are isolated problems,
unrelated to wider processes, tendencies and dynamics at work in the world:'
The current morphing
of
human rights and militarism is neither accidental
nor
arbitrary. By leaving unexamined the tendencies and dynamics that bring
such transformations about,
as
Marks notes, we occlude an understanding
of
what would be necessary to achieve genuine change.
In
this spirit, I now turn
to the origins of Amnesty International and the politics of human rights that
it pioneered. In doing so, I do not wish simply to hold this NGO responsible
for the current mobilization of human rights to justify aggressive wars. Yet, I
do wish to examine what developments and what political choices made that
justification easier, and how its victory over competing political projects played a
role in winning progressives in the West to support for organized state violence.
umanizing Militarism
191
Depoliticizing war
Toward the
end of
1961, US President Kennedy received the Taylor-Rostow
Report, which recommended sending
6 8000
US combat troops to Vietnam
under
the guise
of
offering flood relief (Warne r 1994, 696). The report also
encouraged the adminis trati on to provide individual administrators who
could be inserted into the government of he anti-Communist President Diem
(Warner 1994, 696). Such partnerships, the report assured, would not prove
counterproductive: ''After all, the United States is not operating in south-east
Asia in order to recreate a colonial system doomed by history; it is attempting
to permit new nations to find their feet
and
to make an independent future
(Warner 1994, 697). The rest,
as
they
say, is
history. Over the course
of
the
last major war
of
the Cold War, around two million Vietnamese
and
58,000
Americans were killed, and millions more Vietnamese were wounded,
missing, or homeless, as a result of the devastation of the country (Anderson
2002, 78).
In the face
of
the resistance
of
the Vietnamese guerilla struggle,
and facing mass antiwar movements at home, the United States withdrew
14 years later.
When
the last Americans in South Vietnam were evacuated
by helicopters, it was, an inglorious end to
U.S.
nation building in Vietnam
(Anderson 2002, 77).
In
the wake
of
this dramatic failure, the United States
became increasingly reticent to intervene in conflicts outside its borders a
reticence that led to the memorable diagnosis of Vietnam syndrome
(Anderson 2002, 78).
Also in 1961, a British lawyer, Peter Benenson, read a story about two
Portuguese students imprisoned for raising a toast to liberty,
as
he flipped
through the newspaper while on the tube on his way to work. In a context
of
widespread an d often violent political conflicts, including those
of
the civil
rights movement, and with the Vietnam War soon to break out in earnest,
such a story could easily have been relegated to a footnote in any history of his
turbulent decade. Instead, it became the opening moment in the formation of a
new politics of human rights that grew up alongside, but always separate from,
the antiwar movement, and subsequently came to eclipse it. Today, the story
of
the Portuguese students holds a central place in Amnesty International's
foundation narrative. Perhaps because I
am
particularly attached to liberty,
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i i
I
192
he poria o Rights
perhaps because I am fond
of
wine;' Benenson recounts, "this news-item
produced a righteous indignation in me that transcended normal bounds"
(Buchanan 2002, 575). Upon reading the story, Benenson explains, he left the
train and walked into the nearest church to ponder the situation. There he first
formulated the idea of a campaign to free th e world's political prisoners, and
the seeds of Amnesty International were planted. In less than a year, Benenson
would launch his campaign, with the full-page article "The Forgotten
Prisoners;' published in The Observer The article was republished worldwide
and generated such enthusiasm that, by 1962, Amnesty International was
formed
as
a permanent international organization dedicated to securing the
release of those it henceforth defined as "prisoners of conscience:''
In these two divergent events, both mo re than 50 years old, we see founding
moments of two very different political movements, and the intersection of
two different political logics. The first, which manifested in a global movement
against the Vietnam War, was a politics ofglobalsolidarityforwhich the struggle
against war was intimately tied to that against injustice and unequal relations
of
power. The second was premised
on
the foreclosure
of
these structural
questions, an d the belief that the sufferingof he individual huma n body called
for a response tha t transcended the political divisions of he Cold War. Situating
Amnesty's emergence in relation to the beginning of the Vietnam War reveals
a central paradox: al though Amnesty International was founded ostensibly to
prevent suffering, it does not oppose wars, which invariably lead to human
suffering on a scale, and with a prolonged effect, which even the worst natural
disasters can scarcely approximate. On the contrary, Amnesty International
has consistently remained neutral about declarations
of
war and has sharply
delimited its own mission from that of antiwar movements. According to its
handbook, the "broad issue of whether 'insurgency' or war' is moral ly justified
has no bearing upon Amnesty International's central task, which is to bring
relief to individual victims of injustice" (Amnesty International 1991). Thus,
in the context
of
the Vietnam War, Amnesty International distinguished itself
from the milieu
of
he new left by refusing to oppose the
US
military campaign
or call for the war's en d.'
