The Role of States

All this leads to the final section of this series: the role of governments in universal human rights. In point of fact both international organizations and the communities they serve have to accept the relationships they have with the states involved. The hypothetical aid worker I began this essay with fits into a system where states are all important and where once again they are not “simply” helping to feed people in need but are part of a larger bureaucratic structure. Asad references a US Trade Representative discussion human rights as being encouraged by “the West and Western norms,” directly linking the connection human rights has with Western discourse.15 He argues convincingly that human rights discourse is heavily linked with American discourse on “redemption” and is linked to American domination of the vocabulary used in outlining problems in societies. A foreign aid worker can’t but fit into this entire framework regardless of the country they are operating in.
But not only do they fit into this “Western” framework by operating within human rights, Abdelrahman effectively argues that they fit into states’ interests as well. For example, in Abdelrahman’s article she writes on how the Egyptian state effectively “hijacks human rights debate”16. She details how at various periods the state was able to fit human rights workers into different narratives, at times painting them as “evil foreigners” and at times “representing itself as the natural patron of these organizations as well as the true guardian of human rights in general.”17 Any rights worker working within the borders of another nation state is necessarily working with that state’s say-so, assuming the organization they work for is large and well-funded as the ones in my series are detailing.
Any state allowing this is, as a result, using human rights discourse for its own ends in ways similar to (or potentially different from) the ways outlined in Abdelrahman’s piece on Egypt. Thus , our worker who works in Egypt or within the borders of any state is simultaneously working for the interests of foreign states and foreign organizations and the interests of the host state. In Abdelrahman’s example such a worker would have been used in one case as an example of foreign imperialism and then later as model of why the Egyptian government is great for its people. In neither case are the ends of “helping people,” in theory the worker’s ultimate goal, being realized. So the broader concepts and the organizations are all highly political, which calls into question my hypothetical aid worker’s notion that they’re simply there to help. In fact they are part of the broader political power games Asad references18 even when their goals are “admirable”.
Finally, I want to deal with one of the other features of Abdelrahman’s article. In this essay I’ve talked primarily about foreign human rights IGOs and NGOs, whereas Abdelrahman discusses many of the nuances within human rights work. Most of the organizations she references don’t fall into some of the traps I outline: most people speak Arabic for instance. However I argue that despite these differences human rights workers for “good” (or “better”) NGOs still fit within the paradigms I attack in this essay.
Human rights discourse is still necessarily framed within the language Asad outlines as American and these workers are still fitting within the human rights framework. Despite a better understanding of the local context these workers are still fitting their aid in the framework of universal human rights, of universal norms (which I argue represent “Western norms” in the discourse) and within the highly problematic political context of human rights. Thus I argue that while of course there are rights workers who speak local languages or are more or less sensitive to the problems of human rights, by placing their work within that context in the first place the majority of the criticisms of this series still stand.
BM