Abstract
First published in 2011, the problems and questions addressed by the authors of Human Rights in Our Own Backyard have become more rather than less important. Issues such as income inequality, illegal migration, unaffordable housing, and racial discrimination are increasingly salient in contemporary American politics. Furthermore, social scientists often appear to lack an adequate ethical vocabulary and perspective that could address these issues. This volume attempts to provide an ethical underpinning to social scientific approaches to rights. Consequently, for the growing number of courses on human rights in U.S. sociology departments, this collection is an essential reference.
There are twenty-three chapters, divided into sections covering economic, social, cultural, and political and civil rights. It concludes with two sections concerning conventions on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination and activist resistance to rights abuses in American society. The title of this volume refers to the fact that the majority of human rights researchers assume that the victims of crimes against humanity live overseas in distant and dangerous societies. Human rights discourse typically applies to international crises (such as Darfur, Palestine, and Mali), not to national issues. By contrast, the authors offer detailed examples of human-rights abuses in the United States (“our own backyard”) such as sexual trafficking, victimization of Native Americans, and various forms of degradation as a consequence of unaffordable housing, hunger, and gender and racial discrimination.
The editors, William Armaline, Davita Glasberg and Bandana Purkayastha, have, in many respects, continued the work associated with the notion of “sociology without borders” that has been promoted over the years by Judith Blau, Alberto Moncada, and associates. Here, Blau has written an excellent foreword explaining both the rise of the sociology of human rights and its intellectual requirements. At the outset we may note that human rights research has been dominated by political science, history, and philosophy. For Blau, sociology has something valuable to add: namely, sociologists are well trained to understand how “human rights are embedded in neighborhoods, communities, culture, communication, and society” (p. x). Rights research in professional sociology has emerged in response to globalization, specifically to the effects of intensive economic globalization on housing issues, migration, discrimination, and inequality. Finally she notes that sociology needs to “discover ethics . . . through recognition of others” (p. xi). To a large degree, the diverse chapters of this edition live up to her exacting standards about relevance, importance, coverage, and ethical awareness.
In the space of a short review, it is not possible to discuss every chapter. I shall therefore concentrate primarily on a theoretical problem that is common to virtually all of the chapters in this collection, namely a persistent confusion between citizenship rights and human rights. The former refer to the rights enjoyed by individuals who have a legal claim on entitlements within a sovereign nation state. By contrast, human rights are rights enjoyed by persons qua human beings. Is this just an academic quibble? I do not think so, since citizenship rights are exclusive and depend on a combination of rights and duties. They can be called “contributory rights.” Human rights are inclusive and do not necessarily stipulate any duties. Citizens pay taxes, contribute to the maintenance of states, and are beneficiaries of resources. The only thing these two systems of rights have in common is that, short of world government, both are enforced by states; at the same time, states are typically the offending institutions when it comes to the abuse of human rights.
Many chapters in this volume slip uncomfortably between these two discourses. Why does this matter? One answer is that if citizenship rights were fully in place in the United States, there would be little or no systematic injustice in our backyard. Historically weak citizenship rights are a function of “American exceptionalism,” especially individualism, a history of slavery, privatization, political dynasties, and federal fragmentation. This difference between the two orders of rights was fully recognized by Judith Shklar, who was one of the very few American scholars to write specifically about American citizenship. Human rights, therefore, tend to be invoked when all else has failed, and in this sense they are rights of last resort, or in John Rawls’ terminology, “urgent rights.”
Citizenship is recognized off and on throughout this volume. One chapter by Katie Acosta is specifically about sexual citizenship. There is also an excellent discussion by Shweta Majumdar Adur, who, in her study of the experience of guest workers, poses the basic question “do human rights endure across nation-state boundaries?” and in so doing pinpoints the conundrum of the tangled relationships between states, citizens, and the globalization of labor markets. She notes that “In the absence of citizenship entitlements in the host countries, there is little that the governments of the host countries are obligated to do for them. Plus, once guest workers have voluntarily left the jurisdiction of the countries where they have citizenship rights there is also little that the governments of these countries are required to do for them” (p. 163). There’s the rub, so to speak.
There is, finally, another way in which we can express this dilemma: by asking, given the importance of human rights as the rights of last resort, who or what will enforce them? Second, who or what will pay for these rights to security, health, employment, education, and freedom from slavery? Generally, only states can do the enforcing, and to do so they need to raise taxes; but in a global, neoliberal environment, raising taxes has become deeply politically unpopular. Here is the abiding question as to why citizens vote and generally act against their own interests. However, as this volume amply demonstrates, there is an emerging global network of NGOs, alongside such institutions as the International Criminal Court, that is beginning to do the work of enforcement and provision—but there is a long way to go.
In conclusion, this is an excellent and timely collection that does justice to Blau’s view that sociologists have an important contribution to make to the study of human rights, especially at the meso-level rather than the state level. Its theoretical weakness is shared by the majority of recent sociological contributions to this field precisely because the problematic relationship between human and citizenship rights is intractable. Do these essays fruitfully address ethical issues? They can all be said to promote a sociology of care as a precondition of the study of human rights. In this regard, we might conclude that caring comes before resisting.