Amnesty International's neutrality about the fact of
war
is not
due to a lack
of recognition of the profound relation between war and human suffering.
umanizing Militarism
193
"When wars erupt;' the a rmed conflict page on Amnesty International's website
reads, "suffering and hardship invariably follow" (Amnesty International
2013). And yet, as its handbo ok still makes clear today, Amnesty International
is not a pacifist organization. n contrast to those antiwar movements
whose commitments to ending the suffering caused by wars were bound up
with particular political visions of global justice, Amnesty has historically
refrained from taking positions, not because
of
a commitment to nonviolence
but because it seeks to avoid the difficult political questions that any use
of
violence necessarily raises. As a recent Amnesty International statement,
which refutes the charge
of
complicity with the
US
military, stresses, "[a]s a
matter oflongs tanding policy, we remain independent of governments, we do
not espouse political ideologies or systems of government, and we do not take
positions on armed intervention" (see Rowley 2013). Rather than stemming
from an overarching pacifism, Amnesty's neutral ity about declarations of war
needs to be situated in the context
of
its attempt to transcend politics in the
name
of
a new morality
of
suffering prevention.
Amnesty came into being during the Cold War
in
a "competitive forum"
characterized by stark polarization and radically different visions of economic
life
political possibility, and human flourishing (Moyn 2010, 132). In this
context, while there was much focus on forms of abuse and oppression on
either side of the Iron Curtain, these cynical condemnations were clearly
subordinate to the geopolitical interests of either side
of
he conflict, and "most
states advocated only those norm s tha t would bolster their own political values
and expose the shortcomings
of
heir adversaries" (Eckel2013, 188). While the
United States drew attention to the lack of political freedoms in the Soviet
Union, the Soviets highlighted the policies of racial segregation then in force
in the United States, for instance. Undoubtedly, there were genuine voices on
either side of the global divide, yet the condemnation of he other side's abuses
was frequently combined with the attempt to cover over those
on
one's own
side, so
as
not to provide ammunition in the Cold War. Central to the appeal
of
Amnesty International was its ambition to transcend this political deadlock
and overcome the instrumentalization
of human
rights language by focusing
on the simple fact
of human
suffering. Amnesty, according to a founding
member Eric Baker, represented the response of men and women "who are
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he
poria o Rights
tired of the polarised thinking which is the result
of
the Cold War
and
similar
conflicts but who are deeply concerned with those who are suffering simply
because they are suffering (Buchanan 2002, 579).
A crucial aspect of Amnesty International's claim to transcend politics
and
focus simply
on human
suffering was a commitment to dealing with
individual abuses
of human
rights without considering with structural or
systemic questions. The organization's reports as Eckel (2013) notes, largely
stripped
human
rights violations of the ir political context (205).
