Abstract
This article argues that the forms through which violence and atrocity are expressed – legal, statistical and testimonial – are important objects of analysis because credo is manifest in form, and an examination of form reveals something about the relationship between the ‘world view’ of human rights organizations and the ‘styles of thought’ that shape and inform their representations. The article considers what the discursive forms that seem indigenous to human rights and human rights advocacy both express (legalism, scientism) and repress (historicism), and discusses ways in which these forms of representation potentially facilitate and inhibit action.
The single most important activity that human rights organizations (HROs) undertake to promote human rights is that of documenting human rights violations. As Orentlicher puts it, ‘human rights professionals believe that no action is more effective in promoting governments to curb human rights violations than aiming the spotlight of public scrutiny on the depredations themselves’ (1990: 84). This strategy – promoting change by reporting facts – is, she states, ‘almost elegant in its simplicity’.
Evidence of this foundational credo furnishes the various mandates of human rights organizations and guidelines adumbrated to counsel them. For example, Amnesty International (AI) aims to translate facts into change by undertaking ‘research … aimed at preventing and ending grave abuses of these rights’ (2009a). The Lund-London Guidelines, which provide professional guidance for HROs on fact-finding and translating fact-finding missions into human rights reports for wider dissemination, state that ‘fact-finding … is a crucial vehicle for the implementation of human rights in all countries or situations under examination’ (2009). 2 The driving assumption of this credo – if only people knew they would act – underpins a key cultural form of the human rights movement, the human rights report, which is now firmly established as a literary genre ‘with its own rules of style and presentation’ (Dudai, 2006, 783). These rules are governed by two distinctive duties, documentary and interventionist, which condition their formal aspects and play a role in the social imaginaries within which they are embedded, and to which they speak. Put otherwise, reports carry both a descriptive and a prescriptive mandate – they document the world in order to change it – that conditions the ‘objective structures’ of the text and ‘the interpretive categories or codes’ (Jameson, 2002[1981]: ix) through which they represent violence and social suffering as something to be acted upon. 3
The distinctive discursive codes – legal, statistical and testimonial – that seem, now, indigenous to human rights reports are what drive the knowledge into action principle and distinguish reports as genre. They are important objects of analysis because credo reveals itself in form, and there is a rough homology between the ‘world view’ of HROs and ‘style of thought’ manifest in the genre (Mannheim: 1991[1936]). 4 This is not to suggest that the relationship between the style of thought and worldview is seamless and uncontested, but it is to assert that these forms of representation have become stabilized to the point that they seem ‘natural’ to the discursive architecture characterizing human rights reporting today; that they have become both institutionalized and constitutive of the institutions within which they operate. 5 Consequently, it is both possible and necessary to excavate human rights as an idea by considering what its primary aesthetic vehicles express (legalism, scientism) and repress (historicism), because these have consequences for the forms of commitment, action and justice that HROs both facilitate and obscure. This article thus confirms a recent assertion that ‘we cannot talk about human rights without talking about the forms in which we talk about human rights’ (McLennan and Slaughter, 2009: 7) by calling attention to ‘the vehicles and vocabularies’ through which human rights speak. Indeed, analysis of the cultural and literary forms through which violence and suffering are mediated is precisely the kind of distinctive contribution that sociology can make to the study of human rights because it addresses questions about how cultural forms are constituted in place and time, for a particular society and purpose. As such this type of analysis helps to locate, properly and empirically, the universalist claims of human rights within the specific social, historical and political contexts of its emergence, showing how these are dependent on, rather than independent of, social particularities. To demonstrate the constructedness of human rights and its claim to universality does not, however, require an ironic distance from the subject. Hacking (1999) reminds us that there is also a potentially emancipatory thrust to this approach, which is suggestive (if not explicitly so) of different ways of seeing, knowing and acting.
