Decolonization: The Black Box of Human Rights?

Abstract

Decolonization: The Black Box of Human Rights? Steven L. B. Jensen (bio) In 2007, Reza Afshari published a remarkable article in Human Rights Quarterly. It marked a turning point for the new human rights historiography that has emerged over the last decade, but it has not been fully recognized for this contribution. The article “On Historiography of Human Rights” was at a first glance a sixty-seven-page reflection on Paul Gordon Lauren’s Pulitzer-nominated book The Evolution of Human Rights: Visions Seen. In reality, it was so much more. What Afshari achieved was to write a piece that addressed not only historiography, but also historical method and managed to present an alternative history of human rights. He painted on a large canvas while paying considerable attention to detail at the same time. The article brought human rights historiography down to earth—away from the centuries-long narratives that was veering towards teleological explanations and overly normative approaches and brought the wider research field towards a more self-reflexive, critical, and complex reckoning with human rights in history. For this, his article remains an inspiration and a piece still worth returning to and learning from—even if the field of human rights history has significantly expanded in scope and depth since then. Despite its many merits, I want to engage with one aspect of the article where I believe the historiography over the last few years has proved him wrong in important ways, namely on the relationship between the era of decolonization and human rights. Afshari goes far in discarding the relevance of this connection. In my view, this connection is one of the most important, [End Page 200] fruitful, and challenging research topics currently in human rights history and the research on this has ramifications for the wider cross-disciplinary field of human rights research. It is difficult in this short space to give justice to Afshari’s discussion about the anti-colonial and human rights. There certainly are worthwhile insights, but I would argue that this is the one place in the article that he himself veers close towards the teleological that he otherwise so convincingly deconstructs in Lauren’s book. First of all, Afshari too readily reduces the Third World agendas on human rights during the era of decolonization to questions of “Western colonialism and racism.” He loses sight of what the historian Nico Slate has labeled “colored cosmopolitanism”—a term Slate uses to capture the global visions and outlooks of Global South actors—which is relevant in this historical context as it brings more nuance and complexity to the historical processes in question.1 We should also be careful when describing anti-colonial movements as “single issue” or “single-cause.”2 There was always more at stake and wider questions involved and, perhaps most importantly, considerable variation between actors that constituted the term “The Third World.” Besides this point about allowing for variation, we should also not necessarily let “anti-colonial movements” serve as a representative proxy for the much broader historical phenomenon of the decolonization process.3 The former focuses on specific actors, the latter on a wider structural transformation of global politics. There is a category difference here that we must observe and adequately address—in both method and interpretation. The point where Afshari veers towards teleology is the following: “[T] he expectation that prevailed at the time must be reevaluated in the light of what awaited the ex-colonized countries and their long suffering citizens in the hands of their own independent states.”4 Now many may well agree with this observation and it is not without merit. However, it raises the question: To what extent should we allow human rights outcomes appearing later to determine the histories that we explore and write? To be fair, Afshari may have been expressing a word of caution concerning Lauren’s interpretations. However, this question has for a long time had wider salience in human rights discourse. It has kept researchers and practitioners from exploring the deeper histories of the emergence of international human rights during the first decades after 1945—where on a world-wide scale the [End Page 201] colonial, the anti-colonial...