What's Wrong with Rights?

Radha D'Souza

Description

Through mapping the rights discourse and the transformations in transnational finance capitalism since the world wars, and interrogating the connections between the two, Radha D'Souza examines contemporary rights in theory and practice through the lens of the struggles of the people of the Third World, their experiences of national liberation and socialism and their aspirations for emancipation and freedom.



Social movements demand rights to remedy wrongs and injustices in society. But why do organisations like the World Bank and IMF, the G7 states and the World Economic Forum want to promote rights? Activists and activist scholars are critical of human rights in their diagnosis of problems. But in their prognosis, they reinstate human rights and bring back through the backdoor what they dismiss through the front.



Why are activists and activist scholars unable to 'let go' of human rights? Why do indigenous peoples find the need to invoke the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People to make their claims sound reasonable? Are rights in the 20th and 21st centuries the same as rights in the 17th and 18th centuries?



This book examines what is entailed in reducing rights to 'human' rights and in the argument 'our understandings of rights are better than theirs' that is popular within social movements and in critical scholarship.
Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Preface

Part I: The Rights Resurgence

1. Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations

2. What’s Wrong With Rights?

3. Rights in the ‘Epoch of Imperialism’

Part II: Re-Scripting Rights

4. International Election Monitoring: From ‘Will of the People’ to the ‘Right to Free and Fair Elections’

5. The Rights of Victims: From Authorisation to Accountability

6. Intangible Property Rights: The IMF as Underwriters

7. Rights in International Neoliberal Risk-Governance Regime

Part III: Concluding Reflections

8. Rights and Social Movements in the ‘Epoch of Imperialism'

Postscript

Notes

Index

Sujets

• NGOs
• Political Science
• Civil Rights
• Modern
• HISTORY
• G-7
• UN
• 21st century
• Sociology
• Marxism
• Land law
• Modern history
• Social theory
• International human rights law
• Civics
• General officer
• Developing country
• World Social Forum
• Non-governmental organization
• Civil and political rights
• United Nations
• Age of Enlightenment
• Third World
• Sovereignty
• Imperialism
• International Monetary Fund
• International Criminal Court
• Human rights
• Colonialism
• Citizenship
• Capitalism
• LAW
• Impérialisme (jeu vidéo)
• General
• Finance
• IMF
• Happiness
• War on Drugs
• Third World (reggae)
• International
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• G7
• Cour pénale internationale
• Forum social mondial

