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Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Robert Meister
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Extract

In the lexicon of rights, the concept of human rights can play a wide variety of roles. Human rights can be defined as substantive natural rights that transcend politics and culture or as the rights that underlie political and cultural differences. They can be defined narrowly as rights that could be asserted against enemies in war or, more broadly, as the aspirational goals to which governments are held accountable by their citizens and the world. Despite their lack of recognition in covenant and positive law through much of the twentieth century, human rights are increasingly asserted on the basis of such recognition. To some, human rights are simply the sine qua non (procedural? biological?) for asserting other rights, whatever these may be. In this paper I do not choose among these uses of the concept of human rights by propounding a single definition; neither do I defend or criticize human rights in general.

Type
Debate
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , September 2002 , pp. 91 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2002

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References

* An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the workshop, “The Politics and Political Uses of Human Rights Discourse,” Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, November 8–9, 2001.

1 See, e.g., Ignatieff, Michael Human Rights: The Mid-Life Crisis New York Review of Books May 20, 1999Google Scholar, and the works reviewed therein.

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3 See, e.g., Shawcross, WilliamDeliver Us from Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict 2000 New YorkSimon and SchusterGoogle Scholar).

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6 On December 17, 1999, the UN General Assembly completed a decadelong process of bringing terrorism under the designation of human rights violations. In Resolution 54/164 (“Human Rights and Terrorism”) it declared terrorism to be a violation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It went on to express the UN's “solidarity with the victims of terrorism,” and to require that the secretarygeneral report on the measures taken by member states to cooperate in the “eradication” of terrorism; available at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/54/a54r164.pdf. The secretary-general's report was on the docket of the General Assembly session scheduled to begin in New York on the morning of September 11; available at http://www.un.org/terrorism/a56190.pdf.

7 For a useful background discussion of this process see Cheng, Anne AnlinThe Melancholy of Race 2000 New YorkOxford University PressGoogle Scholar), ch. 1.

8 Counterrevolutionary thought continues (with a twist) the old Socratic idea that the physical and material suffering of victims of injustice is nothing as compared to the moral harm that makes them capable of committing injustice in their turn. For a perceptive discussion of whether the true victims of injustice are the unjust or their prey, see Shklar, Judith NThe Faces of Injustice 1990 New HavenYale University Press 2840Google Scholar.

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18 Ibid., ch. 1.

19 The Argentine jurist Carlos Nino, for example, argued that the function of human rights trials is less to punish the guilty than to change the political culture through widespread publicity and discussion. Nino's argument makes sense only if it is based on an unstated premisethat the purpose of the trial is to win over to the human rights culture present and former beneficiaries of the now-discredited old regime. See Nino, Radical Evil on Trial. See also Osiel, MarkMass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law 1997 New Brunswick, N.J.TransactionGoogle Scholar).

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22 Morgan, Edmund S The Big American Crime New York Review of Books December 3, 1998p.16Google Scholar.

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25 Benjamin, WalterArendt, HannahIlluminations 1969 New YorkSchockenp.263Google Scholar.

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32 Ibid., p.57Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., pp.7879Google Scholar.

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38 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 256. For Benjamin's debt to Schmitt, see Benjamin, WalterJennings, Michael WSelected Writings 1999 vol. 2 CambridgeHarvard University Pressp.389Google Scholar.

39 For a recent development of a similar line of argument, see Feher, MichelPowerless by Design: The Age of the International Community 2000 DurhamDuke University PressGoogle Scholar).

40 Alford, C FredMelanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory 1989 New HavenYale University PressGoogle Scholar), ch. 2; Klein, Melanie Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works, 1921–1945 1988 LondonViragoGoogle Scholar); Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms inMitchell, JulietThe Selected Melanie Klein 1986 New YorkFree Press 176200Google Scholar.

41 Deloria, Philip JosephPlaying Indian 1998 New HavenYale University PressGoogle Scholar).

42 Williams, LindaPlaying the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson 2001 PrincetonPrinceton University PressGoogle Scholar).

43 See, e.g., Robinson, RandallThe Debt: What America Owes to Blacks 2000 New YorkPlumeGoogle Scholar).

44 Stern, FrankThe Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany 1992 New YorkOxford University PressGoogle Scholar); German-Jewish Relations in the Postwar Period: The Ambiguities of Antisemitic and Philosemitic Discourse inBodemann, Y MichalJews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany 1996 Ann ArborUniversity of Michigan PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Kramer, JaneThe Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany 1996 New YorkRandom HouseGoogle Scholar).

45 See, esp., Malan, My Traitor's Heart; Breyten-bach, BreytenTrue Confessions ofan Albino Terrorist 1994 New YorkHarcourtGoogle Scholar). See also Brink, AndreImaginings of Sand 1999 New YorkHarcourtGoogle Scholar).

46 Segal, HannaIntroduction to the Work of Melanie Klein 1973 New YorkBasic Books 9596Google Scholar.

47 Malan, My Traitor's Heart, p. 227.

48 Shklar,“The Liberalism of Fear.”

49 See, most recently, Rawls, JohnThe Law of Peoples 1999 CambridgeHarvard University PressGoogle Scholar). C. Fred Alford argues, in contrast, that the Rawlsian “original position,”requiring us to imagine our own worst feelings as the feelings ofothers toward us, institutionalizes Klein's “paranoid-schizoid” position. See his “Rawls: Justice as Fearfulness,” in Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory, pp.179–83.

50 Examples would include reexperiencing one's aggressive fantasies as a fear of victimization and re-experiencing one's racist impulses as a fear of being treated as a racist.

51 See, e.g., Mamdani, Mahmood Good Muslim, Bad Muslim–A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism American Anthropologist 2002 104 no.3CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

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