As the First “Total” War of the Twentieth century, World War I marked a turning point in the understanding of what Goya had called the disasters of war. The years 1914–18 witnessed a difficult struggle to recognize and defend civilian rights in wartime, rights that had primarily been defined as those of soldiers and prisoners of war, under the Taws and Customs of War on Tand, established at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. Wartime conditions that blurred lines between civilian and combatant unleashed violations of civilians' human rights that the conventions had not anticipated. The ensuing debate during the Great War exemplified the growing complexity of disputes about human rights. In particular, it revealed that competing claims of victimization could exacerbate reprisals in the confusion of combat. In a duel of countercharges, states published documentation carrying titles that denounced enemy indifference to the “law of nations,” such as Die volkerrechtswidrige Fuhrung des belgischen Volkskriegs (“The Conduct of the Belgian People's War in Violation of the Taw of Nations” [1915]) and Rapports… en vue de constater les actes commis par l'ennemi en violation du droit des gens (“Reports … to Record Enemy Actions in Violation of the Taw of Nations” [1915]). A “war of words” raged, as well as a war of dumdum bullets that spread on impact, poison gas, and aerial bombardment—all instruments of war that had been explicitly banned by the conventions of the preceding years.

One of the most compelling criticisms to emerge during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings called attention to the fact that those who benefited from the everyday policies and practices of the apartheid regime were neither identified as complicit in perpetuating systemic violence nor called to account. Nor was their implicated position in the apartheid state extensively analyzed in the commission's report. Commenting at the time on the inadequacy of the TRC process to identify beneficiaries of the apartheid regime and expose its structural violence, Mahmood Mamdani wrote that the TRC “has been interested only in violations outside the law, in benefits which are corruptions, but not in the systematic benefit which was conferred on beneficiaries at the expense of the vast majority of people in this country” (“Reconciliation” 3; also qtd. in Young 149). Mamdani here asserts that the ethical concept of the beneficiary is central to truth telling, reconciliation, and transitional nation building. His trenchant critique implicitly questions whether the truth-and-reconciliation project, relying as it does on the management of justice through the juridical statuses of “victim” and “perpetrator,” can deliver on its promise of addressing injustice and the aftereffects of radical injury and harm. Those positioned neither as victims nor as perpetrators are not called to recognize the benefits to them of structural violence, through which power, privilege, and “corporeal vulnerability” are unevenly distributed (Butler, Precarious Life 30). Nor are they asked to “bear moral responsibility to redress” the consequences of injustice (Mamdani, “Diminished Truth” 183). In response to Mamdani's critique, we want to consider how the ethical stance of the beneficiary can become visible in relation to victim and perpetrator positions and to what effect.

In August 2005, America's three major TV news networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS — refused to air a thirty-second advertisement that called them out for shirking their journalistic duty. Prepared by an activist group trying to bring attention to the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, the ad uses clips from offending newscasts and admonishes the networks for devoting far more time to covering the so-called runaway bride, the Michael Jackson trial, and Tom Cruise's love life than the bloodshed in Sudan. A scolding, stentorian voice-over declares, “You can't stop a genocide if you don't know about it.” And it urges, “Genocide is news. Tell the media to be a witness” (BeAWitness.org). The networks didn't offer any excuses when they rejected the shaming ad, but a month earlier, in the industry magazine Editor and Publisher, newspaper top brass around the country defended their own neglect of the story: John Yearwood, the world editor of the Miami Herald, explained, “If we don't cover the Michael Jacksons, that will be our demise. That is what the public wants. But we ought to make the commitment to also give Darfur or Rwanda attention if we can.” Knight Ridder's foreign editor, Steve Butler, offered an only slightly more dignified justification. “We have been keeping our Iraq coverage going and that is a more important story,” he told Editor and Publisher. “It has US soldiers there, people are very interested in it, and it lends itself better to breaking news” (qtd. in Strupp).

