Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights, Lara Montesinos Coleman, 2024, Duke University Press
Leftwing enemies of neoliberalism may be critical of the concept of human rights motivating activists who resist extractivism in countries such as Colombia—arguing that it ultimately serves as a smokescreen for corporate capitalism—but at least they don’t kill them.
The same cannot be said for enemies of human rights at the other end of the spectrum, who throughout Latin America target their defenders with bullets and brutality on behalf of corporate capital itself.
It is this irreconcilable difference between those hostile to human rights in both principle and practice on both political wings that lies at the heart of LaraMontesinos Coleman’s effort to reconceptualise their role in law as a worthwhile weapon of the weak.
The author recalls how human rights in Colombia were described by one critical lawyer as a classic “opium of the people”, whereby fulsome international support for this principle under the rubric of sustainable development went hand in hand with brutal repression in support of multinational extractive industries.
We are all familiar with this paradox—big capital talks the talk on rights through virtue-signalling policies of “corporate social responsibility”, while those who get in the way of their insatiable ambition turn up dead at the side of a dirt track.
It is a common problem facing activists in developing countries who find themselves in the crosshairs of neocolonial capital, leading to many abuses—from massacres of populations at sites targeted for resource extraction to the assassination of trade unionists and environmentalists.
The reference to opium of the people, points out Coleman, “expresses a widespread sentiment on the left that all human rights can provide in such contexts is a diversion, a sedative, a degree of analgesia in an intolerable situation”. Worse, they may even be trying to fool us.
This sentiment is well established and grounded in an historical critique, with the development in Pinochet’s Chile during the 1970s of a laboratory of neoliberal restructuring—essential to which were torture and forced disappearances—coinciding with the emergence of the international human rights movement as we know it.
This critique proposes that even if human rights defenders are not complicit in the violent excesses of neoliberal policies, they are unwittingly diverting attention from it.
Naomi Klein, notes the author, was among the first to reflect upon this contradiction, with other progressive thinkers running with the ball. Stephen Hopgood is among the most prominent, arguing that to Washington human rights are merely a foreign policy tool to be advocated alongside US policies that in practice undermine them.
The main underlying basis of this position is the historical baggage of liberal individualism which naturalises a concept of the “human” as a sovereign being inextricably linked to the rise of modern capitalism. Marxist scholars are invariably sceptical about the basis rights offer for meaningful emancipation.
An obvious example is the way in which human rights have been “privatised” under neoliberalism to become add-ons to the international “tyranny” of a rule of law that conceals a violent dedication to profitmaking by multinational corporations.
Again, this is something we are all familiar with, taking rhetorical form as the CSR agenda of corporates to give their depredations a human face and facilitate plunder. As Coleman points out, ethical discourse has become a core feature of neoliberal “business as usual”.
Latin American decolonial scholars have added that the modern, Eurocentric notion of what it is to be “human” was developed in the first instance through an interrogation of whether colonised peoples met such criteria at all. Socialists in the region have argued plausibly that rights simply cannot serve revolutionary ends or challenge the systematic inequality created by capitalism.
Nonetheless, Coleman argues, a different sort of appeal to human rights can be at play in struggles for less destructive and more ecologically sustainable social systems that seek to subvert the power-laden norms in which rights have hitherto been advocated within a praxis founded upon an “insurgent humanism”.
The author draws upon her extensive experience of resistance in Colombia—an emblematic example of the “violence of development” that results from synergies between neoliberalism and authoritarianism—to explore “counterlegalities” that challenge the intimate relationship between law and capitalism against which human rights are applied so selectively.
She observes that human rights are the tie that binds diverse struggles among the dispossessed and, as Hopgood has noted, retain potential as a weapon of the weak if used innovatively. The key, Coleman suggests, is the abstract concept of “human” as it has hitherto sat within capitalist and colonial relations, versus the radical concept of human potential developed actively in struggles to expose the violence of capitalism.
She writes: “The life toward which these struggles strive is an indistinct, perhaps ever-receding horizon, but it is embodied in an ethical and spiritual disposition toward others and the natural world that implies the transformation of the human.”
Insurgent humanism is not programmatic alternative to human rights struggles as we know them, but a perspective steeped in the conceptualisation of the human within those struggles—a praxis that interrogates through struggle what this means, or should mean.
Coleman writes: “Whereas mainstream philosophical accounts of human rights have tended to invoke a transcendent human dignity rooted in an understanding of the human as sovereign individual, I point to a dialectic within these struggles between immanent critique of systemic violence and appeal to a transcendent sense of good that is elusive and beyond language, and that renders the normative coordinates shaped through these struggles far from merely ‘local’.”
Part philosophy and part political analysis, this interdisciplinary study explores critical legal studies, intellectual history, and international political economy to provide an eloquent, if at times complex, argument in favour of valorising human rights in a new way.
It is also a timely reflection—it is notable, for example, that Hopgood’s argument was set against the context of a decline in American and European power and the increasing political influence of the BRICS and their counterparts, which are now challenging the claims of the dominant powers in areas such as global justice. Further evidence of this is South Africa’s recent stunning victory against the West at the International Court of Justice over the threat of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Coleman’s book, based upon her extensive experience with activism in Colombia, reflects this development and feeds into it.
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Categories: Colombia, South America