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Overview
An in-depth look at the historic and strategic deployment of rights in political conflicts throughout the world
Rights are usually viewed as defensive concepts representing mankind’s highest aspirations to protect the vulnerable and uplift the downtrodden. But since the Enlightenment, political combatants have also used rights belligerently, to batter despised communities, demolish existing institutions, and smash opposing ideas. Delving into a range of historical and contemporary conflicts from all areas of the globe, Rights as Weapons focuses on the underexamined ways in which the powerful wield rights as aggressive weapons against the weak.
Clifford Bob looks at how political forces use rights as rallying cries: naturalizing novel claims as rights inherent in humanity, absolutizing them as trumps over rival interests or community concerns, universalizing them as transcultural and transhistorical, and depoliticizing them as concepts beyond debate. He shows how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to cover ulterior motives, as crowbars to break rival coalitions, as blockades to suppress subordinate groups, as spears to puncture discrete policies, and as dynamite to explode whole societies. And he demonstrates how the targets of rights campaigns repulse such assaults, using their own rights-like weapons: denying the abuses they are accused of, constructing rival rights to protect themselves, portraying themselves as victims rather than violators, and repudiating authoritative decisions against them. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements; the American civil rights movement; nationalist, populist, and religious movements in today’s Europe; and internationalized conflicts related to Palestinian self-determination, animal rights, gay rights, and transgender rights.
Comparing key episodes in the deployment of rights, Rights as Weapons opens new perspectives on an idea that is central to legal and political conflicts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691189055 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Sales rank: | 1,002,523 |
| File size: | 577 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
THE USES OF RIGHTS IN POLITICAL CONFLICT
In Egypt's nationwide protests against the Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013, one of the loudest and most resonant cries was "Rights!" — for women, religious minorities, and secular Egyptians. Yet, on July 3, 2013, the liberal groups headlining the demonstrations welcomed a military takeover in which hundreds were soon killed, thousands imprisoned, and basic human rights greatly diminished. No doubt most protesters did not expect this bloodbath and rejected the Muslim Brotherhood's apparent plans for Egypt. Elected only one year before in a tumultuous vote, it had made constitutional and legal changes that scared many of those who supported a secular, rather than religiously inflected, government of Egypt. But in battling for another regime change so soon after the election and only two years after the fall of the Mubarak dictatorship, the protesters' eagerness to accept destruction of the country's first democratic government suggested that they had also used human rights strategically. By portraying the Brotherhood as Islamist radicals and inveterate rights abusers, demonstrators could frame themselves as victims, rallying support at home and abroad. Even as they allied with the military and refused at first to call its actions a "coup," liberals seemed to believe that they were protecting their rights. Yet by subverting the Muslim Brotherhood government that had so recently won power through a flawed but real electoral process, they also subverted rights. The dictatorship of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi quickly committed far greater abuses than the Muslim Brotherhood had done. Most of the victims were suspected Brotherhood members. But liberals who had lived in Egypt during the Brotherhood government also fell victim, and many were forced to flee abroad.
The Egyptian liberals' use of human rights as a rhetorical weapon to undermine a flawed but struggling democracy might seem surprising. Rights are sometimes thought to transcend politics, furnishing a moral bedrock for societies and activists. For many, rights are progressive goals whose achievement brings peaceful reform. In some visions, rights embody humanity's best hope for achieving its highest aspirations. The United Nations promotes a universal rights culture as an antidote to conflict and domination. Many observers focus on rights' defensive uses: to protect the vulnerable and uplift the needy. For the influential legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, rights are "trumps" that safeguard individuals against invasive policies, repressive states, and oppressive cultures.
Certainly they protect against these things, but rights, including liberal rights, can also be used as weapons of politics and for illiberal ends. How and why are rights used for aggressive purposes? In answering these central questions, this book focuses on the ways in which powerful forces use rights to batter weaker groups, smash minority ideas, or, as in Egypt, Thailand, and other states in recent years, unseat democratically elected governments. Groups such as Thailand's Yellow Shirts have argued that their movements are simply striving to protect the rule of law from governments that they decry as populist. Yet the rights language of such groups often masks a last-ditch effort to hold on to power when previously marginalized or repressed groups assert different views on social, economic, and political relations.
