Speaking Rights to Power: Constructing Political Will by Alison Brysk (review)

Alison Brysk’s latest book addresses a fundamental question for the human rights movement: How can we give voice to the powerless in a way that will make the world listen? Building on twenty years of research, Speaking Rights to Power sits at the crossroads of international relations and communication theory and explores how human rights rhetoric works.

The book’s starting point is that not all activist campaigns construct enough political will to respond to human rights abuses. The reasons behind success or failure are many, including geopolitics, economic interests, and cultural prejudices. Brysk shows that communication politics is a fundamental element as well: certain forms of rhetoric foster greater recognition for wrongs, and thus build political will to address them.

The most important contribution of the book is to unpack the different rhetorical dynamics of effective human rights language. Through the analysis of twenty-six human rights campaigns (including cases from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, efforts from every major world region, appeals for both specific countries and broader issues, and fights contesting a variety of abuses and perpetrators), a pattern of communication politics emerges. Mobilizing political will for social change depends on some combination of the following five elements: 1) charismatic or authoritative speakers; 2) compelling narratives and well-framed messages; 3) plots performed in public space; 4) skillful use of appropriate media; and 5) a match with a receptive audience.

The central chapters of the book illustrate the different forms that successful voices, frames, performances, media, and audiences can respectively take. Ideal characters to trigger political attention include charismatic heroes and martyred causes célèbres like Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi, groups holding central social roles such as Argentina’s Mothers of the Disappeared, esteemed experts like Amartya Sen and Paul Farmer, and epistemic communities such as Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). Effective framing strategies link new issues to existing and widely supported claims like conceptualizing human trafficking as sex slavery. The framing strategies also link the expectations of modern world culture like discussing female genital mutilation as a health issue. The key performance genres in victorious human rights efforts are testimonial (similar to the Voices of Witness campaign and Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues), allegory (similar to Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement in India), and satire (such as Pussy Riot in Russia and Stephen Colbert in the United States). Transnational communication campaigns have been invigorated by the use of new electronic media (like Twitter in Iran, micro-blogs in China and Facebook in Egypt). Appropriate audiences are often constituted by global professional communities (like the writers’ organization PEN, The Committee to Protect Journalists, and Scholars at Risk) and better-situated peers, across ethnic lines (like the response by Japanese Americans to post-9/11 detentions) or gender differences (like men who care about violence against women).

Offering an incredibly large collection of human rights campaigns, the book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in human rights. Yet it is important to stress that, as Brysk acknowledges,

[t]he detailed discussion of cases is demonstrative and exploratory; it is a map, not a model. This exploration will show that the politics of persuasion is ‘necessary but not sufficient’ and that the more elements of information politics are present, the better the chance of gaining recognition and response. But there are no formulas for social change, only rhetorical strategies for improving the odds.¹

In other words, the book is only a preliminary step towards a full understanding of the relationship between human rights promotion and communication politics. It maps the rhetorical dynamics of successful human rights campaigns, but offers little guidance in terms of what dynamics are more important, and under what circumstances.

Building on the empirical richness of Speaking Rights to Power, future research should concentrate on the following questions. First, what makes the different rhetorical dynamics effective? For instance, why were Mandela...