By
relegating
such context to an unexamined background, the reasons that the abuses were
carried out to begin w ith were obscured.As Naomi Klein (2007) has noted, for
instance, the fact that Amnesty's 1976 report on Argentina offered no comment
on the deepening poverty or the dramatic reversal of programs to redistribute
wealth, though these were the policy centerpieces
of
junta rule;' it served to
foreclose discussion
of
the connection between the imposition
of
a deeply
unpopular economic regime,
and
widespread political imprisonment, torture,
and
disappearance (119). Something similar is true
of
Amnesty International's
decision to focus its attentions
on
the conduct of war, withou t taking a position
on
its very existence. Just as Amnesty International's reports
on
Argentina
is replete with horrific examples of the pain that can be caused to bodies, its
reports
on
situations
of
war offer catalogues
of
abuses while remaining neutral
on
the question
of
war itself. Its 2013 report
on
Afghanistan, for instance, offers
a catalogue of specific abuses but contains only two mentions of war, both of
which attest to the report's narrow legal focus: the first
of
hese is to war crimes
and
the second to the laws of war:'' Central to this focus
on
the suffering of
specific individuals was the privileging of the tortured human body-what
Elaine Scarry (1985) famously dubbed the body in pain -as the prototypical
site of human
rights abuse. This privileging
of
the suffering body was a direct
result
of
Amnesty International's determina tion to transcend politics. Physical
torture appears as the prototype
of
njustice, as Robert Meister (2011) notes, not
merely because the tor ture victim's pain is prototypically intense but because
as bodily pain it can be described, independently
of
its historical
and
cultural
context, as a violation of human rights (66).
And
yet, in fact, as he stresses, this
makes physical pain atypical of other forms of social
and
historical injustice,
which cannot be described outside of a social and historical narrative.
umanizing Militarism
195
Avoiding suc h social
and
historical narratives was central to the new politics
of human
rights, which presented itself as
an
alternative to
the
tarnished
utopian visions
of
the Cold War, and to the forms of organization that aimed
to realize them. Central to this new morality of suffering, which focused
on
saving
the
world one individual at a time;'
in the
words of an early member,
was the belief that grand political visions should be abandoned in favor of a
pragmatic approach focused on the preventionofharm (see Moyn 2010, 132).
The ideas
of
justice and the good, according to these NGOs, had served to
justify political projects that resulted in abuses
of human
rights. The horrors
of the twentieth century were evidence
of
the dangers
of
utopian politics
and
collective visions. Any attempt to formulate a collective justice project was
framed as leading inexorably to totalitarianism, or,
in
the distinctly theological
langnage that began to replace existing political discourses, to
evil:''
The new rights agenda was distinguished in a crucial sense from the
optimism that characterized the radicalismof
he anti-Vietnam War movement.
The attempt to construct a just society by altering the external framework''
Benenson wrote, is, I am sure, doomed to failure'' (Buchanan 2002, 582).
In the place
of
collective justice struggles, Amnesty International pioneered
a new politics of
human
rights premised
on
a concern with individuals, the
prevention of suffering,
and
a shift from politics to morality. Many of these
young activists
and
writers;' Eyal Weizman (2012) notes, replaced an abstract
concept of political 'justice' with an emotive idea of'compassion; a revolutionary
politics with one whose finite
and
practical goals are the relief
of
suffering
in
those regions
of he
world in which it is the most visible (37). Although many
early Amnesty USA activists
had
previously been involved in th e civil rights
and anti-Vietnam War movements, their entry into Amnesty International
represented a departure as they consciously distanced themselves from many
of he political aspirations, modalities
and
styles of 1960s activism (Eckel20 13
200). From now on, politics would limit itself protecting the vulnerable and
warding off needless suffering. This new focus
on
victims,
as
Michael Ignatieff
has noted, was a weary world away from
the
internationalism
of the
1960s.
The central premise
of
the new
human
rights activism was that today, there
are no goo d causes left only victims
of bad
causes (see Chan dler 2001, 692).
With the victory of his idea, political movements that aimed for emancipator y
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196
The poria o Rights
social transformation were dismissed as totalitarian, and the politics of self
determination was replaced by a politics of protection, for which nothing
could be more important than the bare fact oflife.
By portraying itself
as
apolitical, or even antipolitical, the human rights
movement sought to avoid the contentious political questions that had
previously seemed unavoidable in a bipolar world.
