contentious decision made by Amnesty in 1991: to acknowledge abuses by nonstate actors. He argued that as an NGO, rather than a legal body, the group need not be limited by legal definitions. For example, he said, a beating produces similar subjective pain whether inflicted by the RUC or a paramilitary group, and requires recognition in either instance. Yet McEvoy (1999, 2001), an experienced practitioner and scholar, has argued that shifts like Amnesty’s were problematic both in terms of reporting on the conflict and in practice for local NGOs. He writes that, for local human rights advocates, extending attention beyond the state would have been untenable for maintaining the organization’s local credibility. Such a change could have involved greater condemnation for loyalist paramilitaries than republicans and thus undermined the group’s influence.
Nevertheless, local NGOs’ emphasis on state violence convinced many unionists that human rights are a nationalist issue. Generally speaking, many loyalists interpreted human rights criticisms of the state as opposition to union with Britain. Since the basis of republican rhetoric was a challenge to the legitimacy of the post-partition state and British jurisdiction, the focus of human rights discourse on state violations seemed aligned with that larger political project. Efforts by international NGOs to consider nonstate violence intensified critiques of local campaigns’ silence, contributing to the longer-term skepticism that is problematic in the postconflict era.
Today, human rights skepticism exists beyond loyalism. Most strikingly, it is apparent among people charged with upholding human rights standards in the postconflict era. Attorney General John Larkin, the first attorney general since Sunningdale, has argued that rights claims are ubiquitous in the region and that these claims trivialize human rights. Addressing a Human Rights Commission conference in 2010, he noted that the public housing agency had recently asked residents of a particular housing development not to wear pajamas outdoors. Residents’ response to the rule, he said, was “This is our culture,” to which they had a human right. Larkin argued that “Perhaps the outdoor wearing of pyjamas is a useful emblem of our contemporary malaise” regarding human rights and concluded that “Wearing pyjamas outdoors should be left for regulation simply to social courtesy and social decency (and a strong sense of the ridiculous)” rather than treated as a human rights issue (16).44 In a less humorous example, in February 2011 the policing federation’s newsletter decried the policing board’s “one-sided” approach to human rights. The newsletter claimed rules regarding human rights protections disregard the rights of police officers facing threats from both rioters and dissident republicans. The editorial condemned legal advice not to publish photographs of wanted rioters under age eighteen as “human rights nonsense.”45
Punishment attacks underscore key problems of human rights discourse as peace promotion and highlight the multiple contradictions of rights talk. These contradictions are not merely the result of undisciplined NGOs interpreting legal principles incorrectly. They are also linked to disjunctions between the terms of legality and actually existing experience. How human rights are received and how effectively they can be pursued are not determined simply by how clearly legal and social advocates speak. The effects of discourse are also produced by context-specific circumstances. Complex conditions of production frame contradictory claims for human rights as both a weapon of war and a tool for peace—including, of course, my own claim that rights discourse has functioned as a form of war by other means. This is why the social life of rights discourse over time requires scrutiny, particularly to understand the historical trajectory of different political projects being treated as human rights promotion and then conflated with peace. This history, in turn, explains the consequences and reception of rights discourse in the present.
Rights Discourse over Time
The peace process began when the first stone was thrown.
—Loyalist community activist, August 2010
Human rights have been central to Northern Irish politics, international litigation, and scholarship on the conflict. The civil rights movement, prisoners’ rights campaigns (e.g., protests for political status culminating in the hunger strikes), and extrajudicial killings inspired court cases, media coverage, and academic monographs on both legal and grassroots mobilizations (e.g., Dickson 2010; Ross 2012). However, a historical account of human rights focused only on well-known cases and campaigns obscures important ways rights discourse has worked in everyday politics. Most important, such an approach does not address how rights talk became central to community activism and a vehicle for conflict as well as peacemaking. To acknowledge and explain the ambiguous politics of human rights in Northern Ireland, this book looks at that more subtle historical process: how rights discourse came to permeate grassroots politics and activism, how it transformed these politics, and how rights discourse itself was transformed. This history explains the susceptibility of human rights talk to ethnopolitical appropriation, provides a caution regarding its potential to promote peace, and highlights less recognized contributions of rights discourse to broader reconciliation.
To introduce this history, in Chapter 2, “The Usual Suspects,” I trace the adoption of rights discourse in everyday politics. In the 1960s, both the U.S. civil rights movement and the global student movements of 1968 influenced a local civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland. As in these movements, campaigners faced both state and civil violence. In Northern Ireland, however, civil violence became widespread and routine. In subsequent years, grassroots NGOs in the most polarized areas appropriated both the rhetoric and tactics of civil rights to express grievances about housing and communal space. This was, as I argue, a crucial moment when rights talk became central to everyday political understandings and actions. The rhetoric of rights subsequently became a common political tool in grassroots politics. Chapter 3 considers campaigns for economic rights in the 1980s. I argue that economic injustice mobilized activists in the most deprived and violent areas of the city. However, as campaigners became focused on the relative deprivation of nationalists versus loyalists, an inclusive campaign for economic rights fractured, and a comprehensive critique of economic injustice failed to materialize. In Chapter 4 I examine the contradictory consequences of rights discourse as peace appeared possible during the 1990s. When ceasefires were established and, eventually, peace talks began, previously unthinkable discussions also took place among political opponents at the grassroots level. These efforts were justified and sustained by defenses of political rights to association. At the same time, however, rights to assembly fueled ongoing violent conflicts, creating bitterness that lingers more than a decade after the GFA. Chapter 5 moves into the post-GFA years to explore a significant lacuna of the settlement; that is, the GFA included no institutional provisions for systematically addressing past violence by either state or nonstate actors. Its lack of either an amnesty or a truth commission—that is, some official form of truth recovery—has been rapidly filled with discursive efforts to record history (such as community-based oral history projects), and selective accounts of the past have become a means of waging war in the theater of history. Chapter 6 shifts from the failures of rights discourse to consider local LGBT advocacy since the GFA. In contrast to the GFA’s shortcomings regarding past violence, the settlement presented gay rights activism with legal opportunities. Although the GFA rights language is focused on parity of esteem for “two traditions,” it provided tools that LGBT activists used to expand legal and social equality for LGBT persons. This unexpected consequence of the GFA’s human rights provisions hints at new possibilities for rights discourse to support both justice and reconciliation.
Chapter 7, “Ethnopolitics and Human Rights,” concludes the book with a return to history. I examine the Irish Enlightenment’s outcome, the bloody United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798, in order to revisit debates about who is the subject of rights. To think critically about political subjectivity, the human
