Doing Rights as Indicators: Informatising Social and Economic Rights

Abstract

The nook’s third chapter follows parallel, if much more discontinuous, efforts to measure social rights through indicators from the 1980s until their ascendency in the noughties. The chapter argues that this turn to indicators reflects a strategy to depoliticize social rights by turning them into information. Throughout the middle of the 20th century, what would become known as the Third World mobilized social and economic rights claims, most notably the right to self-determination, in an expressly political project designed to remake the global economy on fairer, more just terms. Situating indicators in relation to this political use of rights, the chapter considers how their emergence responded to anxieties precisely about the political nature of social rights with seemingly objective forms of measure organized around very narrow interpretations of their legal inscription in international law. The result, the chapter argues, is an informatized practice of ‘doing’ rights work that reconfigures and reduces the social rights project to a process of finding and measuring information.