So, the questions animating this article are these: how is the assumption – that knowing leads to acting – served by the style of thought intrinsic to the human rights report? What are the consequences of this style of thought (that is, what does it express and repress)? And what forms of action (and inaction) does this style of thought engender? My argument proceeds as follows. The first sections of the article analyse the general style of representation that characterizes human rights reports to show how it constructs a ‘correspondence’ between what is represented and how it is represented. These sections also identify and investigate the key registers – legal, statistical and testimonial – that are characteristic of the human rights style of thought. I argue that their claims to objectivity and universality are, broadly, grounded in their dislocation from historical, political and broader social interpretations of violence and suffering. 6 In illustrating my arguments, I concentrate primarily (although not exclusively) on reports published by Human Rights Watch (HRW), AI and the recent Lund-London Guidelines. HRW and AI are key agents, and their reports constitute some of the central, long established and highly visible exemplars of the genre and for this reason merit particular attention. The Lund-London Guidelines are instructive because they give professional advice on how to maximise the veracity and persuasiveness of HRO reports, and thus grant insights into the construction of the knowledge-action nexus within the professional practice of reporting itself.In the final section of the essay I argue that the frequent absence of context in these forms of representation has important consequences for the ways in which human rights violations are perceived, amongst which are unpredictable and contradictory effects on the consumers of humanitarian communication (who are potential actors in the field of human rights), at once galvanizing and inhibiting action. I show how these contradictions cause us to rethink the assumption that knowledge leads to action, which is central to the practice of human rights reporting specifically, to humanitarian communication more generally, and to the human rights movement of which it is definitional.
Correspondence Effects
The knowing-acting nexus is partly contingent upon a general style of representation which
conjures a ‘correspondence effect’ between what is represented and
how it is represented. This is attributable to the fact that the
influence of HROs throughout the 1970s and the 1980s grew ‘in direct relation to the
persuasiveness of their factual reporting’ (Orentlicher, 1990: 134). HROs were then reporting in
contexts such as Argentina and Chile where atrocities were a routine feature of political
rule, yet states just as routinely denied their practice. This made ‘breaking the silence’
imperative, and a premium came to be placed on the qualities of impartiality, fairness and
balance in reporting – namely, political ‘neutrality’ – upon which the persuasive authority
of HROs came to be contingent. Human rights reports are not, however, abstract factual
accounts: they are advocacy tools. Yet the registers of truth deployed by HROs work, to some
degree, to obscure this fact and rely, stylistically, on a ‘correspondence model of truth’.
This truth model is marked by stock-in-trade ‘elevator words’ (Hacking, 1999: 22), such as ‘facts’, ‘truth’,
‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’. For example, AI describes its reporting as ‘factually accurate’
and ‘impartial’ (2009b); HRW
conducts ‘accurate fact-finding’, ‘impartial reporting’ (2008a) maintaining a need to ‘ascertain the truth’
and to understand ‘reality’ (2008b); the Lund-London Guidelines promote ‘accuracy’,
‘objectivity’, ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’ and ‘efficacy’: If a report has been compiled in accordance with these guidelines it indicates that the
allegations, observations and conclusions in it can be reasonably relied upon, thus
enhancing the efficacy and credibility of the report. (2009)
This statement links the credibility of the report (its claim to knowledge) to its efficacy (action). In effect, the guidelines advise HROs to maximize the correspondence effect, and, by extension, the persuasive power of what is presented.
Elevator words are marked by two distinctive attributes which make them operate ‘at a higher level’ (Hacking, 1999: 23). First, they are ‘circularly defined’ which means they appear to be self-evident, requiring no further explanation. Second, their meaning appears to transcend time and space, compounding their authoritative effect. As a consequence, elevator words provide an important moral grounding for the claims made in human rights reports and are critical to the ‘call for action’ that reports generate. They serve to make the claims advanced seem irrefutable, morally unambiguous, universal and timeless. Simultaneously, they comfort us with scientism, confirming the correspondence between our representations and the world ‘out there’. This is important because, on the one hand the human rights report asserts its correspondence with reality by virtue of its mimetic authority – ‘this is life’ – and yet this authority carries with it a moral obligation for changing the reality it represents. As a consequence, the mode of representation (‘objective’, ‘impartial’) conjoins with the objective of representation (‘advocacy’, ‘persuasion’) and the mimetic truth style thus works to foster the relationship between knowledge and action.
The next sections of the article move from an analysis of the general style of representation to an identification and analysis of the three specific truth registers (legal, statistical and testimonial) that characterize human rights reports and facilitate the relationship between knowing and acting. Each of these registers corresponds to an aspect of the knowledge-action nexus. Statistics ‘declare’ a state of affairs and provide incontrovertible ‘proof’ of atrocity. Testimonials add an affective dimension: they testify to the human suffering behind the data, and make emotional appeals that invoke empathy. This mode of truth constitutes the core of the appeal to action. Finally, law both frames what is reported (violence as ‘violation of human rights’), and fulfils the promise that something can be done, thus closing the gap between distant suffering and action. I characterize these distinctive truth regimes as declarative (‘this is happening’), affective (‘please do something about this’) and curative (‘here is the remedy’).
