Linked to foisting what I’m referring to as “culture†upon local populations in the name of human rights is the breaking of “tradition.†What I mean by tradition are the standard practices of the people aid workers come to help. Talal Asad notes that “most human rights theorists don’t address seriously enough the thought that human rights is part of a great work of conversion.†This statement includes cultural conversions, particularly in language and its usage. But it also includes customs and practices. Save the Children lists as its primary goal to “help children and families help themselves.†Implicit in this statement is an understanding of critiques of rights workers from dependency perspectives. The goal is to foster internal and sustainable growth rather than providing food that necessarily comes from the outside. However, also implicit and significantly more pernicious is the idea that the societies “touched†by Save the Children are incapable of “helping themselves†without outside assistance. As already mentioned, rights workers are coming from a context totally outside of the sphere within which they work. The presumption is that a foreign (likely Western) worker with no knowledge of the language, culture, history, sewage, draining, practices, bureaucracy, economy, and/or law is necessary to teach the (even MORE ignorant) local how to grow crops or find ways to feed their family. Or failing that on how to get an education, or address health needs or the myriad things that qualify as necessary human rights. As in the cultural example, it’s not enough that the worker coming in is wholly ignorant of local traditions. Instead they foist their own notions of how these rights (which already are framed in the English language and specifically American) need to be addressed, necessarily with reference to what they and their organization know rather than what the (unknown) local context is. In this way human rights ceases to be about “human abuse of human beings†and instead about “undermining styles of life. It is people who are pushed, seduced, coerced, or persuaded into trying to change themselves into something else.†Asad’s argument here mirrors exactly the language of Save the Children, or of Amnesty or HRW or the vast majority of human rights organizations. A foreign organization dictating the terms of how a community must protect its own “human rights†necessarily means that they are dictating the changes the community must make. When combined with the fact that those changes aren’t based on knowledge on the ground this is highly problematic. **Next week The Role of States BM