As
NGOs like Amnesty
International have grown in both institutional power and in influence, they
have continued to portray themselves
as apolitical defenders of suffering
individuals. And yet, just as there is no simple suffering, outside of a political
and historical narrative, there is no such thing as mere reduction of suffering
or protection from abuse (Brown 2004, 459-60). Rather, as Wendy Brown
(2004) stresses, the reduction and protection are themselves productive,
both
of
political subjects and political possibilities.
By
framing their own
investments in narrow apolitical terms, human rights NGO's tended to
disavow the productivity
of
heir own activism. As David Kennedy (2005, 152)
puts it, [h]umanitarians have become partners
in
governance
but
have not
been able to accept politics as our vocation:' Today, the discourses of human
rights and humanitar ianism are central to global geopolitics, and provide the
language in which all states are forced to legitimize themselves
if
they wish
to avoid being subjected to (humanitarian) military intervention.
Yet,
while
human rights signify numerous rival political schemes, they still trade on
the moral transcendence
of
politics th at th eir original breakthrough involved
(Moyn
2010, 227).
Today, when those who wage wars themselves trade on the
language of moral antipolitics, this serves to depoliticize wars and neutralize
dissent. This depoliticization of war has made it possible to treat the conduct
of war
as
a technical problem that hum an rights organizations and militaries
have a shared interest in. Ultimately, war itself has come to be viewed
as
a
technical instrument for preventing the abuse
of
human rights.
Greater
and
lesser evils?
In 2012, Amnesty International responded to charges that the organization
had supported the NATO bombing of Libya by noting: ''Amnesty International
umanizing Militarism
197
generally takes no position on the use
of
armed force or on military interventions
in armed conflict, other than to demand that all parties respect international
human rights and humanitarian law (Bery2012). The decision simply to treat
the ondu t of war, by calling on all parties to a dispute to respect international
humanitarian law and human rights law, means that legality becomes the sole
criterion for determining the legitimacy of state military action. This focus
on the legality
of
war has obscured the larger political context in which wars
take place, and the forms
of
global and local power that they consolidate
or undermine.
As
Marc Garlasco, a former Human Rights Watch (HRW)
analyst who was recruited to HRW from the Pentagon put
it:
''After being in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Burma, I can
no
longer say
if
this destruction was
wrong or right. I can only say whether it was legalor illegal (see Weizman
2012,
123). There is a further consequence of the shift toward considering war only
in terms of its legality: [T]he law in war Uus in
bello]
offers the possibility of
embracing the unavoidabilityof making trade-offs, balancing harms, accepting
costs to achieve
benefit a
calculus common to both military strategists and
humanitarians (Kennedy 2005, 139). In contrast to demands for global justice,
or world peace, this technical-juridical focus leads away from political principles
toward utilitarian calculations of collateral damage and excessive'' deaths.
Meanwhile, the belief that war could be stopped fades into the background a
relic of a past that is now disparagingly referred to as utopian:''
In his brilliant reading of our humanitarian present, Weizman (2012, 9
suggests that in a world that has given up on the good;' and views large-scale
emancipatory justice projects
as
too dangerous, politics increasingly orients
itself to the so-called lesser evil. This logic
of
he lesser evil,
of
course, requires a
calculus that could determine which evils are lesser ones, and human rights and
international humanitarian law become crucial tools with .which to calculate
and manage the economy of violence. Weizman thus makes the provocative
claim that the moderation of violence is now part of the very logic of violence
(Weizman 2012, 3). f anyone epitomizes this problem of the lesser evil, it is
Garlasco. A forensic ballistics expert, in his role at the Pentagon Garlasco was
chief
of
high-value targeting : that
is,
he designed the targeted assassination
program that he United States used to determine targets for aerial bombardment
in the last Iraq War (Weizman
2012, 130).
