Juristocracy as a Symptom of the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Once considered a topic that held little interest for cultural anthropologists, human rights became a focus of growing anthropological concern over the 1990s and 2000s. Important publications now number in the hundreds, even when limited (as this article is) only to works by cultural anthropologists (and not forensic anthropologists), which directly reference human rights (and not works that are relevant but make no more than a passing mention of human rights). As Annelise Riles aptly summarizes in her article “Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage” (Riles 2006, p. 53, cited under International Legal Epistemology), anthropologists have turned “from treating human rights doctrines, actors, and institutions as instruments to be used (e.g., as a tool of advocacy on behalf of indigenous peoples) to treating them as subjects of ethnographic research, on par with other ethnographic subjects.” What was a discussion of anthropology and human rights has thus evolved into a research subfield, the anthropology of human rights, offering field research–based examinations of place- and time-specific encounters among the promoters of human rights universalism (a term coined by Mark Goodale in Goodale 2009, cited under General Overviews) and diverse communities of sufferers of human-inflicted harms. Whether current scholarship in anthropology focuses on human rights as practice or as discourse, its common signature is to foreground the local, national, and international political and economic processes in which human rights and larger social justice projects are embedded. Two publications that appeared in 1997 marked a watershed in the development of new modes of anthropological engagement with human rights. One, the contributory volume edited by Richard Wilson, Human Rights, Culture and Context (Wilson 1997, cited under General Overviews), anticipated research and writing relating to both the practice and the discourse of human rights. The other, a Journal of Anthropological Research special issue on Human Rights, edited by Carole Nagengast and Terence Turner, articulated a new view of culture’s relationship to human rights, not as an argument against ethical universals but an argument for the embeddedness of ethics within any human group’s encompassing way of life (see Hatch 1997, Messer 1997, and Nagengast 1997, all cited under Pros and Cons of Cultural Relativism; and Turner 1997, cited under Cultural Rights). Even if the year 1997 seems an arbitrary dividing line between the eras of “anthropology and human rights” and the “anthropology of human rights,” there is nonetheless a disciplinary consensus that anthropology’s engagement with human rights has undergone significant changes in its guiding concerns, approaches, orientations, and commitments.

INTRODUCTION This chapter seeks to complement the emphasis in this volume on the discursive and social aspects of human rights by focusing on their legal character, and how this shapes the responses of local actors who generate innovative discursive and political strategies within a rights paradigm. Law is not the only viable setting for an ethnography of human rights, nevertheless anthropologists need to have better analytical tools for understanding the institutional environment in which rights are generated and enforced. Law is the focal point of studies of human rights in international relations, political science and international law, and anthropologists cannot afford to neglect the legal aspects of human rights, if their insights are going to have a salience beyond the discipline. The question then becomes, what conceptual ideas can the field of legal anthropology offer to the study of human rights in transnational and domestic law? While the origins of legal anthropology can be traced back to Maine, Morgan, and Marx, the history of the anthropology of human rights in transnational legal processes is relatively recent. Less than twenty years old, the anthropology of transnational law came into its own in the 1990s during an epoch of the rapid globalization of law and the rise of a more robust international human rights legal framework. Anthropologists responded to this resurgence of global humanitarianism by studying a number of its manifestations, from refugee camps to HIV/AIDS clinics to local courts.

Human Rights, Anthropology of

This chapter introduces an anthropological inquiry into human rights activism, sexuality, and gender, and proposes taking an ethnographic approach grounded in love, agency, and humanity to do so. Such an inquiry brings together queer anthropology and the anthropology of human rights to analyse the intersection of human rights and social justice activism for people with non-normative sexualities and genders. Although queer anthropology has illuminated the contingent and multiple ways of doing sexuality and gender, it usually does not examine the processes and patterns that arise out of human rights or the actions and experiences of activists. On the other hand, anthropologists of human rights have generally not focused on non-normative genders or sexualities. The proposed ethnographic approach does not merely pay attention to the interpretation, adaptation, and circulation of the substantive meanings of human rights and such affiliated identities as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT); it also analyses the emotions and interpersonal relations that give rise to and emerge from those processes and treats them as inherent to the practices of human rights and LGBT identities. Additionally, this approach is motivated by compassion for the agency and empirical realities of their research subjects. Taking this approach to develop research at the intersection of human rights activism, sexuality, and gender, the field of anthropology can further influence theories of social movements and collective action in the broader social sciences.

Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a well-tempered human rights-an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by a sense of humility, an appreciation for the disorienting fact of multiplicity, and a willingness to make the mundaneness of social practice a source of ethical inspiration. In examining the curious history of anthropology's engagement with human rights, this book moves from more traditional anthropological topics within the broader human rights community-for example, relativism and the problem of culture-to consider a wider range of theoretical and empirical topics. Among others, it examines the link between anthropology and the emergence of neoliberal human rights, explores the claim that anthropology has played an important role in legitimizing these rights, and gauges whether or not this is evidence of anthropology's potential to transform human rights theory and practice more generally.

In this “In Focus” introduction, I begin by offering an overview of anthropology's engagements with human rights following the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) 1947 “Statement on Human Rights.” After offering a rereading of the Statement, I describe the two major anthropological orientations to human rights that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, following several decades of relative disengagement. Finally, I locate the articles in relation to this history and indicate how, when taken as a whole, they express a new key or register within which human rights can be studied, critiqued, and advanced through anthropological forms of knowledge. This “In Focus” is in part an argument for an essentially ecumenical anthropology of human rights, one that can tolerate, and indeed encourage, approaches that are both fundamentally critical of contemporary human rights regimes and politically or ethically committed to these same regimes.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2007 and endorsed by the Australian Labor government two years later. This achievement is an essential element in the global politics of Indigenous recognition and includes unique rights, such as the right to a cultural collectivity and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, while reinforcing the right to self‐determination. Yet this new Indigenous rights regime is both underpinned and constrained by the UN human rights system, the implications of which include constraint within a secular neo‐imperialist liberal paradigm. However, this human rights paradigm can also offer generative potential to challenge existing relations of power. According to Kymlicka, the UN's system of human rights has, after all, been ‘one of the great moral achievements of the twentieth century’. How can these tensions between the aspirations to universal secularism and the right to culture, for instance, be accommodated within the Indigenous human rights discourse? And how does this new international legal and norm‐setting instrument speak to the glaring disjunct between declaration of rights and social fact in central Australia, the focus of this research? The move toward an anthropology of human rights looks squarely at this conundrum and attempts to locate spaces of continuity and co‐option or, conversely, subversion and rejection as local cultures of human rights are articulated.

From the 1990s to 2020, human rights activism in Moroccan‐occupied Western Sahara emerged through a process of familiarization before serving a new purpose: as a nonviolent instrument in the broader struggle for Sahrawi self‐determination. Over the last decade, this practice has intensified with the rise of digital video as a means of documenting street protests. In the process, human rights activism has become a kind of “sousveillance”: a tactic in which people seek to counteract surveillance by making state violence visible. By conceptualizing human rights activism as a form of sousveillance, researchers can bring into focus the entanglement of multiple kinds of monitoring: Moroccan state surveillance, transnational human rights sousveillance, and UN oversight. Furthermore, tracing the relationship between human rights activism and transnational fields of “veillance” shows the importance of surveillance studies for an anthropology of human rights.

In 2002, the AAA Committee for Human Rights (CfHR) initiated the Fellows Program in the Anthropology of Human Rights. Positions provide recipients with strong experience in human rights work, possibilities for publication, as well as the opportunity to work closely with the Committee, government agencies, and human rights‐based NGOs. CfHR Research Fellow (2002–2003) Kimmerle came to the position with a strong background in the practice of anthropology in international human rights. Between 2000 and 2001 she served on the forensic team of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in its missions in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia. We are pleased to present here a brief version of Kimmerle's report. A longer version appears on the Human Rights page of the AAA website (http:www.aaanet.org).

