The Leading Rogue State: The U.S and Human Rights (review)

This book is representative of emerging work in sociology on human rights that is ideologically grounded in a general critique of individual rights, global capitalism (or "neoliberalism") and U.S. power. The position represented in the collection of essays, with few exceptions, is that the only "real" human rights, in an ontological sense, are social and economic rights. Subsequently, those states that promote these rights are "good" states, and those that do not are "bad." And in this case, the worst state, the leading rogue state is, in fact, the United States. The volume is a representative of the kind of neo-radical "public sociology" that has been advocated within various sectors of the American Sociological Association in recent years. It is also an example of everything that is wrong with this direction in contemporary sociology.

The volume begins with an essay by Bryan S. Turner, which, ironically, is the strongest essay in the volume. In its balanced and measured tones, it seems out of place in relation to the other essays. Turner's essay recapitulates some of his foundational work in the sociology of human rights, which sees rights as protections for the vulnerability of the human body. It would make sense for this essay to serve as a foundation for a strong program for the sociology of social and economic rights, since the latter are, after all, about alleviating vulnerability. Yet the theoretical and analytic power of Turner's essay gives way to the generally weak, ideologically driven essays that constitute the remainder of the volume. Each chapter focuses on a particular social/economic right and discusses it primarily in relation to the failure of the United States to promote that right.

In discussing housing as a human right, for example, David L. Brunsma (16) begins his essay by noting that the U.S position on the denial of the right of housing is a "denial of humanity." One wonders, then, what the genocide in Darfur might be called, or if Sudan might be a better candidate for the title of leading rogue state? Jean Lynch (87) notes that "contrary to prevailing popular opinion, the treatment of people with disabilities in the United States is abysmal." One wonders how disabled people in the rest of the world are treated? A representative example of the excessive ideological rhetoric in the volume can be seen in Rodney D. Coates' essay on cultural rights, which focuses on the United States as the perpetrator of "cultural genocide." The author leads by saying that "U.S. history is tainted by genocide, racism, exploitation, discrimination, imperialism, and corruption" (138) and ends by saying that "[t]he winds of change are blowing, the songs of wonder are being heard, and the poetics of liberation are being rehearsed all around us. These forces, voices, and movements are the logical responses of the subalterns to the rogue state [the U.S] and cultural genocide."(149) This is not sociology that aims to inform practice, this is ideology masquerading as practice.

These unfortunate examples do not mean that some of the essays in the volume do not have something to offer about the history of the United States' relationship with social-economic rights and the "world community." Damayanti Banerjee offers a serious outline of environmental rights. She sees environmental problems, quite rightly, as a result of unbounded global capitalism, yet insists, quite wrongly, that "there remains a decided lack of attention to human rights concerns in the academic and policy discourses on the environment within the United States."(164) One wonders how to understand Al Gore in light of such a statement. Tola Olu Pearce provides a theoretically informed discussion of women's rights in global context and avoids the overt tendency to vilify the United States that is characteristic of most of the collection, perhaps because it is clear that women in the United States have made unprecedented strides in...