When hiring me in
2003
Garlasco
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198
The poria
o
ights
revealed to Weizman (2012, 128), "HRW knew that I had been involved in
the killing
of
about 250 civilians in Iraq:' Despite such knowledge, the first job
assigned to Garlasco in his new role
as
a human rights analyst was to write the
HRW report on the impact of he
US's
aerial bombardments
oflraq a
program
he had been directly involvedin designing Garlascds trajectory is not merely an
individual one, but is symptomatic, as Weizman has convincingly shown, of he
changing field in which both human rights NGOs and militaries operate. Once
politics is sacrificed in favor oflaw, warfare becomes a technical question and
a background like Garlascds becomes a perfect qualification for the technical
work
of
a human rights analyst. "Wben studying a ruin;' Garlasco said
of
his
human rights work, "the first thing I do
is
t ink how I would have planned
the attack'' (Weizman
2012, 135). Within such a frame, war is reconceived as
something that can be shaped, humanized, or brought into conformity with
international humanitarian law a project that increasingly sees h uman rights
organizations collaborating with Western militaries in order to make military
violence more efficient (Weizman 2012, 117).
We
speak the same language
as
those who plan and fight wars;' David Kennedy (2005, 132) notes
of
his work
as
training militaries in human rights, "the language
of
humanitarian objectives
and proportional, even humane means:'
As Hannah Arendt perspicuously noted, the problem with the logic of the
lesser evil is that it tends to condition both government officials and the public
at large to accept what would once have been unacceptable. "Politically;' she
writes, "the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose
the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil" (see Weizman 2012, 27).
Today, when militaries are themselves profoundly interested in managing, and
in some cases, humanizing, the conduc t
of
war, Amnesty's neutrality leaves it
susceptible t o forms of collaboration that would be unthinkable o n the basis
of a political opposition to aggressive wars. The discourse of humanitarian
intervention,as Anne Orford (2003, 12) notes, makes "high violence" responses
to conflict situations "marketable to citizens of he USA and othe r democracies,
in ways rendered unimaginable in the immediate aftermath
of
Vietnam:' Here,
humanitari an concerns are used to make military action, aimed ultimately at
bolstering
US
foreign policy objectives, palatable. The actual incorporation
of
human rights concerns into military
planning through
attempts to
umanizing Militarism
199
rights training for military personnel, for instance would seem to make good
on these ideals, demonstrating that the military itself has transformed from
a killing machine into a tool for securing human rights.
Yet,
as "less brutal
measures are also those that may be more easily naturalized, accepted and
tolerated" this humanization also enables democratic societies to maintain
wars, and to consent to "regimes
of
occupation and neocolonialism' that may
otherwise generate popular opposition (Weizman 2012, 10).
To point out that the supposedly apolitical focus on preventing suffering
may in fact lead to greater suffering is surely of central importance. If the
attempt to humanize militarism in fact legitimizes civilian casualties, this
makes it possible to question whe ther the goals of human rights organizations
like Amnesty are really so easily reconciled with the goals
of
the US military.
Further, it suggests that good intentions do not guarantee one's actions against
effects that entrench ra ther t han ameliorate the problems they intend to solve.
And yet, a focus on suffering that avoids the question of the historical and
systemic context
in
which it occurs remains within the logic
of
lesser evils.
To go beyond this, it is necessary to ask after the political and economic
logics in which contemporary humanit arian interventions are inscribed. The
decision not to take any position on armed intervention not only depoliticizes
the question
of
war, but also serves to neutralize antiwar movements. War
becomes a permanent fact
of life something
to be managed
and
regulated
by those with appropriate expertise. In a unipolar world, in which the sole
superpower instrumentalizes the language ofhuman rights to justify wars with
less humane rationales, the refusal to challenge war itself ultimately functions
to naturalize existing relations of domination. War thus becomes a mechanism
for enforcing
an
unequal social and economic order, and for perpetuating the
effects
of
historical injustice.
Conclusion: Smart power and
the military-humanitarian complex
To suggest that the language of human rights may have unintended effects
today is necessary in order to understand how well-meaning activism may
. •
_
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200
The
poria ofRights
however, that there are not some within the human rights movement whose
intentions are far more easily reconciled with those
of
he most powerful states.
In January
of
2013, Amnesty International USA announced the resignation
of
its Executive Director Suzanne Nossel, who had been at the helm
of
the
organization during its NATO Summit campaign.