What One Sees: The Optic of International Law
What HROs ‘see’ is framed by international human rights and humanitarian law, which, frequently, provide the criteria for the mandates determining the ambit of HROs, the selection of events they investigate, and the practical recommendations they make. A few prominent examples bear this out. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel campaigns ‘in accordance with standards set … in international law’, noting that ‘torture … is incompatible with the moral values of democracy and the rule of law’ (2009); HRW’s mission statement calls upon governments and power holders ‘to end abusive practices and respect international human rights law’ (2008c). It requires researchers to ‘frame the violation as it relates to international human rights and humanitarian law’ (HRW, 2008b); AI demands ‘that all governments and other powerful entities respect the rule of law’ (2009a); and the Lund-London Guidelines advise HROs to ‘reference the applicable international law’ in order to ‘enhance quality and credibility’ of reporting (2009). Taken together, these statements are striking because they seem to suggest that HROs need only formulate their mandates, methods and recommendations in relation to law, and the qualities of morality, objectivity, quality and credibility are, in turn, injected into the reports themselves.
Law provides the first and final point of reference for HRO mandates and reports. It is the first point of reference because mandates are adumbrated with reference to international human rights and humanitarian law, and because the crucial first step in reporting requires the legal definition and classification of the atrocity under scrutiny. Law is the final point of reference because reports make recommendations with respect to international law, either by appealing for its application or calling for ‘more law’. Hence, there is often a logical circularity at work: everything begins and ends with law, which works to marginalize other interpretations of action. This legal framing is crucial in completing the ‘knowledge into action’ effect: law provides the answer to the question ‘what can be done?’
There are several important consequences of note. First, it makes contemporary human rights advocacy seem ‘naturally’ indivisible from the international legal paradigm. However, advocacy did not develop in a linear and cumulative relationship with international law: the relationship is, rather, historical and marked by rupture (Cmiel, 2004). Second, human rights reports invoke the legal framework as their objective animator, authenticating their core aspiration to impartiality. International human rights and humanitarian law are conditioned by practices of argumentation that rely for authority on their self-presentation as divested of interest (Koskeniemmi, 1989). Yet, this presentation conceals the fact that law is itself a framework for the exercise of power, which facilitates the switch in control from the political to the legal sphere. It is thus neither disinterested, nor objective, nor self-evidently superior to other frameworks of power. Third, law often does little to change the social and political conditions that make violations possible in the first place, making tenuous any special claim that law makes to preventing atrocities from recurring in the future. Indeed, law treats, primarily, the violent symptoms rather than the root causes of historically profound social and political injustice, the remedy for which must, surely, be sought elsewhere, beyond the realm of technical administration. Yet much human rights advocacy persists in its investment in the ability of law to change social and political reality and to instantiate the conditions necessary for prevention of repetition of violations in the future.
How One Files Seeing: Statistical and Testimonial Truth Regimes
Two further, albeit different, registers of truth carry authoritative power and together facilitate the knowledge-action nexus: statistical and testimonial. These truth paradigms also converge to forge a correspondence between what is reported and how it is represented. Statistical data play a ‘verification’ role and equip the activist with ‘hard facts’ which underpin the moral certainty upon which action must be based. By contrast, victim and witness testimonials represent the ‘truth of suffering’ in order to make an emotive appeal that aims to spur action by mobilizing empathy.
Statistical Knowledge
Statistics play a critical role in the documentation of atrocity because they appear to deliver ‘a world … purged of value’ (Eagleton, 2009: 20) thus furthering the aim of neutrality in reporting. They help to establish the scale, spread and frequency of violations, and, crucially, to establish whether they are occurring on a scale sufficient to convince us that violent repression was planned and executed (Orentlicher, 1990: 132). How much torture? How many victims? How much, how many, how often …? These are the urgent questions to which answers must reveal themselves in statistical form. Statistics help to make it difficult for governments to deny that torture and disappearances took place, and reduce ‘the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse’ (Ignatieff, 1996: 113). The exercise in statistical stockpiling is a characteristic and persuasive technique of human rights reporting. Establishing scope, intensity and range is a first step in demonstrating that a government is not fulfilling its obligations under international human rights law, and can both constitute supporting evidence in prosecutions and facilitate the design of ameliorative policies and laws.
