International Human Rights and the Politics of Memory: Limits and Challenges

Human rights as a transnational social movement, and memory discourses in many different parts of the world, first emerged in the 1970s, gained steam in the 1980s, and together reached inflationary proportions by the 1990s. Both discourses were historically overdetermined and both are now increasingly being questioned about their hidden assumptions, their effectiveness, and their future prospects. In a recent book, Samuel Moyn interprets the human rights movement as a last utopia after the collapse of the earlier utopias of the twentieth century such as communism and fascism, as well as modernization and decolonization.¹ In my book Present Pasts, I argued analogously that the collapse of an earlier utopian imagination was one condition that made it possible for the new memorial discourses to arise. I argued that the time consciousness of high modernity in the West tried to secure utopian futures, whereas the time consciousness of the late twentieth century involved the no less perilous task of taking responsibility for the past. The human rights movement, however, remains firmly oriented to the future goal of establishing an international, perhaps even global, rights regime. Here it is important to remember that the international human rights movement in its contemporary configuration has as short a history as the current culture privileging a politics of memory. Of course, there always was a discourse of memory, and rights discourse itself does indeed have a deeper history. Greek tragedy provides many insights into the links between memory, justice, and the law. From the American and French Revolutions through decolonization, rights and memory were always umbilically linked to state and nation, to citizenship issues and the invention of national traditions. And yet, the current international human rights movement and the transnational flows of memory politics since the 1990s represent a fundamentally new conjuncture.

This leads me to a simple question that defies easy answers: What do rights have to do with memory in the first place? At the most simple level, one could argue that only memory of rights violations can nurture the future of human rights in the world, thus providing a substantive link between past and future. But, all too often, memory discourse and contemporary rights debates remain separated by more than just disciplinary specialization with memory discourse dominant in the humanities and rights discourse in the social sciences. From my vantage point in the humanities, I would argue that contemporary memory studies should be linked more robustly with human rights and justice discursively and practically to prevent memory, especially traumatic memory, from becoming a vacuous exercise feeding parasitically and narrowly on itself. But I would also suggest that unless it is nurtured by memory and history, human rights discourse is in danger of losing historical grounding and risks legalistic abstraction and political abuse. After all, the abstract universalism of human rights is both a problem and a promise.

History of Human Rights and Memory Discourses

Recognizing the inherent strengths and limitations of both human rights and memory discourse is important if we want to nurture their interaction. The individual strengths of both fields must be mobilized to supplement each other in order to mitigate the deficiencies of either. Both are concerned with the violation and protection of basic human rights, and both must draw on history to do so. Both want to acknowledge, if not right, past wrongs, and both project and imagine a better future for the world. Both grew to a certain degree out of legal, moral, and philosophical discourses about genocide and rights violations after World War II. Both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations’s Genocide Convention of 1948 were the political result of memory (though in their phrasing both UN documents circumvented the ethnic and particularist dimension of the Holocaust). Memory, not only of the unspeakable genocides and forced population transfers of the first half of the twentieth century, but also of the legacies of the natural law tradition, was influential in the shaping of these UN documents. And yet it took several decades more before the international human rights movement took off.

Some recent...