The Future of Human Rights by Brysk Alison;

Author:Brysk, Alison; [Brysk, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2018-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

4

Contracting Rights: Regression and Resistance

In the fall of 2016, I returned to an America that frightened me. There were hate crimes on my campus, and some of my students feared deportation. My academic networks buzzed with urgent action alerts: Hungarian authorities tried to shut down the Central European University – where I had been invited to lecture on human rights just the year before. Turkish colleagues with whom I had toasted the spread of freedom at international conferences were fired, banned, arrested. After mere months in Trump's America, my friends and family were dispirited by the daily outrage to civil liberties, social justice, safety, truth – and simple human decency. But, by that winter, we remembered how to respond. The day of the LA Women's March, by the time my car reached the outskirts of the city, the crowds had grown so much that Los Angeles shut down its metro system for the first time. When we finally arrived, standing beside my students, neighbors, and a rainbow of strangers, texting coast-to-coast with three generations of my family all marching in their cities, we began to reclaim our democracy. I saw Jewish and Muslim women marching together in solidarity against religious prejudice, a huge Planned Parenthood contingent defending women's health and freedoms, signs for the Black Lives Matter movement against police violence, and a migrant rights banner claiming inclusion: “You can't spell America without Maria.” The ultimate sign of the times – which inspired this book – was the one that read: “It's not a moment, it's a movement.”

The third movement of human rights is contraction, reinforcing gaps and contrasting with expansion – but constantly met with contestation. The contraction of human rights represents both a shrinking of “who is human” in the face of the rising responsibilities profiled in the last chapter and a retreat from regime responsibilities. In this sense, it is more than a lag or a breakdown of the long-standing system as outlined in chapter 2. Another worrisome feature of declining rights is regression in “what is right” in state policy, public opinion, and international doctrine. Established civil rights are attacked with counter-frames of security, exclusionary nationalism, and patriarchal tradition that position freedom as a threat to identity and safety. Solidarity shrinks with the claim that minority rights compete with the collective rights of majorities. Twenty-first-century human rights resistance involves an active movement to counter illiberal states and populist publics shrinking the public sphere through dehumanization and deinstitutionalization.

States and populist political parties contest cosmopolitanism with claims that institutional globalization of governance threatens the social rights and the well-being of national majorities. The combination of two other forms of negative globalization is the context shaping rights regression claims: neo-liberal economic globalization and transnational terror. Twenty-first-century economic globalization shifts the liberal social compact, the impact of linkage, and material interdependence, sparking a retreat from global legal institutionalization, from Brexit to withdrawal from the ICC. Epic levels of inequality shape a defensive rise of chauvinistic nationalism and religious fundamentalism – as the only available forms of solidarity.

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