I believe that many of the problems of “universal human rights†are sufficiently evident to approach the issue from a somewhat different angle. Talal Asad’s argument that the supposedly “universal†notion of human rights comes out of “natural law in Latin Christendom,†or the arguments over what exactly constitutes “universal human rights†(health care? property? etc.) persuasively raise serious issues with the underlying assumptions of “human rights.†In this series I aim to address a question I find more difficult to answer. What of the more familiar aid worker who is not enmeshed in a vast bureaucratic structure, who isn’t making critical political decisions and who actively attempts to remove themselves entirely from political debate, particularly over what should and should not feature in human rights’ definitions? Of the worker who – to their mind – works simply to provide the evidently basic rights of food, drink, and shelter to third world children who don’t have them. For the sake of this series we will create a hypothetical worker and assume that this worker is working for and receiving funds from an organization that operates in the Middle East; although I believe that there’s a large extent to which the worker would perceive the locations to be interchangeable. As the rights of food and shelter are universal, so are the children suffering without those rights interchangeable. How do broader critiques and contradictions within the notion of human rights serve to offer a critique of this non-descript worker, whose stated aim is solely to help people achieve the most basic of what should be universal human rights? How can there be something wrong with simply attempting to feed and shelter children in need? One of the first things I want to make clear in this series is that I’m specifically not applying my critique of such human rights work to a specific context. First of all, the universal nature of human rights means that they necessarily apply to all contexts in all places. As a result, focusing on human rights in, say, the Middle East is unnecessary for the purposes of this essay. Furthermore, I argue that the aid workers themselves view things through the prism of universality. To them they are providing the basic rights of food and shelter to third world children who are themselves as interchangeable as the contexts within which to place these rights. As a result, it is far from uncommon for aid workers to move from region to region or from NGO to IGO to NGO working in essentially the same broad field of “human rights,†but without ever bothering to try to learn the nuances that shape the differences between each context. Language, which would appear to be the most basic of qualification for aid work (insofar as it is a first step towards understanding a location, communicating with people and understanding what they perceive as their needs), is wholly absent from any of the directives or qualifications for human rights aid work. As a result this series will not deal with a specific case study on the way human rights is handled in a specific region or a specific country because the workers themselves don’t view human rights work through that prism. Countries and regions are interchangeable and differing contexts irrelevant. I aim to analyze the problems with this framework, and thus I will be discussing how workers view human rights in the abstract sense rather than focusing on specific contexts that they themselves see as irrelevant. My critique of this notion of simply feeding and sheltering children is precisely that’s it’s framed as if there is no cost involved, that the sole act taking place is that of “giving freely.†As critiques of aid work and human rights have become more common, defenses like this have become more common, as in Michael Ignatieff’s description of how rights need to be more “minimalist.†This argument is familiar with some of the problems of “universal†human rights, particularly arguments such as Asad’s argument on different cultural definitions of “decency†and their application to human rights. Ignatieff tries to distance himself from those arguments by saying that we can all agree that things such as “food†are a basic right and that as a result we escape arguments surrounding what should fall within the scope of human rights and what shouldn’t. Thus, aid workers argue that they provide a need – a minimal human right – and nothing more. I argue that in fact such workers are providing much, much more. In return for providing aid of whatever sort, they’re selling a vision, or what I have referred to above as a “prism,†of what giving food and aid means. Encompassed in this is the notion that local cultures mean little to nothing: That local languages mean little: That local “traditions†mean little: That Western aid funded by Western states is necessary to provide basic needs. From here I will break this series into these three sections. The following sections will outline these three points of the faultlines of culture, tradition, and power structures into which even this minimalist approach falls. **Next week “Undermining Culture” BM **The beliefs and statements of all Bikya Masr blogumnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect our editorial views.