10
The notice
of
Nossel's
departure gave
few
clues
as
to why she was leaving the position only one year
after her appointment. Nossel, however, had been a controversial appointment.
Prior to taking the top position at Amnesty, she had worked for the
US
State
Department, where her responsibilities included multilateral human rights
and humanitarian affairs. A committed liberal interventionist, she supported
the 2003 war on Iraq, and pushed the United Nations to approve military
action in Libya. Moving easily between human rights organizations and state
positions, Nossel, like Garlasco, embodies to day's blurring
of
military power
with the language
of
human rights.
Nossel
is
best known for coining the term smart power;' central to which
is
knowing that the
US's
own hand
is
not always its best tool (Nossel
2004,
138). In a 2004 Foreign Affairs article, she (2004, 133) called for the reclamation
of
liberal internationalism, which she argued had lost its
waY:'
Charging
the neoconservatives with creating a vicious circle by associating freedom
and democracy with US unilateralism, the article outlined a new liberal
internationalist agenda that could turn the vicious circle into a virtuous one,
in which
US
power generates confidence in
US
leadership, enhancing
US
power all the more (Nossel 2004,
135).
That greater
US
power was desirable
was, for Nossel, never in question. US leadership, she argued, is central to the
spread
of
liberal ideas. Central to the political vision outlined in her article
is
a belief that the United States should avoid unilateral action and build
alliances in order to reach its own objectives. US interests are furthered;' she
writes, by enlisting others on behalf
of
US goals, through alliances, interim
institutions, careful diplomacy, and the power
of
ideals (Nossel 2004,
138).
Despite her distaste for the neocons, Nossel's article displays an unshakable
commitment to the project
of
fostering
US
military power. For a senior staff
member
of
the US State Department this was to be expected. That the director
of
one
of
he world's most important human rights organizations could display
such enthusiasm for the hard power
of
the US military, however, testifies to
umanizing Militarism
201
the extent
of
the contemporary indistinction between human rights concerns
and military ones. How else to explain the fact that Nossel's background was
not considered a liability by the board
of
Amnesty International? Quite the
contrary, the announcement
of
her appointment lauded her for coining the
term smart power;' which Secretary
of
State Hillary Clinton has made a
defining feature
of
US foreign policy (Human Rights Investigations 2012).
Today, more than ever, the very possibility
of
the success
of
human
rights critiques is tied to the fact that they unfold within, and not against,
the deployment
of
contemporary military power.U Smart power;'
as
Nossel
defines it, relies on the combination
of
military weight with humanitarian
ideals.
A
renewed liberal internationalist strategy recognizes that military
power and humanitarian endeavors can be mutually reinforcing; she writes
(Nossel2004, 138). One ofNossel's central concerns is to weaken any politics
that would situate itself outside this mutually enforcing loop by opposing US
wars-especially those that are clothed in a humanitarian garb. An appeal to
liberal values, she argues, could undercut opposition to military action on
both the left and the right. Whereas liberal internationalism can overcome
the isolationism
of
the anti-imperialist left (exemplified by its defense
oflr qi
sovereignty before the war);' she (2004, 137) writes, the war on terrorism can
overcome the aversion
of
the right to humanitarian endeavors:' Transcending
the divisions between the right and the left, and undermining traditional
opposition to war on both sides
of
the political divide, this vision promises
a world in which the need for global US military intervention becomes, to
borrow the slogan oflnvisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign, something we
can all agree on: At this point, Foucault's (1990) remarks about the critique
of
sexuality apply equally to the human rights-based critique
of
militarism.
To
the extent that this critique represents a tactical shift within a deployment
of
power, it is apparent why one could not expect this critique to be the grid for
a history
of
that very deployment. Nor the basis for a movement to dismantle
it (Foucault 1990, 131). To begin to dismantle the military-humanitarian
complex would require us to relearn the art
of
hinking politically about
w r-
an art that was explicitly abandoned by human rights NGOs like Amnesty
International. Unless we are able to do so,
we w ll
be left with neither justice
nor peace.