Nationalist battles involve the thrust and parry of rival rights — both individual and group. In places as diverse as Quebec, Scotland, and Catalonia, cultural, language, and minority rights are at the center of conflict. In Malaysia, India, and Nigeria, "sons of the soil" movements have won special rights to political, economic, and social status for indigenous majorities, even as "migrant" groups, both from overseas and from other regions of the same countries, seek their own rights. Nativist and populist movements in Europe demand cultural protections for majority groups in the face of mass migration from Africa and Asia.
Women's rights have been used in France, Belgium, Austria, and elsewhere to justify burqa bans. Although couched as a way of liberating Muslim women, the claim acts as a powerful attack on "unassimilated" Muslims. Meanwhile, Muslim women in these countries have begged to differ from their self-proclaimed defenders. They protest that wearing the burqa is itself a basic right. Internationally, women's rights served as post hoc justification for America's war against the Taliban and NATO's support for a corrupt new Afghan government. In another recent case, American and European governments have elevated LGBT rights to a central plank of foreign policy. The World Bank has followed suit, withholding development loans to poor countries, such as Uganda, for draconian laws attacking LGBT populations. Yet traditional Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims in Africa and elsewhere view these policies as misguided international attacks on their right to live by the time-tested or majority-approved values of their own cultures. Many in the West condemn the resulting violations of LGBT rights in the name of majority cultural rights, but the societies targeted with internationally based rights claims see themselves as under threat by powerful outsiders.
Nor is there anything novel in offensive usages of rights. Natural rights, civil rights, and human rights have been used in such ways for centuries, not only to protect the powerless but also to boost dominant communities at others' expense. John Locke, philosopher and partisan of his day, stressed the right to "property" in "lives, liberties and estates." He did so not only to weaken the British monarchy of James II in its conflict with Parliament, but also to increase the political power of the landed gentry and middle classes against propertyless Britons who also demanded rights. In revolutionary France, the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" undermined the old regime but limited political rights to men of means. When radical women such as Olympe de Gouges issued a "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen," they were rebuffed, then guillotined; women would not gain the vote in France until 1945. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, states' rights repeatedly stifled African Americans' claims to equality. These and many other cases reveal that rights are and have always been Janus-faced. They are used not only for defensive ends but just as much for aggressive purposes. They may protect the powerless, but just as commonly the powerful employ them to expand their influence.
This book focuses on this understudied aspect of rights, providing an answer to the puzzle of how rights may not only help achieve liberation but also end up justifying or facilitating oppression. The book provides the first systematic account of the multiple ways in which activists use rights in conflicts. In particular, I show how they invoke rights to mobilize their political forces, then deploy them against their foes — and how foes in turn counter these advances with their own rights tactics. The result is a new approach to understanding how political actors use rights as offensive weapons of conflict, not just as noble objectives to be achieved through selfless struggle. I analyze the variety of ways in which all sides to conflict invoke rights, particularly highlighting aggressive usages by the powerful against the weak. Ultimately, this perspective helps explain why some who appeal to rights end up undermining them in practice.
Prior Perspectives
Until now, the scholarly literature has primarily contemplated the appealing first face of rights, largely ignoring the less attractive second face. The most optimistic accounts focus on individual human rights, chronicling their historical triumph and foreseeing their future victories. For some, such liberal rights represent a global "script" that magnetically attracts new adherents around the world. In this view, rights inevitably expand over time and across space, and any delays or diversions are ascribed to governmental repression, cultural backwardness, or individual false consciousness. In this vision, rights' achievement will ultimately realize humanity's greatest dreams, raising it to its highest stage of development. In such an "indivisible" rights culture, as the United Nations asserts, "the improvement of one right facilitates advancement of the others," and "likewise the deprivation of one right adversely affects the others." Missing, however, is the recognition that contending political forces often dress up their causes as human rights, whether individual or group. Vindicating the rights of one comes at the expense of another. In the name of rights, powerful forces have engaged in invasions, coups, and even torture.