Statistics seem so natural a feature of the human rights report, now, that it is worth historicizing their incorporation as a way of penetrating their constitutional power. The burgeoning power – visibility, status and numbers – of HROs in the 1980s is inextricably linked to their turn to statistics in that decade, up until which time human rights reporting had been dominated by more qualitative assessments of violations. 7 Significant symposia on statistics and human rights simultaneously bore witness to, and helped generate, the shift to metrics in human rights documentation. 8 Calls for measurement spoke, in turn, to a broader modern faith in the power of statistics to get ‘the facts straight’, provide objective accounts, and deliver recommendations. This turn was itself driven and endorsed by the broader epistemological status that statistics enjoy, which is derived from their purported proximity to the paradigm of natural science: numbers are seen as the ‘bedrock of systematic knowledge’ because they appear to be pre- or non-interpretive (Poovey, 1998: xii). 9
From the 1980s onwards, statistics were to play a crucial role in human rights advocacy, resulting in a complex reciprocity between the authority of HROs and the metrics they deployed. This authority resides in two qualities with which statistics historically have been endowed, and to which HROs aspire: veridical and persuasive. First, the turn to statistics helped to proclaim the veridicality of the claims of HROs themselves, underlining their scientificity and hence authority. Statistics furnish the truth status of human rights reports by seeming to endow them with objectivity, which in turn consolidates their credibility and authority, making them appear to be invulnerable to political controversy and contestation. As De Neufville puts it, statistics help to make reports not only ‘appear more objective, but actually to become more objective’ (1986: 696). 10 In turn, this helps HROs to survive the scrutiny of those who might deploy, act upon, or indeed refute the claims they make. In addition, statistics seem to serve human rights particularly well because their seeming neutrality puts them beyond the ‘local’/‘universal’ impasse that dogs both thinking and practice in human rights. These social consequences are, however, bound up in the epistemological power of statistics, in which statistical representation appears to guarantee truth claims. Yet this is a contingent consequence of the ways in which political economies of truth are characterized by the forms of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce them (Foucault, 1991).
Second, statistics underscore the connection between knowledge and action: ‘nothing is more effective than verified counts of specific types of violations in convincing us that something needs to be done’ (Claude and Jabine, 1986: 565). Statistics persuade us to act on the world, they invite, indeed incite, us to change it. 11 HROs, it is argued, are ‘more likely to produce the desired condemnation of violations (or changes in policy) when there are quantifiable standards with which to present data on the attainment or abuse of rights’ (Claude and Jabine, 1986: 556). And yet, as Durkheim has shown us, statistical representations also obscure certain realities. For example, the quantification of disappearances in Argentina meant that other, concomitant, violations were concealed: typically, a person ‘disappeared’ had been kidnapped, interrogated (tortured), and sentenced (killed), in a violent parody of the regular legal process (Brysk, 1994: 676). Statistical data make legally codified regularities appear, and irregularities (events that do not yield to legal codes) disappear. That is to say, they work to reinforce legal outcomes because they furnish the attempt to establish ‘objective’ legal facts. Statistics, in tandem with legal codification, construct commensurability across cases and appear to universalize violence and suffering. Yet neither the particularities of state terror nor the thicker dimensions of social suffering can be captured by a body count: ‘the economistic measurement of suffering leaves out most of what is at stake’, the narratives, ethnographies, and social and political histories that cannot be squeezed into an econometric index (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1997: 15).
Testimonial Knowledge
Victim testimonials are the third characteristic truth regime of human rights reports, often recounting extreme suffering. 12 The normalization of testimonial truth to human rights reporting is attributable to its broader social importance, which in turn is consequent upon a complex set of social and historical conditions: from the rise of testimonial autobiography in the wake of the Holocaust; the post-war rise of the therapeutic model in various aspects of the administration of liberal states, from education, health and penal reform (Rieff, 1966); the more recent rise of ‘victimology’ (Elias, 1986) in domestic restorative justice processes in the UK, USA and Australia; to the privileging of victim accounts in transitional justice. These contexts together have converged to authorize the testimonial as a privileged mode of truth, and serve as the backdrop against which the representation of victim suffering in human rights reports should be read, interpreted and understood. Victim and witness testimonies service a number of core functions in human rights research: they seem to restore the human subject to technical accounts of horror, and thus redeem human rights reports from more technocratic schemes of knowledge; they claim to have both a probative and therapeutic value; and they aim to elicit emotional responses from readers in order to promote action.
