activities from law and legal cases, as above in Dickson (2010). With increasing human rights advocacy during the late twentieth century, defining and securing rights became part of everyday politics. Yet appeals to fundamental human rights frequently mask this politicization. McEvoy (2011) writes that the primary weakness of human rights talk is “its tendency to deny the quintessentially political nature of its argumentation” (377). Even the most dedicated defenders of human rights as a project acknowledge its limitations and ambiguities. For example, Ignatieff (2001) recognizes contemporary human rights “idolatry” and states that “rights inflation—the tendency to define anything desirable as a right—ends up eroding the legitimacy of a defensible core of rights” (90).
Critics point out that the malleability of this discourse facilitates co-optation—for example, human rights have been invoked to justify less-than-liberatory projects, such as the substitution of truth commissions for retributive justice (e.g., Feher 1999; Wilson 2001) and as a rationale for military interventions like the Iraq war (e.g., Orford 2003). The ubiquity of human rights NGOs has allowed groups like the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute to enter UN consultation processes, bringing their politics to bear on the United Nations Population Fund’s contraception policies—politics that some see as diminishing economic and social rights for large numbers of humans (see Buss and Herman 2003). An even larger problem sketched by current critics of human rights discourse is that the ideology and rhetoric of human rights masks oppressive political-economic processes (e.g., Gledhill 2003). Some scholars such as Brown (2004) detect a profound disingenuousness whereby human rights politics disable other visions and promote “unchecked globalization of capital, postcolonial political deformations, and superpower imperialism” (461).
“Discourse” and “talk” are sometimes problematic terms to distinguish certain activities from law (see Wilson 2007). One problem is these terms’ lack of descriptive specificity. “Discourse” in contemporary usage often echoes Michel Foucault’s thought on power and resistance, departing from conventional definitions of “discourse” as patterning in language above the level of the sentence (see Curtis and Spencer 2012; Sherzer 1987). In some uses, “discourse” seems to indicate something more like “hegemony” or a slightly modified Althusserian “ideology.” In another vein, using “discourse” in a more linguistic sense to distinguish talk from law is flawed from the perspective of pragmatic linguistics, since a binary opposition of law and talk does not convey the degree to which law itself is linguistically constituted (see Richland 2013; Mertz 1994). Furthermore, framing discourse as a separate category from law betrays an undertheorization of language in use, treating language as mere epiphenomenal representation, rather than as “a constitutive element of material social practice” (Williams 1977: 165). Thus, the term “discourse” can obscure a range of practices that take place, such as research, documentation, lobbying, and education, while setting “talk” in the realm of something less real than law. Yet some terminology is necessary to describe practices outside law or legal proceedings. As Helsing and Mertus (2006) note, “the reality of the human rights field … relies heavily on extralegal mechanisms and on the promotion of human rights norms through diplomacy, the building of human rights institutions, education and postconflict reconstruction and reconciliation” (9). Now, as Dembour (2010) observes, discursive approaches constitute a “school” within the study of human rights (2, 19). As such, “discourse” is an inescapable lingua franca for describing the advocacy and activism considered here.
Ethnographic analysis has contributed to the study of human rights discourse, especially regarding social processes at the nexus of law and politics (see Goodale 2009a, b; Goodale and Merry 2007; Cowan et al. 2001; Wilson 1997a; Wilson and Mitchell 2003). Wilson (1997a) characterizes this program: “part of anthropologists’ brief is to restore the richness of subjectivities and chart the complex fields of social relations, contradictory values and the emotional accompaniment to macro-structures that human rights accounts often exclude” (15). Notable works such as Merry (2006b) describe and conceptualize the globalization of human rights advocacy and its outcomes.23 In the discourse vein, anthropological work on human rights has made visible its political origins and effects in different social contexts. For example, Speed (2008) argues against simply accepting prior assumptions about rights talk’s political or antipolitical effects: “We can learn more by looking at the various reappropriations of the discourse of human rights, and the ways that they emerge in particular interactions: the way the tool is held by particular social actors in particular contexts” (181).
Despite contradictions and unforeseen consequences, rights talk, especially human rights talk, animates a range of political movements. Such discourse, however, merits scrutiny, rather than reflexive acceptance or dismissal. This scrutiny must critically trace the sources, varieties, and consequences of rights talk, to understand what has been achieved and what has not, and what, if anything, might be useful for general theory or application in other regions. To that end, and to situate the themes of this book, the next two sections consider some substantial political challenges that are not addressed by contemporary narratives about human rights and peace in Northern Ireland.
“Sunningdale for Slow Learners”
Orwell would have appreciated the way ‘an “agreed” Ireland’ turned out to mean the very opposite of a “united Ireland,” while “power-sharing” came to denote “separate spheres,” not reconciliation.
—Roy Foster, “Partnership of Loss,” 2007
In 2003 “Anthony,” a commissioner on the new Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (HRC), resigned his position. He was one of six commissioners to resign or withdraw from the commission in 2002 and 2003. He and his colleagues cited multiple reasons related to the commission’s lack of authority and resources, its approach to drafting a new Bill of Rights, and its approach to handling a contentious dispute between residents of a north Belfast neighborhood. The new commission—created by the GFA—had struggled to establish itself since being set up in 1999. Legal proceedings had made public the commissioners’ internal disagreements about loyalist protests in 2001 at the Holy Cross Primary School (a Catholic girls’ school) in Ardoyne, an area of north Belfast. Although the commission as a whole voted not to become involved, its casework committee committed the HRC to supporting a lawsuit on behalf of some families of the pupils. The suit alleged that policing of the protest violated their human rights.
In Anthony’s view, the scandal and squabbling were part of a broader problem: the commission had become captive to political debates about collective, communal rights and had devolved into a forum for pursuing grievances. The problem, he said, was that society was concerned with only Catholic rights and Protestant rights, fixated on identity issues—human rights were peripheral, even within the body established to promote them. In his view, these circumstances allowed human rights to be a proxy for ethnopolitical conflicts between nationalists/Catholics and unionists/Protestants. Concerns outside these categories were systematically marginalized. Anthony’s commitment to a culture of human rights was indisputable. A lawyer trained at Queens University in Belfast, he had advised the UN, government ministers, and civil servants on human rights policy. He was also actively engaged with NGOs and grassroots groups, and, in the early years of the GFA’s implementation, he conducted public workshops for activists and NGOs to explain the new legal and political structures.
The preoccupation of the HRC with conflicts like the Holy Cross dispute was part of a broader trend. Institutional commitments to parity of esteem between two communities quickly facilitated antagonism soon after the new institutions began to operate. For example, during this period, the Department of Health and Social Services implemented plans made under direct rule to close the City Hospital maternity unit in south Belfast. On its face, this was a sensible rationalization of services, since the hospital was just a mile from the Royal Victoria Hospital, where maternity services were centralized. Belfast’s geography, however, meant that the closure became a political debate about the distribution of both health services and public employment. The City Hospital’s front entrance is on the Lisburn Road, where both nationalists and
