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Dr. Thom Workman Political Science Department, University of New Brunswick When I read Shelley's paper I was increasingly uncomfortable with some of the unspoken intellectual assumptions that inform the overall project, the project of recitation. I think that part of this project is formed on a faith that the human rights discourse and the more mundane protection of human rights is of worth, a positive thing. It is this view that I want to challenge directly, and I want to suggest that there are specific reasons why we should proceed with the utmost caution and be prepared at anytime to reject this project. I think that in the conclusion of Shelley's paper that this is the tenor of much of what she is saying. What I want to argue is that the idea that the human rights discourse is liberating or empowering, or in anyway contributing to an emancipatory status is hypocritical, the most misguided notion of the 20th century. On the one hand this is paradoxical for no one is denying that we are not experiencing the some of the most profound and utterly offensive forms of human abuse that human kind has ever seen. So there is a certain paradox as there is an underlying sense that these serious issues are best taken up by a human rights discourse. In the level of everyday life the human rights discourse is irrelevant, particularly in the context of the globalizing economy today in the current neo-liberal phase, a phase that is producing rather unique and special tolls for women that we have never seen before. On the other hand, a human rights discourse in an extreme contrast to the mythology becomes what Foucault would call one of the macro physics of power - that it enters into the practices of domination, particularly western domination. Therefore, rather than being empowering, human rights discourse itself bequeaths human rights abuses, specifically by legitimizing and entrenching modes of power and domination that are at the heart of abusive people. That is basically what I wanted to throw out for discussion. It is not really furthering the discourse per se, but it is offered in the spirit of a counter hegemonic project. I would want to illustrate the irrelevances of a human rights discourse by focussing on some of the specific problems that emerge for women in the global economy. For instance, human rights are irrelevant for a Thai prostitute who has been recruited from the countryside through the contract between a pimp and an unwitting parent, or for those 30,000 prostitutes who are situated on an american airforce base in the Philippines of which 10,000 were children - here the discourse of human rights has very little if any relevance. It is also irrelevant to a Filipino domestic worker who has been raped and beaten by her Kuwait employer, to a Salvador nanny who is isolated, lonely and somewhat vulnerable under the constant threat of deportation and living in Toronto, or an eight year old girl living in India who is stuffing matches in matchboxes because her parents don't think she is worthy of an education. It is irrelevant in the following way, when any reference to human rights appears in these contexts, it appears not as a discourse of liberation but as a discourse of desperation. It is a language of anxiety, a language of unease and a language of dread. On the other hand, if it appears somewhat more self consciously it is seen as rhetorically strategic. Often quite explicitly, people who suffer the abuse and resort to a discourse of human rights are very aware that they are adopting the narrative of colonizing consciousness. Even among human rights groups, far from being emancipatory or liberating, the human rights discourse is a rhetoric of despair. It provides standards of misconduct but in these situations it is a language that is immediately marginalized, a prime example of which was the reaction to the Kurdish genocide. Certainly there has been an increase in human rights texts internationally but this can not be taken as a sign of much beyond hegemonic culture and power that manifests itself in certain bodies like the United Nations. In this sense, the texts legitimize very repressive regimes, for as these texts have been circulated, they do not stand outside of the prevailing power structure. In this context I would suggest that there is a legitimizing function that human rights narratives or discourses perform. I am not optimistic about the efforts to rescue a human rights discourse. I would argue that it should be abandoned and that we should not go westrocentric at all. We should not adopt or continue to adopt yet another dimension of the narrative of colonizing consciousness. We certainly should be uneasy by the privileges accorded to us by virtue of being white and western, and we should not merely, blindly reproduce the power structures that that privilege is derived from.
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© 2007 Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University |
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