The Colonialism of Human Rights. Colin Samson
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Expressed in many ways today,11 human rights call for universal application through national and international institutions recognizing specific, sometimes ‘inalienable’, rights that accord to people either as individuals or as collectives. Broad rights to equality, liberty, freedom, legal protections and private property decreed in the Enlightenment, but having antecedents in Roman, Greek and early modern European thought, were believed to be fortified by the French and American Revolutionary declarations as well as nineteenth-century British liberalism. According to Lynn Hunt, these declarations ‘gave birth to an idea that would make slow and steady progress in Europe and the rest of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.12 These rights were integrated into state constitutions, jurisprudence and other written laws, especially after the 1948 Declaration. Although most chroniclers of human rights rarely venture outside the European orbit, some argue that the sources of human rights can also be traced to declarations, activism and legal argument emanating from the Global South.13 However, these are not the product of epistemologically distinct indigenous cosmologies that might consider the issues at stake very differently, something I shall consider in chapter 6. Human rights were given international expression through the UDHR in 1948, the Geneva Convention in 1951, further UN Covenants and international jurisprudence in international and regional courts. These may be called human rights, but they are also civil rights, citizenship rights or just ‘rights’. Indeed, many of the great social movements placed all such rights under the same umbrella, and have called for equal and universal application.
Nevertheless, denial of human rights, and rationalizations of such denials based either in law or in exceptions to the law, often occur alongside assertions of virtues that are held to reside largely with, and derive from, Europe and its North American diaspora. This paradox – or, to use a harsh word, hypocrisy – is incarnated in the colonial dimensions of human rights pronunciations, and is a component of ongoing white privilege and asserted moral rectitude. A Janus-faced orientation to the world recalls European writers struggling with Empire, such as George Orwell. As an English person commenting on a world in which the British state and society had such profound influence, Orwell was exercised about the imperial subordination of others regarded as inferior. In Burmese Days, and essays such as ‘England Your England’, he illustrated how the British Empire was presented as a triumph of civilization, exposing contradictions between this and the numerous abominations committed in Britain’s name.14
It is something of this that attaches to discussions of human rights. Rights which were rhetorically associated with Western civilization, and often held to be universally valid, were explicitly denied to colonial subjects, indigenous peoples and the enslaved. The denial of equal rights – or, sometimes, any rights – to these populations was justified by their imputed savagery, backwardness and inferiority. Indeed, the claim to be acting on behalf of humanity was a convenient justification for colonialism. General Mattis and Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon are emblematic of a longer history in which the practice and endorsement of non-universal human rights corresponds with claims to allegiance to universal human rights. This tension is now manifold, as the exceptions, exclusions and denials of human rights that occurred simultaneously with colonialism and enslavement metastasized into new realms of de facto non-universality.
Contemporary human rights conflicts are layered onto this uncompleted history of racial domination. Consequently, my focus is on past and ongoing practices of Western colonial powers and settler colonial states and their relevance to selectivity and differentiation in human rights today. My task is not to follow the footsteps of numerous human rights scholars who trace genealogies of international human rights, or to advocate a system of apolitical and fully universal human rights. This is not so much a study of human rights, but of uncompleted histories of exception, differentiation and rightlessness which cannot be entirely extricated from the study of human rights.
As I hope to show, the official treatment of particular populations is linked to colonial domination and its enduring social, political and economic expressions. Human rights recognition and implementation can be roughly mapped onto ongoing histories. Following Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic politics,15 we may say that Western colonial domination as a ‘social division’ is constitutive of a colonialism of human rights. States which administer human rights are represented by institutions and personnel that embraced ideas affirming the inferior status of indigenous and enslaved persons. Because states are dedicated to the perpetuation of hegemony, neither they nor the official human rights they oversee can hold great potential for social change.
Where I Am Coming From and What Follows …
I would like to think that Orwell’s spirit attaches in some small way to the following chapters linking human rights to colonialism. While what follows is not autobiographical or ethnographic, it is connected to my animation onto these pages. A large part of this emerges from experiences, both in my personal life and working with indigenous peoples, and in seeing at first hand the many futilities of claiming rights within alien systems of law that perpetually situate indigenous peoples as petitioners in inferior relationships to the state and other third parties.16 The book also emerges from my work as a teacher, and insight accrues from collaborations with students, texts and sources in university contexts. I have often asked myself whether there can be a dividing line where research somehow legitimates itself by crossing into being impersonal and devoid of the feelings that come from interacting with each other.
But there is no neutral place to stand. As a writer and educator, I feel compelled to comment critically on human rights. As Lydia Morris observes, human rights are mediated by social processes, rather than emanating from primordial ‘natural’ principles.17 This social mediation includes their embedding in – and, I would add, exclusion from – law. Underlined much earlier in Émile Durkheim’s essay on the French Revolution, the distinction between the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a type of sociology and as a historical event is salutary.18 The context-laden human authorship of the Declaration and, by extension, other statements of human rights have often been assumed to be clear propositions about the characteristics of a society human rights, springing from certain elemental sources. They have, therefore, become elevated to a type of sociology, but without context. Earlier, Jeremy Bentham had, almost line by line, debunked the French Declaration of Rights. Calling it ‘nonsense upon stilts’, Bentham showed that the Declaration