Testimony invites a physical and emotional proximity to suffering, making it more palpable. It aims to engender an emotional response in the reader in order that s/he might be moved to act. Testimonies help to translate knowledge into action by, as AI puts it, mobilizing both ‘outrage’ and ‘hope’ in its supporters (2009c). As Seu puts it, HROs are ‘animated by the hope that by provoking the emotional responses of compassion and empathy, people would become involved with the fight against human rights abuses’ (2003: 183). 13 Reports sometimes deliver victim testimonials in italics, forging a formal relationship between aesthetics and action. They deliver to the page immediacy, urgency, a sense of ‘here and now’, of terror in real time: terror that the reader is being implored to stop. This appearance renders a stark visual counterpoint to the rational, legal-scientific framework – statistical tables, legal conventions – within which they are enclosed.
HROs also charge testimonial knowledge with both a probative and a therapeutic value.
This is confirmed by HRW’s methodology statement on the practice of interviewing victims
and witnesses: … the principles by which Human Rights Watch conducts interviews with victims and
witnesses are standard … guiding principles, such as the need to ascertain the truth,
to corroborate the veracity of statements … to remain impartial … Some of the most
commonly employed techniques … are to conduct interviews in private settings … and
focus the interview on the details of what occurred. Conducting interviews in private
helps to avoid false statements, exaggeration and conjecture by ensuring interviewees
make independent statements. Researchers will always attempt to ask other witnesses
and victims questions about the same incidents, attempting to corroborate factual
details, confirm witness accounts, expose exaggerations, or discount unverifiable
statements … By focusing on details such as ages, names, locations, times and other
descriptions, researchers can identify false or misleading statements … Asking
interviewees to repeat or clarify information that they have given earlier in an
interview is another technique used to expose false statements … Our researchers are
careful to avoid re-traumatizing people who have suffered serious abuses. They … are
trained to communicate with sensitivity … in addition to understanding the reality of
what has occurred, Human Rights Watch interviews victims and witnesses in order to
give them an opportunity to have their voices and stories reach a wider audience.
(2008b)
Here, HRW wants to align itself with and simultaneously distinguish itself from a court of law. This is due to a conflicting imperative at work: the victim interview constitutes both ‘hard evidence’ and ‘therapy’. On the one hand, HRW needs to demonstrate the forensic perspicuity of its practices: the interview data must stand up in a court of law, hence the description of interviewing techniques more familiar in a policing or legal context. This description helps to establish that HRW’s procedures are objective, impartial and designed to elucidate the truth. On the other hand, it wants to demonstrate its attentiveness to the potentially re-traumatizing effects that such an investigation might incur. Here we can see the influence of therapeutic truisms that have more recently become the common currency of humanitarian practices (Moon, 2009; Pupavac, 2004), to which the claim to ‘give voice’ to victims is a striking example. This idea has gained particular credence in the context of transitional justice processes where victim testimonies are deemed the privileged sites of truth production.
There are several problems with these claims. First, it is not always possible to translate terror into story because its experiential structure either defies narrative re-ordering (Scarry, 1985) or resists narration because shame, stigma and other social consequences are contingent on telling. Victims of rape, for example, might be stigmatized because they are deemed to bring the community into ill-repute. These conditions place limitations on the quality of the truth that the reporter claims to advance, and the alleged therapeutic value that giving testimony carries. Second, victims have complained about the way in which their stories have been appropriated, commodified and circulated without their consent by human rights entrepreneurs (Ross, 2003). Far from being ‘given voice’, some have complained that they have lost control over their stories. Third, there is a hierarchy of relations implicit in HRW’s account, and the passivity of the victim is reinforced: their opportunity to speak, to reach a wider audience, must be ‘granted’ by the human rights reporter. This is one way in which human rights work ‘gets pleasure’, by ‘making the victim speak and thereby be human again’ (Lemaitre, 2007: 16). That said, identity categories such as ‘victim’ carry both repressive and productive potential. Hacking captures something of these contradictory effects through the idea of the ‘looping effect’ through which persons wittingly interact with and adopt certain subject categories, for example ‘refugee’, in order to pursue certain ends (Hacking, 1999).
