‘Of course we are bound by those’—Dañino’s Human Rights Agenda

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 5 engages with one key aspect of Dañino’s ambition and legacy: his project to adopt a new ‘human rights agenda’ in the World Bank. In doing so, it elaborately engages with a debate that has received much attention in legal scholarship: the (legal) status of the institution under international (human rights) law. The chapter qualifies ‘human rights’ not as a stable normative object with fixed properties and effects but as a relational assemblage of aspirational discourses, political projects, institutional ideals and professional alliances undergoing continuous translation. Drawing on interview material, internal documents and correspondences, this chapter maps this assemblage and traces key tenets of Dañino’s ‘human rights agenda’. These observations shed a new light on the political orientation and institutional function of his human rights opinion (which was applauded by human rights scholars such as Philip Alston). Rather than instilling operational accountability or engendering empowerment, this ‘human rights agenda’ entails both a ‘dramatic’ expansion in political reform projects and a technology of audit attuned to private sector assessments of financial ‘risk’. This account of Dañino’s ‘human rights’ ideal (and the universalist tropes it draws upon) is remarkably different from existing literature on the topic. It shows the normative and political ambiguity of this cosmopolitan human rights discourse and its deep entanglement with corporate, deformalized and post-political visions on law and global governance. This also displays how the tools of actor–network theory can be used in critical studies of legal discourses and objects, and open new pathways toward political contestation.