Challenges Toward a Human Rights of Structural Transformation: Connecting Theory and Lived Realities

Reza Afshari’s work has long forced readers to question orthodox assumptions regarding human rights. It is, therefore, discouraging that the disconnect Afshari identified between human rights theory and lived realities remains quite present in too much contemporary human rights’ scholarship.¹ Such continued theoretical disconnects—and their debilitating real world impacts—must be confronted if human rights are to be part of alternatives to the xenophobic nationalism sweeping the globe. To that end, Afshari’s critiques of scholarly orthodoxy on human rights are a reminder of other orthodoxies that also must be challenged if human rights are to move past their beleaguered status quo. To do so requires that human rights scholarship take up an urgent challenge: to conceptualize human rights as informing a pluralistic vision of political community based in addressing structural exclusions in the cultural, economic, political, and social spheres.

Afshari critiques how abstract academic theorizing too often fails to take into account local actors who invoke human rights’ relevance to their struggles. This critique is intimately connected to a simple but essential insistence coursing through his work: that lived realities need to be at the center of how we understand human rights. It is, thus, no surprise that Afshari is a critic both of naïve cultural relativist skeptics assuming human rights’ political-cultural irrelevance and of human rights’ champions arguing their inevitable historical or philosophical progression. He shows how these contrasting points-of-view share a common fault: failing to use on-the-ground realities to inform their theorizing. Such theory imperially imposes from the outside notions of what can or cannot matter to individuals and social-political groups around the world, rather than letting peoples speak for themselves. This has real and dangerous consequences. A distorted notion of how human rights develop also distorts how human rights movements around the world are, in practice, perceived and judged. At worst, this has tangibly reinforced self-serving state narratives that such movements are somehow “inauthentic”—often precisely the justification invoked for violent exclusion, if not repression of dissidence in just about every corner of the world.

Afshari was at his most trenchant in showing that theory that discounts on-the-ground human rights practice is not neutral but, rather, serves to actively disempower such practices. It is for this reason he insisted on acerbically challenging such theory. And this is why Afshari remains a beacon to those who believe in the necessity of developing theories of human rights on the basis of the idea that power is political rather than cultural; that human rights gain strength from being continuously reimagined in the hands of different peoples confronting structural violence in different locales and in different historic contexts; and that, on that basis, structures of power that dispossess cultural, economic, political, and social minorities in favor of the dominant few can be legitimately and powerfully challenged.

Theorizing human rights as constituted by lived realities remains urgent if human rights are to develop in ways that keep them relevant. It is no secret that we are currently living through particularly sobering times for human rights. In that context, there are also troubling trends in human rights scholarship that need to be challenged with Afshari’s powerful spirit if such scholarship is to contribute to a compelling alternative to present-day realities. There is, in fact, good reason to think human rights are a necessary part of any such alternative: human rights have established international legal standing; they have demonstrated global political resonance; they have been integrated into transnational normative networks; and, as well, they have become embedded in institutions at the international, state, and non-state levels. These mutually intertwined groundings have given human rights their ability to make some remarkable impacts. A rhetorical debate about human rights’ “endtimes”—in Stephen Hopgood’s attention getting but substance-less phrase—is a good example of strawman theorizing that is disconnected from any actual research into tangible human rights realities around the world. At the same time, as we see human rights under attack around the globe, the [End Page...