File(s) under permanent embargo
Struggles, over rights: humanism, ethical dispossession and resistance
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 22:50 authored by Lara Montesinos ColemanLara Montesinos ColemanWhat should we make of appeals to human rights in the context of struggles against dispossession or armed repression? After the ‘death of man’ as transcendent ground of all right, critics have highlighted the disciplinary effects and absolutist tendencies of human rights discourse. However, attempts have been made to ‘rescue’ human rights – and wider forms of humanistic advocacy – as an immanent, self-grounding ethical practice. Drawing on analysis of struggles over natural resource extraction and indigenous rights in Latin America, this paper argues that such accounts mirror the assumptions of a predominant mode of international humanitarian activism. By reifying humanistic ideals, without sufficient attention to the effects of practices within which rights are invoked, both obscure entanglements between humanist interventions and logics of dispossession. This is particularly significant at the current juncture. Through these interventions rights have been absorbed into a neoliberal regime of truth in which the subjects of rights are interpellated as parties to private contract, such that rights themselves become tools of exception. Taking struggle as a starting point, by contrast, highlights not only the indeterminacy of rights but also the potential of human rights discourse to disrupt these logics. Through ethnographic engagement with ‘people’s hearings’ into ‘Multinational Corporations and Crimes against Humanity’ in Colombia, I revisit the questions of ‘the human’ and ‘rights’ and propose a more dialectical approach to the relation between normative principle and immanent critique.
Funding
Independent Social Research Foundation
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Journal
Third World QuarterlyISSN
0143-6597Publisher
Taylor & FrancisExternal DOI
Issue
6Volume
36Page range
1060-1075Department affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2015-10-19First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2021-03-08Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC