“…whereas disregard and contempt for human rights
have resulted in barbarous acts”
Rights, Dialogue and Historical Memory
Ben Dorfman
Aalborg University
Denmark
…”you can’t avoid human rights” (Cmiel
2004: 117)
…the “age” of rights (Bobbio
1996)
…a human rights “life-world”
(Dorfman 2012)
…human rights as the “last utopia”
(Moyn 2010)
Rights, intervention and conflict
Humanitarian intervention
Civil conflict resolution
human rights as contingent
upon historical memory and
imagination
vistas of the historical
imagination
…all human beings are born free
and equal in dignity and rights…
…all members of the human family
[have]…inherent dignity…
…freedom, justice and peace in the
world [are] the aspirations of a
common people…
…disregard and contempt for human rights
have resulted in barbarous acts which have
outraged the conscience of mankind…
…[we] are inclined to idealize a remote past of
natural human innocence from which men have
fallen into the corrupt social state in which
they currently find themselves. [We] in turn
project this utopia onto what is effectively a
non-temporal plane, viewing it as a possibility
of human achievement at any time, if only men
will seize control of their…essential humanity…
(White 1973, 25)
corruption
…human rights draw from experiences of
human “suffering”… (Baxi 2006)
…we suffer on private, individual (civil
and political) scales
…we suffer on collective, mass
(social and cultural) scales
Images of suffering
…the political disappearance
…the famine
…gender abuse
private suffering
universal humanity
collective, mass suffering
Collective, mass suffering
Mazower (2002)
Inordinate levels of state violence in the twentieth century
Grossest, largest scale human rights violations perpetrated
by states
Global diversity of large-scale slaughter
Holocaust retains pride of place in the global imagination
“genocide consciousness” and the
global “cultural economy”
(Moyn 2010; Appadurai 1996)
Bosnian genocide
Cambodian genocide
Holocaust
The radical expansion of genocide
consciousness in the 1980s and ‘90s
was linked to the radical expansion
of grass roots human rights activism
and increased breadth of human
rights organizations in those years.
It also concerned surprise at
continuation of the practice in the
wake of the immediate promise of the
end of the Cold War.
Mediascapes and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990, 298-9)
…the distribution of electronic
capabilities to produce and disseminate
information which are now available to a
growing number of private and public
images throughout the world…and…images
of the world created by these media…
…concatenations of images…often
directly political and frequently
hav[ing] to do with the ideologies of
states and…counter-ideologies of
movements explicitly oriented towards
capturing state power or a piece of
it…[these include] ideas, terms and
images including “freedom,” “welfare,”
“rights,” “sovereignty,” “[political]
representation” and…”democracy.”
creating “master-narratives”
Eurocentric
during the Rwandan
genocide, there were
a maximum of 15
members of the
international press
present in the
country
(Melvern 2007, 204)
Conclusion
Events of the mid-1990s in conjunction with the expanded global
discursive deployment of human rights vocabularies lead to a
continued heightening of “genocide consciousness” in the latter
part of that decade and the start of the twenty-first century.
Though Eurocentrically-driven and dominated by the Westernized
perspectives undergirding and structuring the global cultural
economy, this global receptiveness to both political and popular
culture driven interests in- and representations of deleterious
mass violence. These – senses of deletorious mass violence –
form the outer limit, or ultimate justification of, human rights
ideas. This reflects the essence of human rights consciousness,
structured, as it is, around senses and images, or imaginations,
of humanity’s descent into “barbarous acts.” Barbarity, or mass
scale negations of human life are present qua artifacts of the
historical imagination in all discursive and policy-oriented
invocations of human rights. This includes those surrounding
humanitarian intervention and post-conflict dialogue. This
serves to make explicit the precise terms and imageries to which
the (or a) de facto global community refers in the deployment of
human rights ideas. This again includes policy and law.
References
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