Humanizing Militarism: Amnesty International and the Tactical Polyvalence of Human Rights Discourses

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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



Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint

of

Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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mark of Blooms bury Publishing Pic

First published 2014

© nna Yeatman Peg Birmingham and contributor s 2014

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6977-8

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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



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



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



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



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


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



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



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.


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,



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.


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



194

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.


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



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


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



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


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

. •

_



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


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.



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).

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Humanizing Militarism: Amnesty International and the Tactical Polyvalence of Human Rights Discourses

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