Academics who take a more political approach to rights nonetheless continue to conceptualize them narrowly, portraying them as unequivocal goods attained through principled methods and high-minded persuasion. Movements for civil rights, women's rights, indigenous rights, and countless others are analyzed this way. It is seldom recognized, however, that in rhetorical, political, and legal conflicts over rights, they are means — potent tools to defeat opposing forces — not just ends. This is most obvious in the "cause litigation" common to highly institutionalized settings, such as American or Indian courtrooms. There rights are fought with and fought over — with direct consequences not only for the individual litigants but also for the societal groups whose interests they embody. It is equally true in other, less structured political contexts, such as newspapers, parliaments, public squares, and even battlefields. An invocation of rights, whether group or individual, can cover up less estimable goals, mobilize armed forces, shatter opposing coalitions, and destroy entire societies. This is why rights are so commonly used by the most powerful forces in modern societies, as well as by the weakest. Indeed, as this book shows, rights are multiform weapons and are popular not merely for their ostensibly progressive goals but also for their usefulness to all sides in all types of political disputes.
If scholars have recognized rights' instrumental uses, they have mostly seen them as defensive — as shields to protect the vulnerable or as hoists to raise the downtrodden. Michael Ignatieff has claimed that human rights are "universal because they define the universal interests of the powerless, namely, that power be exercised over them in ways that respect their autonomy as agents." International relations specialists have highlighted the naming and shaming of violators as the primary means of vindicating rights. It is noteworthy, however, if often overlooked, that many basic rights are beloved of the powerful. A good example is property rights, which are staunchly upheld by a wealthy minority against insurgents claiming rights to food, education, work, and more. Oligarchs, who centuries ago had to protect their riches by employing private armies, have added rights as another arrow in the bulging quiver of protections they now use to maintain their status and the status quo. Internationally, a gamut of rights are now invoked by Western states to justify armed interventions into weaker societies. Rationalized by concern for the most vulnerable, such interventions often advance only the interests of the most powerful.
Those scholars who do take note of material and political matters nevertheless have not sufficiently analyzed how rights operate in practice. Critical scholars, following Marx's footsteps, have noted that rights can be tools of the powerful but have seldom explored how they are actually used in politics. Others confine deep analysis of rights to specific historical or organizational settings. Lawyers and law professors, who use rights on a daily basis, demonstrate their instrumental aspects. But much of this scholarship examines rights and law within well-ordered national legal systems, particularly the United States or Canada. In such contexts, it is easy to see how litigation can be utilized as a tool. Judicial decisions can provide definitive judgments in favor of needy claimants. Less analyzed, however, are the ways in which broad political movements use rights outside institutionalized settings — to mobilize domestic support during moments of societal change or to draw international awareness to their cause.
What explains this neglect, even though rights' weaponlike utility has been, as I suggest here, central to their rise? One reason may be that proponents of rights are so imbued with the righteousness of their causes and the assumed universalism of their goals that they are blind to rights' aggressive aspects — or even actively conceal them. The necessary strategic element in political conflict is seldom celebrated, at least not by the winners. Instead, theirs are triumphant tales of right over wrong. It is only those facing a rights campaign who cry that they are being attacked. Sometimes, of course, their protestations cover up their own controversial goals and repressive policies, which they themselves have draped in rights language (albeit a very different set of rights). Either way, there is much to be learned by analyzing rights as tools rather than being transfixed by their moral content.
It is true that pragmatically oriented analysts such as Ignatieff have noted that rights are "a fighting creed," one that demands "taking sides, mobilizing constituencies powerful enough to force abusers to stop[, being] partial and political." The legal historian Samuel Moyn argues that human rights have risen to prominence as the contingent outcome of longterm if indirect competition with other visions of "utopia." James Peck, Stephen Hopgood, and others have documented the ways in which human rights NGOs have sometimes tethered themselves to the violent foreign policies of powerful states. This political realism is exactly right but limited in scope: it neither conceptualizes nor analyzes the ways in which proponents, both weak and strong, use rights in the pursuit of political goals.
Some, such as Ignatieff, claim that human rights are different from other forms of politics because they are "constrained by moral universals" that "discipline [activists'] partiality — their conviction that one side is right — with an equal commitment to the rights of the other side."In fact, this is seldom the case. Rivals often portray rights conflicts as zero-sum, with full achievement of their foes' rights necessarily coming at the expense of their own. In most cases, opponents are so sure of their rectitude that they brook no concession on core values. Those who promote their causes with rights reject their foes' claims. Rights advocates denounce their opponents, even if they too come outfitted in a suit of rights. Governmental institutions may enforce particular rights, usually based on the influence of one side over those institutions. But such outcomes, variously portrayed as glorious wins, ignominious losses, or necessary but regrettable compromises, are seldom stable because the competing sides keep on fighting to achieve their rights more fully.
