Recent Histories and Uncertain Futures: Contemporary Critiques of International Human Rights and Humanitarianism

Human rights? Through a hard-fought battle they must be wrestled from those who would seek to use and abuse them.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life: From Modernity to Modernism

The financial and economic collapse that began in 2007–2008 became the essential catalyst, domestically and internationally, for the rebellion against neoliberalism that we are witnessing today. Neoliberalism, in its very essence is a violation of human rights.

—US Human Rights Network Statement about Human Rights and the Occupy Movement, posted on the Occupy Pittsburgh website, among others

“Education is a human right!” “Health care is a human right!” “When human rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”

—Chants often overheard at uc Berkeley student protests, circa 2011

Human rights remain objects of passionate political attachment and endless theoretical speculation. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that one finds so many references to them in the context of contemporary social movements fighting against austerity politics and corporate power. One need only glance at the websites of various Occupy Movement groups to see statements and declarations to this effect: slogans like “Human Rights, Not Corporate Rights!”¹ and demands to “apply principles of human rights” and even create a “Department of Human Dignity—instead of Homeland Security.”² Indeed, in 2011 International Human Rights Day served as a powerful rhetorical focus for Occupy assemblies who held up the social and economic rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) as a contrast to the “corporate rights” recently reaffirmed in the 2010 US Supreme Court case Citizens United.

For some theorists, however, the resurgence of left political movements in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis foretold the death of a post–Cold War politics of international human rights and humanitarian interventions.³ Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek recently declared that “the long night of the Left is drawing to a close”;⁴ they argue that the mass public uprisings of 2008 to 2011—the Arab Spring, anti-austerity struggles in Europe, the Occupy Movement—finally repudiate Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which proclaimed political liberalism’s final victory over its ideological rivals. Many critical theorists and activists sharing this sentiment have recently embraced a certain optimism about possibilities for more radical left politics that seemed to have previously vanished from the world stage. “Left” in this context—while not simply reducible to, or synonymous with, Marxist, post-Marxist, or anarchist positions—should be read as occupying a political terrain distinct from, and often defined in opposition to, that of contemporary liberalism and neoliberalism. Temporarily suspending concerns about this narrative’s persuasiveness, we might still ask a pertinent question: If the alleged “return of history” has indeed produced a “renewed interest in radical ideas and politics” (ic, 2–3), what role, if any, does the concept of international human rights have to play in this revival?

Writing in a spirit similar to that of Douzinas and Žižek in his 2011 work The Rebirth of History, Alain Badiou offers one extreme answer. He describes “human rights” as nothing more than the “the rights of the powerful to carve up states, to put in power … corrupt valets who will hand over the totality of the country’s resources to … the powerful for nothing.”⁵ According to his view, human rights are “interchangeable” with other terms of contemporary liberal and neoliberal ideology, such as “globalization,” “the West,” “market reform,” and “modernization” (rh, 4–5).⁶ Thus for those interested in resisting the rise of austerity programs, neocolonial economic exploitation, and the privatization of public goods, human rights are not only inefficacious tools but also collaborators in a pernicious politics of inequality and domination.

Although Badiou claims to diagnose a contemporary political program, his derision of human rights should be read as part of a much longer tradition of critique. In his famous 1844 text “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx denounced the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as an empty bourgeois formalism that emancipated the state...