These values – probative and therapeutic – do not have equal weight. HRW’s statement, in which ‘factual’ truth is privileged, reveals that whilst testimonies ostensibly serve to render visible the subjective experience of violence, they are subservient to its attempt to engender an ‘objective’ account of ‘reality’. Testimonials serve to bolster the truth of allegations already statistically recorded, to provide verification of already established technical evidence, to maximize ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’, and to eliminate ‘false statements, exaggeration and conjecture’, upon which, critically, their credibility relies. This credibility is, in turn, contingent upon the violation being codified in legal terms and upon it being stripped of contextual information that might suggest a particular political proclivity on the part of the reporting HRO. As such, the claim to objectivity and universality is grounded in the dislocation of testimony from the historical, political and broader social interpretations of violence and suffering. The inclusion of testimonies in human rights reports thus preserves and consolidates the scientific status of the report (Wilson, 1997). Victim statements are meticulously pared down, stripped of any information – social and especially political – that might confer meaning on the reported violence. They appear as abstract, universal, timeless accounts that rely for effect on being elevated above all contextual interpretation. The consequence of this is that the structural conditions and consequences of violence are rarely actually raised and addressed (Dudai, 2009; Mamdani, 1998; Moon, 2008).
The ‘Hubris of the Zero Point’: 14 Consequences of Decontextualization and Universalism
The ability of reports and organizations to ‘survive scrutiny’ has come to rely, generally, on HROs evacuating reports of detailed historical, social and political context and on the representation of social and political violence as a technical and legally codified sequence of ‘gross violations of human rights’. Cohen remarks with customary acuity on this proclivity: ‘decontextualization’ … is ‘the deliberate result of the human rights credo that no context … can ever justify the violations of universal prohibitions’ (Cohen cited in Wilson, 1997: 149). This alerts us to the idea that credo is tied to form and that cultural forms are regulatory, allowing some ideas, histories and politics to travel whilst curtailing others. Decontextualization thus represses the real conditions of political violence in order to service ‘objectivity’ and ‘universalism’, which puts a number of crucial issues at stake. First, it draws attention away from social and political issues such as class or ethnic power, with the effect that violence remains virtually incomprehensible, an ‘irrational outburst devoid of meaning’ (Wilson, 1997: 148). It follows that decontextualization is mystificatory: it conceals real material antagonisms between social and political groups, rendering violence unintelligible. This consequence is revealed through a comparison with the appearance of a similar, but deliberately historicized, regime of truth in a number of truth commission reports, whose aim is not to mobilize action but to understand the past in order to address and ‘move on’ from it. This demonstrates the ways in which the genre, properly historicized, can service very different aims.
A second consequence of this proclivity is that it obscures the fact that human rights violations are the symptoms and not the cause of profound and enduring social inequalities and injustice, which international law is ill-equipped to address. The causes of violence, suffering and injustice thus remain invisible to law’s optic. Revelation of the broader contexts of violence might in fact lead away from rather than towards law, in pursuit of amelioration, and also might require wider social and political responsibility for violence and suffering.
A third and related consequence concerns the knowledge-action nexus. Whilst the effects of reporting violations remain generally ‘unknown and unmonitored’ (Cohen, 1996: 518), some recent studies can be drawn upon, and their implications extended, to speculate on the assumed causal ecology between the two. These studies render a mixed verdict, however, and lead me, finally, to make two observations to advance the argument that the dehistoricized mode of truth indigenous to human rights reports and to other forms of humanitarian communication generates contradictory consequences, forms of action and inaction, which problematize the knowing-acting doctrine in specific ways.