Some scholars recognize rights' political aspects but lament this fact or urge restraint. Richard Thompson Ford's Universal Rights Down to Earth typifies this view. He argues that activists overuse the concept of human rights. Instead, "only the most stark and discrete abuses" should be considered human rights issues, whereas "problems with more diffuse and complex causes are better understood as political questions." Ford is hardly the first to decry rights' "proliferation" or "rightsification." For decades, academics of all political persuasions have pointed to the explosion of "rights talk" as a problematic development in national and international politics. In this view, the overuse of rights fragments societies, leading to an individualistic dissensus that ignores the common good. Others more sympathetic to the rights project criticize the expansion of new rights beyond a civil and political core. For international human rights lawyers and scholars, the ceaseless propagation of rights waters down their essence. This makes it difficult to build agreement around "fundamental" rights and rally action against the worst violators.
Notwithstanding these critiques, political leaders, alert to rights' utility, ignore the dons' warnings. Rights continue their historic march, used by all sides in all manner of conflicts. They are not so much goals as means in these struggles. As Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon show, for instance, Israel's Jewish settlers now employ indigenous and property rights to deprive Palestinians of land and ultimately to undermine Palestinian activism, if not Palestinian society itself. In the United States, where the Supreme Court in 2015 affirmed the right to same-sex marriage, Democrats are already using the Obergefell v. Hodges decision to drive wedges into a Republican Party torn between conservative religious voters who oppose the decision and party leaders who, with an eye on electoral victories, are more divided. In this move, liberals follow a well-worn path: before the Court's decision, conservatives had used the ostensible threat that same-sex marriage posed to religious freedom as a means of wedging traditionalist Democrats away from the Democratic Party leadership as it became increasingly supportive of such marriages in the late 2000s.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction: The Uses of Rights in Political Conflict 1
Part I Preparing for Conflict
2 Rights as Rallying Cries: Mobilizing Support 27
3 Rights as Shields and Parries: Countering Threats 51
Part II Contending with Foes
4 Rights as Camouflage: Masking Motives 65
5 Rights as Spears: Overturning Laws 93
6 Rights as Dynamite: Destroying Cultures 118
Part 111 Thwarting Third Parties
7 Rights as Blockades: Suppressing Subordinates 151
8 Rights as Wedges: Breaking Coalitions 185
9 Conclusion 208
Acknowledgments 219
Appendix 223
Notes 225
Index 251
What People are Saying About This
"In this lucid and compelling account of historical and contemporary human rights struggles, Clifford Bob offers an entirely new lens for understanding how rights have been deployed to advance political objectives. Through an array of cases and adopting a realist perspective, he conceptualizes the different ways rights are being weaponized. A fantastic book."—Neve Gordon, coauthor of The Human Right to Dominate"Rights as Weapons is a timely and important reminder that while human rights discourse can empower and liberate, it can also justify oppression by the powerful against the weak. Clifford Bob masterfully documents the ways in which actors in conflict use rights as weapons to amplify their own power. This book is a must-read."—Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, University of California, San Diego "With clarity and insight, Clifford Bob enlarges our perspective on rights claims, demonstrating how they are employed to strengthen the powerful, defend the indefensible, or protect the powerless. Highlighting rights strategies used by activists on the right and left, Bob helps us see that normative power in the modern global system is as much political strategy as moral claim. His book presents a less utopian and more accurate understanding of the possibilities and limitations of rights."—Stephen Hopgood, SOAS University of London"In this highly original and timely book, Clifford Bob illuminates the heretofore dark side of political struggles for rights. While we tend to use the term in a diffuse, uncritical way, Bob reminds us that in the real world, rights are often deployed as rhetorical and legal weapons by groups in order to oppress others. Anyone interested in the strategic or moral dimensions of political contention will want to read this book."—Doug McAdam, Stanford University “Over the past two decades, Clifford Bob has established himself as the most original human rights thinker working in the English language. In Rights as Weapons, Bob breaks through paradigms, undermining feel-good claims of human rights as universal, unproblematic public goods. Instead, he argues rights claims are weapons strategically used by all sides for political advantage. Students and educators will want to incorporate this book into their thinking, syllabi, and research.”—James Ron, University of Minnesota