Over the past two decades, cultural brokerage and translation have become central to the anthropology of human rights. This article sheds new light on the role of cultural brokers as agents capable of placating cultural opposition to human rights. This novel perspective is informed by participant observation at a dialogue group composed of Israeli human rights activists and representatives of one group of their opponents: ultra-Orthodox Mizrahim. This form of activism is called here “deliberative activism” aimed at social learning. This refers to a dialogical activism designed to promote mutual legitimacy and respect between social groups involved in deep cultural conflicts. This activism and the form of translation discovered while observing it—“dialogue-oriented translation”—open new paths for activism that is more equal, reciprocal, and culturally sensitive. However, they also raise new questions regarding the implementation of deliberative principles in activism aimed at advancing human rights.

This chapter looks at the modalities through which impartiality can be guaranteed in a context as fraught and highly politicized as post-war Kosovo, and explores how impartiality is produced in the everyday at the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA). The KPA is a quasi-judicial institution put in place by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to 'resolve' war-related property claims and thereby restitute property rights to, for a great majority of claims, Kosovo Serbian 'displaced persons'. The chapter argues that impartiality is produced and made possible by different, seemingly contradictory repertoires of justice that are acted out in everyday practice by the national lawyers of the agency. It probes the tenets of the dialectic between 'global' ideals and 'local' practice, and ethnographically demonstrates the limits of an anthropology of human rights that sees vernacularization and meaning-making as the only analytical tools available. The chapter shows that, in the specific political landscape of post-war Kosovo, it is the 'nationalistic bias' of Kosovo Albanian lawyers that ensures due diligence and respect for rule of law principles.

This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables that can be measured using statistical procedures that flatten the underlying complexities. Commensuration, in this sense, takes place at all levels: local, subnational, national, and international. At each stage, the process of “measuring justice” through commensuration has the paradoxical effect of becoming more precise as variables become more detached from the nuances of everyday conflicts. In Merry’s analysis, the global “seductions of quantification” reinforce the dominance of commensurability as an ideology of both scientific validity and social change. Drawing on both Merry’s work and wider comparative research in the anthropology of human rights and justice, this contribution to the symposium argues that the anthropological critique of commensuration carries important lessons for the meanings of “justice” more generally. How can justice be measured at a global level if, as Merry’s research shows, the underlying factors that supposedly reflect injustice are highly specific, contingent, and, most importantly, incommensurable? As a potential way out of this dilemma, the article explores the possibilities of conceptualizing “justice” in the vernacular, an approach grounded in local cultural and ethical realities.

Anthropology is uniquely positioned to open a new dimension of critical human rights discourse based on engaging indigenous rights. Moving toward a critical anthropology of human rights begins from the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The charge that this document reifies ‘indigenous’ and ‘rights’ is examined in light of reifications such as ‘primitive’ and ‘tribe’, referencing Eric Wolf’s assertion that cultures, societies and nations should not be treated as if they were bounded ‘billiard balls’. In reframing rights, Marx’s (1844) and others’ insights on human collectivity are useful. This reframing perforce questions the ipso facto legitimacy of nation-statism.

This article uses empirical data from the anthropology of human rights and the ethics of everyday life to examine the relationship between dominant value frames, moral action, and the rise of ‘counter-humanities’ in the form of cultural identitarianism, racial and class-based nationalism, apocalyptic theologies, and nativist populism. This article focuses, in particular, on the emergence and growing power of the value frame of human rights in the post-Cold War period and argues that the more recent spread of violent movements based in forms of moral exclusion was an ironic consequence of the power of human rights. After considering, and then rejecting, the possibility that citizenship can stand in for ‘humanity’ as a more sustainable value frame, the article concludes with an argument for the promise of a post-utopian solidarity inspired by the humanism of Montaigne and More and the pluralism of Berlin.

Book under review in this essay: Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights by Mark Goodale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. xii + 180 pp. $19.95 paperback. For better o...