about rights which were both metaphysical in terms of their origins, and meaningless in terms of their realization since they lacked any concrete context.19 Following Durkheim and Bentham, iterations of human rights should be situated as social constructions, and we could add that the study of human rights needs to include prominently the differentiation of rights, rightlessness and states of exception.
My bias then is towards seeing human rights sociologically, but I believe that singular devotion to any academic discipline and the associated exploration of subjects through a prism called ‘the literature’ is limiting. Encasing one’s ideas within professionally approved formats curtails the imaginative possibilities inherent in the plurality of methods, genres and sources. This means that, whereas I cite a wide array of writings, I do not systematically trek through standard, popular or academic opinions pertinent to the subjects I cover in this book. While a vast number of scholars are mentioned, I am reluctant to fatigue readers with reviews, or debates with authors whose perspectives might agree or differ from mine. What follows is also not the product of specialism. Readers seeking more detail on some of the historical and contemporary issues discussed here will need to consult specialist works.
Consequently, this book is about the connections between elements of colonialism in particular places and times and human rights. I consider the intersections of colonialism and human rights not just through their empirical, theoretical and, importantly, political dimensions, which are manifold, but also through the lenses of art, literature, film and creative non-fiction. Visual, literary and imaginative works can help us understand sociological processes and historical events in more visceral ways. While I am aware that I write as a social scientist, creative works provide subtlety, perspective and immediacy often lacking in purely expository writings, concerned as they are with argument, theory and methodology. Imaginative works, although only appearing in cameos, are imperative to the writing of essays.
Chapter 1, ‘Non-universal Human Rights and Rightlessness’, introduces the contexts for the major concerns of the book. Here, I discuss the multiple articulations of differential human rights occurring through racial, rather than social, contracts and internal civic stratification of populations. I identify various practices that produced categories of people who, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, lacked the right to have rights. Given the histories and ongoing consequences of colonialism and slavery, rightlessness and variegated human rights, it is suggested, are crucial arenas for study.
One of the reasons prompting such study is the recent interest in colonialism, apparent in concerns among activists, artists, scholars and journalists over public memorials, museums and cultural forms linked to colonialism and slavery. Chapter 2, ‘The Uneasy Present of Colonialism’, looks at these contemporary efforts to know about the activities of colonial and slave states, but also how they are rebuffed by governments concealing records and trying to shape knowledge of history. The chapter also considers the tenuous link between democracy and human rights, both inside Western democracies and in former colonized states that have retained colonial laws inimical to human rights. Finally, the chapter considers the reactions of colonized peoples to articulations of Western virtue by invoking Frantz Fanon’s ‘muscular lockjaw’, and speculates that the acts of colonizing itself produced a kind of amoral sensibility that survives in the current selective attention to human rights.
I proceed by examining several concrete examples that link colonizing and human rights. These bias heavily towards discussions of the United States and France, partly because these are the states whose various revolutionary declarations are seen to have operationalized Enlightenment notions of the ‘rights of man’ in laws and constitutions.19 Discussions involve three broad categories of colonial practice. These will be considered not as the snapshots or discrete contemporary episodes so common to legal human rights focuses, but as enduring violations with past and contemporary manifestations in Western countries. The forced extraction of labour, colonial occupation and assimilation programmes, and expropriation of land will be considered. While it is true that human rights offences occur everywhere and many of them are not connected to colonialism or Western powers but to local forces, histories and exertions of power, these will not be a specific concern of this book. Likewise, space does not permit analysing all the human rights violations occurring in contexts of inequality, corruption, violence and autocracy which may be directly related to Western foreign policies and blowback from military invasions that have distinct colonial dimensions.
I understand colonized peoples as divided into various groups that were subject to one form of colonization or another. Memberships sometimes overlap, but principally my focus is on: (1) the Afro-descended peoples of the Americas and the larger Black Diaspora whose ancestors were captured, bought and transported from Africa as slaves from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries; (2) those who came under formal European colonial rule in Africa and Asia during the occupation of their lands, including the North African and Middle Eastern territories within the Mandatory system implemented after World War I to divide up the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France; (3) indigenous peoples of the Americas, whose lands have been appropriated, and over whom an external European-style state authority has been imposed. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will roughly correspond to these divisions.
Although not formally within the remit of this book, another category consists of those under legal, military and economic occupation who are subject to similarly differential, largely inferior, rights from those who form part of the occupying society. This would prominently include Israel, where a chiefly settler Jewish population supplanted a pre-existing Palestinian Arab population, and whose Basic Laws assert that it is a Jewish and democratic state. This gives primacy of citizenship rights to one ethno-religious group. In 2018, this was embedded further by making self-determination a unique power of Jewish people. In a policy of ‘juridical erasure’ deriving originally from exceptions within the British Mandate,20 Palestinians have no such rights. Additionally, Israel imposes military occupation and martial law over the Occupied Palestinian West Bank and, to a lesser extent, Gaza, territories which are to be the basis for a future Palestinian state. Large parts of the West Bank have been annexed for Jewish-only settlements. The 2018 addition to the Basic Laws formalize the primacy of Jewish institutions, the Hebrew language and the unfettered unique rights of Jews to migrate to Israel.21 Another instance is the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, where a settler population has displaced indigenous Sahrawi peoples. Despite an ICJ ruling in 1975 that denied Moroccan sovereignty over the territories, the region has been occupied by the Moroccan military, settled by Moroccan civilians, and laws denying all forms of Sahrawi self-determination have been imposed. Mass imprisonment of Sahrawi civil rights activists, banishment to refugee camps in Algeria, and suppression of the press and local Sahrawi culture have been common.22
Chapter 3 is the first of these more focused chapters. Entitled ‘Slavery and Its Afterlives’, it examines the human rights implications of enslaving Africans, particularly in the USA, a nation that has been referred to as the ‘Applied Enlightenment’. While six European countries all had major slave plantations in their colonies in the Americas, I spotlight the USA, in part, because its enslavement of Africans, and human rights enunciated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are simultaneous and related. In this chapter, I will articulate how this contradiction, incarnated especially in the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson, was destined to be played out through later policies that created differential rights for African-Americans. This was recognized early by numerous black scholars, orators and creative artists who, from Frederick Douglass onwards, realized that the country designed for them was anything but enlightened. Federally enforced segregation, discrimination and racialized concepts of rights after slavery set the precedent for ongoing police violence against black people and suppression of basic civil and human rights.
Chapter 4, ‘The Less Than Human’, considers how liberal Republican principles incarnated in the French