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202 The Aporia o Rights
Notes
1 My thanks
to
Anna Yeatman
and
Peg Birmingham for
sharp and
helpful
editorial suggestions. I
am
also grateful to
seminar
participants at the University
of New South Wales Philosophy seminar and the University of Western Sydney
Institute for Culture and Society seminar where I presented earlier drafts of
this chapter,
and to
Joanne Faullmer
and
Sonja Van Wichelen for invitingme
to
present my work. Special thanks to lhab Shalbak for incisive criticismsof
an earlier draft and for numerous conversations that helped
to
me sharpen
my argument.
2 See the comments on Vienna Colucci, (2012) We Get It; Amnesty
International
Human Rights
Now
Blog http://blog.amnestyusa.org/asia/we get it/.
3 Laura Bush, Radio Address by Mrs. Bush;' (Texas: November 17, 2001), http://
georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/200 1/11/20011117 html.
Eleanor Smeal, Presiden t of the Feminist Majority Foundation explained
the ribbons as she launched the foundations campaign against Gender
Apartheid:' The
burqa
is
like a
prison-a
poisonous
shroud
that
can cause
or
aggravate respiratory conditions
and
loss
of
vision-both
of
which can cause
death. This swatch
of mesh
represents the obstructed view
of
the world for
an
entire nation
of women
who were once free:· Smeal told
the
press: We are
asking everyone to wear it in remembrance so that we do not forget the women
and girls of Afghanistan unt il they are free once again:· While the Feminist
Majority Foundation launched their campaignprior to 9/11,
it
was taken up by
those in power only in the wake of he launchingof the war on Afghanistan.
As ofJuly2013, the burqa swatches are no longer for sale on the Feminist
Majority Foundation's website. (Feminist Majority Foundation, Mavis Leno to
Chair Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign to Stop
Gender
Apartheid;'
October 21, 1998, http://www.feminist.org/news/pressstory.asp?id=4542).
4 For
an
insightful critical engagement with redemptive critiques of
human
rights, see also Ben Golder's forthcomin g review essay The Critiqueof
Human
Rights in Contemporary International Legal Thought:' I thank Ben for
providingme with his draft essay.
5 Amnesty's worldwide growth, as Jan Eckel noted, was slow,
and in
some cases
stunted. A mnesty USA was founded in 1967,
and
by 1970
one of
its founders
could refer to it as an unmitig ated failure:' Even the London organization was
by no means an instant success (Eckel2013, 183
and
192).
Humanizing Militarism
203
6
t
was only
in
the wake
of
the war's inglorio us end
that
a number
of
former ant iwar activists helped swellthe membership numbers of Amnesty
Internat ional USA. Jan Eckel suggests that it seems plausible to assume that the
organization absorbed much of the potential for political activismnow set free
and
points to the repudiation of revolutionary
and
anti-systemic politicsamong
this mili eu (Eckel2012, 200).
7 Amnesty International's 2013
report on
Afghanistan, for instance, is divided
into six key categories of
human
rights abuse: abuses by armed groups;
violations by Afghan
and
internat ional forces; freedom of expression; violence
against women
and
girls; refugees
and
internally displaced people;
and
death
penalty. See Amnesty International,
'i\nnual
Report 2013: Afghanistan;'
http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/afghanistan/report-2013.
8 Robert Meister suggests that the revolutionary rights tradition
of
1789 has been
replaced
by
a counterrevolutionary
human
rights tradition
that
views the entire
200 year
period
from 1789 to 1989 as dominated by evil (Meister 2011, 7.)
9 While he does
not
consider Amnesty's position on war, Eckel notes
that
those former antiwar movement activistswho joined Amnesty International
USA in the late 1960s and 1970s repudiated social utopianism in doing so
(Eckel2012, 200).
1 Nossel was
soon
reemployed as the head of another established
human
rights
organization: PEN.
11 Foucault makes a similar
point
about Reichian critiquesof repression, which
had
a limited effectivity,he argues, because they unfolded within, rather than
against, what he terms the apparatus of sexuality. (Foucault 1990, 131).