Where are human rights when more than 200 Muslims are rotting for months in your prisons in a 4x5-meter room, without any of them finding a place even to sit down? Where are human rights when every day prisoners are tortured at the hands of drunken pagans? Where are human rights when Muslims are killed as a result of the torture of your executioners, and their bodies are thrown out in the open? (“Jaish Ansar al-Sunnah”)

Many of us say with a smug surprise: “the Law is founded on its own transgressions.” This may be a convenient aphorism that carries within it the memory—in most cases a textual memory not necessarily elaborated by the user—of Lacan's explanations of the Law of the Father, or of Derrida's meditations on perjury, or, rather, par-jure because ultimately Derrida carefully stopped short at the irreducibility of idioms, the limits of the translatability of philosophies.

Many liberals endorse an ideal of neutrality for the state when it comes to its relations with people of distinct identities. One model in the United States has been a certain understanding of the First Amendment, with its careful balancing of free exercise, on the one hand, and nonestablishment, on the other. In recent work I have defended such a liberal conception, which I call “neutrality as equal respect.” The basic idea is simple: state acts shouldn't disadvantage individuals because of their identities. This notion of neutrality might help flesh out what happens when we try to generalize the First Amendment paradigm from religious groups to identity groups more generally. One obvious test for such an analysis is to ask what help it offers us in thinking about how liberal states should treat language minorities.

I want to raise some questions in this essay about the impoverished way debates on the relation among gender, religion, and human rights are often framed. I approach this issue as an anthropologist who comes from a discipline that, whatever its flaws, thinks hard about social and cultural processes and what it is to be human; I also approach it as someone who has spent her academic life thinking about and studying the Muslim Middle East, a region that carries a heavy symbolic load in the Western imagination with respect to the relation between religion and women's rights.

“Human rights” is now a technique deployed to measure the progress of states. In the last two decades it has become both the normative language of how injustice is evaluated and a means through which powerful states discipline the new world order (Grewal 121). This disciplining often relies on a relation posed between gendered violence and human rights violations, whereby the denial of women's human rights represents the pathological cultures of repressive states. But this representation—commonly assumed by states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the public—is founded on the ignoring or effacing of political violence. Discourses about human rights attribute responsibility for gendered violations to purportedly pathological cultures, rather than to political sources. This tendency becomes apparent in the narrative told of why violations occur, as well as in the solutions proposed to these violations. What lurks beneath this disappearing act is a presumption that the world is made up of two kinds of states. One kind, described as rogue states or failed states, has a pathological culture in the place of a civil society. The other kind of state enjoys both a civil society and a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Will historians looking back a hundred years from now see the rise of human rights as an agent or reflection of the decline of national sovereignty? I take this question (asked at a recent meeting by Richard Wilson, director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut) as an expression of worry about the effects that the decline of national sovereignty is likely to have, including effects on human rights themselves. Human rights advocates will recognize an obvious reason for this worry. Human rights are often seen, correctly but narrowly, as a key line of protection against an invasive and oppressive state. But the project of winning respect for human rights also relies heavily on the state's legal and bureaucratic powers—the power to enforce, to educate, to take positive measures, and so on. This is especially true in the domain of economic, social, and cultural rights, which require for their fulfillment that states exercise what has come to be called “due diligence.” Violence against women, for example, which has only been classified as an abuse of human rights since 1993, is often perpetrated not by states but by private individuals and groups. It can come under the protection of human rights discourse only if a sovereign state, which is held responsible for intervening to punish and prevent, is strong enough to do so. Weaken national sovereignty, and you may subvert the cause of women's rights.

The cold war, many people contend, ended sometime around 1989. A number of facts, such as the United States' military hegemony, the demise of the Soviet empire, and China's impeccable capitalist record, tend to corroborate this contention. Yet, with all due respect to the memory of John Adams, stubbornness is not the privilege solely of facts. Certain mind-sets can prove just as obstinate. Dormant or sidestepped during most of the 1990s, cold war mentalities and their mantras—“trace all evil to the main enemy,” “don't let your base be troubled by nuance and ambiguity”—have indeed made a great comeback since the beginning of the new millennium, and their mouthpieces are working hard to turn George W. Bush's post-9/11 pronouncement “You are either with us or you are against us …” into a self-fulfilling prophecy (“President”). To ward off the return of these disciplinary strictures, it is tempting to resort to probably the most powerful cold war remedy of the 1970s and 1980s—namely, human rights discourse and activism. Has this remedy retained its potency in the current context? Addressing this question—or at least stressing its urgency—is the main ambition of the following pages.

as a human rights practitioner rather than an academic, I am humbled in a number of ways to be part of this conversation. I am also reminded of the gulf of perception that exists between human rights practitioners and those who write and think about the practice of human rights. One example of this is the very different sense of the human rights movement's capacity to influence change.

