Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (review)

At a time when democracy and human rights seem the panacea for all the world's ills, and salvation for Africa's poor is to be found in participation and partnership, Harri Englund's contention that "new freedoms entail new prisoners" is as important as it is heretical. Against prevailing wisdom, Englund shows how ideas of freedom and human rights have become a disempowering discourse, impeding struggles against poverty and injustice. While dissent may be more readily tolerated than in the one-party era, this book shows how the association of democracy and human rights with political and civil freedoms has effectively silenced public debates about inequality and marginalization in democratized African states such as Malawi.

Englund's theoretical framework is drawn from the literature on governmentality, while rich ethnographic fieldwork ensures that his critique is not focused merely on abstract concepts, but on the production and conduct of the actual subjects who put the concepts to specific uses. Englund's setting is postcolonial Malawi, where more than a decade of multipartyism has brought little change for the majority of people. The reasons for this are in large part to be found in the manner in which democracy and human rights have been interpreted by donors and human rights activists alike. Fluent in Chichewa, the national language of Malawi, Englund demonstrates how translations of key human rights documents in both Malawi and Zambia systematically translate "rights" as individual freedoms, silencing references to "entitlements" and social and economic rights. Thus the human rights discourse becomes not only largely irrelevant to the poor majority, but also actively disempowering, in that it neither allows for the formulation of claims toward the state or the international community, nor facilitates collective action. In civic education programs, as in legal aid, human rights activism promotes individual, technical solutions to structural problems of marginalization and exploitation, and thereby helps depoliticize and contain potential popular challenges to the state and transnational governance.

Whose interests are served by this interpretation of rights? Englund's answer is unsettling; in a nuanced and respectful analysis, he shows how a cultural disposition toward contempt for the poor leads human rights activists, even if poor themselves, to use the human rights discourse as a means to distinguish themselves from the "grassroots." In a harsh economic environment, various human rights programs become an answer to educated Malawians' desire to find occupations that bring them status. The non-elite mimic the elite in their encounters with those who have been related to the status of "the poor," and identify more readily with the interests of the expatriates and the economically powerful than with the intended beneficiaries of their activism. Accordingly, Englund concludes that substantive democracy requires much more than controlling or abolishing the elite. As for donors, they not only share a disposition toward elitism, but by emphasizing abstract rights they also avoid engagement with ostensibly "political" issues. Hence they prevent confrontation with those in positions of power and ensure the survival of their development projects.

This is an exceptional book and a powerful critique of dominant discourses. Eschewing easy dismissals of freedom and liberalism, Englund aims instead to unchain the minds of those who have become the prisoners of a specific kind of freedom, while retaining the idea of freedom for alternative projects of socioeconomic transformation. There can be few more urgent tasks, making this a book of tremendous importance.