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783717279
• Langue: English

Extrait

What s Wrong with Rights?
What s Wrong with Rights?
Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations
Radha D Souza
First published 2018 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Radha D Souza 2018
The right of Radha D Souza to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3540 7 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3541 4 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7837 1726 2 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1728 6 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1727 9 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
In memory of Uday Mahale Comrade, friend, fellow traveller
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Preface
PART I THE RIGHTS RESURGENCE
1. Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations
2. What s Wrong With Rights?
3. Rights in the Epoch of Imperialism
PART II RE-SCRIPTING RIGHTS
4. International Election Monitoring: From Will of the People to the Right to Free and Fair Elections
5. The Rights of Victims: From Authorisation to Accountability
6. Intangible Property Rights: The IMF as Underwriters
7. Rights in International Neoliberal Risk-governance Regime
PART III CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
8. Rights and Social Movements in the Epoch of Imperialism
Postscript
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making and many people have contributed to the development of the arguments in it. Over the years many activists around the world have invited me to speak at public events on a wide range of themes: conditions of workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, women, environment, multilateral trade agreements, civil liberties and much else. The events were attended by people who were deeply concerned about the future. At those meetings and outside, people contributed generously to the debates, raised questions and engaged with the arguments in this book. This book has grown from those dialogues and conversations with people committed to a better world. Their engagement encouraged me to write this book. I wish to take this opportunity to thank all of them wherever they may be.
Thanks to Ren e Vellv of GRAIN, a non-profit organisation working with Third World farmers on community-controlled biodiversity-based food systems, for inviting me to the panel discussion which was published in Seedling (October 2007) under the same title: What s Wrong With Rights? The reservations of farmers and rural activists from Africa and Asia on the panel about rights, people whose voices are seldom heard in mainstream academic discourses, gave me the confidence to pursue my own project on rights. Thanks to Reza Banakar for inviting me to contribute to his edited volume on rights even though I am not labelled as a human rights scholar within the academia. It forced me to go beyond speaking to activists and put pen to paper, or rather fingers on keyboard, to think about rights more theoretically and induct my critique into academic scholarship. Thanks to Brewster Kneen who has, over the years, been an unwavering cheer leader for the project. Aziz Choudry organised public and academic events and provided me with valuable opportunities to engage with his students.
Anyone who writes anything knows the importance of a sympathetic but critical reader. Nicola Perugini gave his time very generously and painstakingly went through a rough and ready first draft of the manuscript line by line, paragraph by paragraph and provided valuable comments. I have benefitted a great deal from his feedback. I am indebted to him for his labours and his generosity. The shortcomings in the book are of course my own.
David Shulman in Pluto was very patient, kind and understanding about the many interruptions in the writing of this book. Thank you David. Thanks to the Pluto team for seeing the publication to fruition. This book was not possible without the support of the library staff at the University of Westminster. I want to say a special thanks to the Interloan Document Delivery team in the library. Every time I needed something, and it was always urgent and frantic, I filled out the online IDD form and bingo, like magic the article, or book chapter or book turned up in my inbox or pick-up shelf at work faster than I had expected.
Knowledge is a social phenomenon. In writing something that is copyrighted as my own, I stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants: scholars, thinkers, philosophers, poets who have shaped my mind and my thoughts in ways that go beyond academic conventions for source citations that property rights to knowledge requires. My ongoing debts to all those predecessors who have inspired me to follow in their footsteps.
Amma, Bharti, Kunal, Jaya, Ajeet can I thank you enough? Uday, how I wish you were here to read my book.
Abbreviations
AFTA
ASEAN Free Trade Area
APEC
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation
BIT
Bilateral Investment Treaties
CCPC
Commission on Crime Prevention and Control
CSCE
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
CSO
Civil Society Organisations
CVR
Corporate Voluntary Rescue
DCN
Debt Crisis Network
ECOSOC
Economic and Social Council
ESG
Emergency Stabilization Fund
EU
European Union
FCN
Friendship, Commerce and Navigation treaties
G7
Group of Seven
GGP
Good Governance Programme
ICC
International Criminal Court
ICCPR
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
ICESCR
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
ICJ
International Court of Justice
ICSID
International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes
IEO
International Economic Organisation
IEM
International Election Monitoring
IHRLG
International Human Rights Law Group
ILC
International Land Coalition
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INGO
International Non-Governmental Organisation
IO
International Organisation
LPG
Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation
MDG
Millennium Development Goals
MIGA
Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agreement
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCI
National-Competitive-Industrial
NED
National Endowment for Democracy
NGO
Non-Governmental Organisation
NIE
New Institutional Economics
NIEO
New International Economic Order
NSM
New Social Movements
OAS
Organization of American States
OPEC
Organization of the Oil Producing Countries
OSM
Old Social Movements
Post-WC
Post-Washington Consensus
RoL
Rule of Law
SAP
Structural Adjustment Programme
SDG
Sustainable Development Goals
TAN
Transnational Advocacy Networks
TMF
Transnational Monopoly Finance
TNC
Transnational Corporations
TTIP
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
UDHR
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UK
United Kingdom
UN
United Nations
UNCTAD
United National Conference on Trade and Development
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
UNGA
United Nations General Assembly
UNICEF
United Nations International Children s Fund
UNOHCHR
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
UNSC
United Nations Security Council
US
United States
USAID
United States Agency for International Development
VDPA
Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action
WB
World Bank
WC
Washington Consensus
WSF
World Social Forum
WTO
World Trade Organization
WWI
World War I
WWII
World War II
Preface
The ideas in this book have germinated over many decades during the course of my involvement with social movements as a social justice activist in India, New Zealand, Asia, the UK, and internationally, as a constitutional lawyer in India involved in labour, civil rights and public interest cases and later as an academic in New Zealand and in the UK. Rights were very much at the centre of debates within social movements, in the court-rooms and within the academia and continue to dominate all three arenas. The arguments in each of these constituencies - social movements, legal practice and academic scholarship - were of very different types however. The three distinct types of practices that I engaged in revealed, at least to me, radically different assumptions about rights that the three constituencies made about what rights were, their histories, their role and purpose and the interrelationships between rights in social philosophy, in political theories and practices, and in legal doctrine and practice.
In the 1990s I was drawn into international issues, first during the campaign against Harkin s Bill, the Child Labour Deterrence Bill proposed by US Democratic Senator Tom Harkin. The Bill prohibited importation into the US, products made by child labour, an issue with serious consequences for millions of poor Indian families whose children worked in the carpet industry, an important export item. I found myself arguing against rights introduced, supposedly, to protect Indian children as an activist while at the same time defending children s constitutional rights in the courts. I was drawn into regional campaigns against the impacts of International Monetary Fund (IMF)-led Structural Adjustment Programmes in the Asia-Pacific region and later to campaigns against linking labour standards to international trade agreements proposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Both issues had devastating consequences for well-established constitutional rights: collective bargaining rights of workers, land rights of peasants, and rights of indigenous peoples in the Indian constitution. Many precedent setting litigat