According to the report of the United Nations commission on Human Rights, rape is the least condemned war crime (coomaraswamy, Further Promotion 64n263). Although wartime rape was listed as a crime against humanity by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and by the Geneva Conventions, it was not until 2001 that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia identified rapists as war criminals. In that year the tribunal sentenced three men for violations of the laws or customs of war (torture, rape) and crimes against humanity (torture, rape) committed during the war in Bosnia during the 1993 takeover of Foca, where women were systematically raped and killed, the purpose being “to destroy an ethnic group by killing it, to prevent its reproduction or to disorganize it, removing it from its home soil.”

As i write these lines, back in Argentina a myriad of commemorative events mark the thirtieth anniversary of the genocidal military coup that destroyed our movement for social change in the 1970s. An outpour of testimonial texts is reaching the presses. The words of public intellectuals pepper interviews and newspaper articles dealing with the currency of the testimonial first person. Beatriz Sarlo's new book Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusion contributes to this debate. Sarlo recognizes the value of the testimonial first person for legal purposes, to set records straight while other documentation is not available (24) and to secure justice. She admits that personal narratives can be a source for historians (25). Sarlo argues, however, that excessive trust is placed on victims and survivors as producers of historical truth (62, 63). Her intervention has been called polemical by journalists in the country and abroad. Arturo Jiménez, from the Mexican newspaper La jornada, has seen it as a call to “go beyond the overwhelming predominance of the testimonial account of the repression by the military dictatorship and to engage with more strength in theoretical reflections to be able to understand what has happened” (my trans.). What concerns me about these words and Sarlo's statements is the belief that survivors are unfit for theoretical reflection unless they undergo traditional academic training and do not refer directly to their experience.

I used to worry a lot about what good we do in the humanities. Sometimes I'd get so sore from the everyday ethical barbs that interrupt a literature teacher's chain of thought that my thinking would get derailed from aesthetic questions to questions of their importance. The moments that haunted me most were when graduate students would wonder why—when the world was so urgently in need of practical contributions—they should write a dissertation about this or that literary genre or motif or formal property. They didn't doubt that preparing to teach in the arts is an enormous pleasure and also a privilege. But what redeems the profession from irresponsibility? What direct or indirect outcomes could justify the resources of time and money, the intellectual passions that can replace sleep at night, the dedication to writing books that (by my hardly admirable example) can trump even a mother's attention to her children? Can we, in good faith, counsel students to pursue humanistic careers when the same barbs that bother us may prick their conscience if they manage to land a job?

Human Rights violations traumatize more than the immediate victims of “barbarous acts.” they wound families, communities, and entire societies sometimes for years, even generations. While the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights locates rights primarily in the individual (“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”), it is clear that “the human family” invoked in the opening sentence both sustains claims to inalienable rights and suffers from their transgression. Nonetheless, most responses to violations focus on individual victims almost to the exclusion of family and the broader community. Several countries sponsor “torture clinics” to reintegrate victims into society or find them asylum elsewhere. Survivors are diagnosed, and therapists help them work through their trauma in different ways, usually involving individual, group, and family therapy. These important programs medicalize trauma as individual pathology and attempt to reduce symptoms and empower survivors. However, even when particular programs are successful, problems and contradictions abound. Not all communities have access to mental health care. Not all governments are willing to sponsor programs that recognize the traumatic effects of their political actions. The wider impact of criminal politics on society as a whole remains unexplored. The question of whether society is the site of the so-called normal rather than a highly repressive or toxic environment is left unexamined. The individual becomes both the exclusive site of traumatic injury and the subject to be healed.