My first assertion is that dehistoricization can serve to reinforce the knowing-acting nexus, albeit to problematic effect. The success of the ‘Save Darfur’ campaign in the USA is testimony to the persuasive and mobilizational power of numbers, demonstrating the importance of technical, statistical knowledge to popular action. Here, the public battle for and against the application of the genocide label was fought on statistical grounds. Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times columnist most closely associated with raising awareness about genocide in Darfur, posted a ‘genocide counter’ on his website with a running total of the dead. The success of the campaign can only be understood in the context of popular rather than legal interpretations of genocide, a consequence of the Genocide Convention’s historical conditions, which invest statistics with a special power as an affective animator. However, Mamdani argues, the post-Rwanda mantra of ‘saving before it is too late’ that drove the Save Darfur campaign requires that we ‘act before seeking to understand’ (2009: 3). Mamdani shows how the Save Darfur campaign advanced an abstract account of political violence, concentrating on the numbers killed rather than on the history and politics of the region. It promoted the labelling of political violence as genocide, which in itself begged the ‘pursuit of revenge as punishment’ against Sudan’s President al-Bashir (2009: 8). This call, Mamdani argues, was based on a misunderstanding of the situation (an effect of abstraction) and threatened to worsen political violence with the effect that Save Darfur ‘must … bear some of the blame’ for delaying amelioration of the situation. His argument recalls, in a different key, Sontag’s assertion that ‘moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action’ (2003: 105).
My second, and contradictory observation emerges from Cohen and Seu’s studies of responses to humanitarian appeals (Cohen, 1996, 2001; Cohen and Seu, 2002; Seu, 2003, 2011). Their research is animated by a question invoked in the opening gambit of Cohen’s States of Denial (2001) in which a ‘nice middle class couple’ are depicted breakfasting on coffee and croissants whilst browsing the weekend papers, concealed in the pages of which are a sheaf of humanitarian appeals. What, Cohen asks, does this information do to the croissant eaters, and what do they do with it? Their research demonstrates that consumers of humanitarian communication often engage complex strategies of denial in order to avoid responding to such appeals. In place of action they discover detachment, apathy, denial, self-justification. They discover a particular suspicion of the effort to invoke guilt, compassion and empathy: the ways in which HROs try to ‘move you beyond knowing by moving you to feel’ (Cohen and Seu, 2002: 189). In their investigation respondents drew upon a stock set of ‘bystander alibis’ that justify detachment from the issues – ‘it’s just one thing after another’, ‘it will just go back to how it’s always been’, ‘it’s always gone on, that’s just the way it is’ – which reflect a range of culturally acceptable responses to information about violence and suffering. These range from expressions about human nature (‘they have been doing this kind of thing to each other since the beginning of time’), to cynicism about the work of NGOs (‘they just want our money’), to culturally acceptable justifications of selfishness (‘it’s not my problem’). These ideological justifications masquerade as ‘common sense’.
These findings suggest something else of interest: the way in which the ‘compassion fatigue’ thesis has turned from being a description of a condition, to a justificatory discourse of inaction. However, this ‘apathy’ has its roots in helplessness rather than indifference and over-exposure (Sontag, 2003: 90–1), and leads me to extend the analysis presented in Cohen and Seu’s careful catalogue of the forms of ‘denial’ to argue that this helplessness is in part a consequence of the generic style of representation that HROs deliberately advance: abstract, universal, timeless, decontextualized. Decontextualization itself creates the effect that ‘this has always gone on’, that ‘it will always go on’, that there are people towards whom ‘this kind of thing will always happen’, that ‘nothing will change’. As a consequence, this deliberate style of thought potentially debilitates understanding and in its place generates helplessness and inaction.
Thus the absence of context in the representation of violence and suffering has unpredictable and contradictory effects on the consumers of such knowledge, and these contradictions force us to rethink the belief – that knowledge leads to action – central to the practice of human rights reporting specifically, to humanitarian communication generally, and to the human rights movement of which it is characteristic. Whilst the dehistoricized genre of humanitarian communication serves the governing protocols – objectivity and universalism – of human rights representation and advocacy, it is also a source of disconnection from social suffering, thus potentially debilitating activism, or promoting courses of action that are based on a misunderstanding of the events under representation. What all of this suggests is that it is by no means obvious that the style of thought ‘natural’ to the genre leads to the kind of action we might assume it to promote, which in turn begs us to recognize the complexity of, and investigate further, the social and political potential of human rights representations.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was first presented at the international conference Human Rights and the Social: Making a New Knowledge, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 4–6 November 2009. I would like to thank Anthony Woodiwiss for his kind invitation to that conference and for his helpful comments, and other participants in the conference for their thoughts on this paper.