The Colonialism of Human Rights. Colin Samson
Coming From and What Follows …
I would like to think that Orwell’s spirit attaches in some small way to the following chapters linking human rights to colonialism. While what follows is not autobiographical or ethnographic, it is connected to my animation onto these pages. A large part of this emerges from experiences, both in my personal life and working with indigenous peoples, and in seeing at first hand the many futilities of claiming rights within alien systems of law that perpetually situate indigenous peoples as petitioners in inferior relationships to the state and other third parties.16 The book also emerges from my work as a teacher, and insight accrues from collaborations with students, texts and sources in university contexts. I have often asked myself whether there can be a dividing line where research somehow legitimates itself by crossing into being impersonal and devoid of the feelings that come from interacting with each other.
But there is no neutral place to stand. As a writer and educator, I feel compelled to comment critically on human rights. As Lydia Morris observes, human rights are mediated by social processes, rather than emanating from primordial ‘natural’ principles.17 This social mediation includes their embedding in – and, I would add, exclusion from – law. Underlined much earlier in Émile Durkheim’s essay on the French Revolution, the distinction between the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a type of sociology and as a historical event is salutary.18 The context-laden human authorship of the Declaration and, by extension, other statements of human rights have often been assumed to be clear propositions about the characteristics of a society human rights, springing from certain elemental sources. They have, therefore, become elevated to a type of sociology, but without context. Earlier, Jeremy Bentham had, almost line by line, debunked the French Declaration of Rights. Calling it ‘nonsense upon stilts’, Bentham showed that the Declaration amounted to a number of assertions about rights which were both metaphysical in terms of their origins, and meaningless in terms of their realization since they lacked any concrete context.19 Following Durkheim and Bentham, iterations of human rights should be situated as social constructions, and we could add that the study of human rights needs to include prominently the differentiation of rights, rightlessness and states of exception.
My bias then is towards seeing human rights sociologically, but I believe that singular devotion to any academic discipline and the associated exploration of subjects through a prism called ‘the literature’ is limiting. Encasing one’s ideas within professionally approved formats curtails the imaginative possibilities inherent in the plurality of methods, genres and sources. This means that, whereas I cite a wide array of writings, I do not systematically trek through standard, popular or academic opinions pertinent to the subjects I cover in this book. While a vast number of scholars are mentioned, I am reluctant to fatigue readers with reviews, or debates with authors whose perspectives might agree or differ from mine. What follows is also not the product of specialism. Readers seeking more detail on some of the historical and contemporary issues discussed here will need to consult specialist works.
Consequently, this book is about the connections between elements of colonialism in particular places and times and human rights. I consider the intersections of colonialism and human rights not just through their empirical, theoretical and, importantly, political dimensions, which are manifold, but also through the lenses of art, literature, film and creative non-fiction. Visual, literary and imaginative works can help us understand sociological processes and historical events in more visceral ways. While I am aware that I write as a social scientist, creative works provide subtlety, perspective and immediacy often lacking in purely expository writings, concerned as they are with argument, theory and methodology. Imaginative works, although only appearing in cameos, are imperative to the writing of essays.
Chapter 1, ‘Non-universal Human Rights and Rightlessness’, introduces the contexts for the major concerns of the book. Here, I discuss the multiple articulations of differential human rights occurring through racial, rather than social, contracts and internal civic stratification of populations. I identify various practices that produced categories of people who, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, lacked the right to have rights. Given the histories and ongoing consequences of colonialism and slavery, rightlessness and variegated human rights, it is suggested, are crucial arenas for study.
One of the reasons prompting such study is the recent interest in colonialism, apparent in concerns among activists, artists, scholars and journalists over public memorials, museums and cultural forms linked to colonialism and slavery. Chapter 2, ‘The Uneasy Present of Colonialism’, looks at these contemporary efforts to know about the activities of colonial and slave states, but also how they are rebuffed by governments concealing records and trying to shape knowledge of history. The chapter also considers the tenuous link between democracy and human rights, both inside Western democracies and in former colonized states that have retained colonial laws inimical to human rights. Finally, the chapter considers the reactions of colonized peoples to articulations of Western virtue by invoking Frantz Fanon’s ‘muscular lockjaw’, and speculates that the acts of colonizing itself produced a kind of amoral sensibility that survives in the current selective attention to human rights.
I proceed by examining several concrete examples that link colonizing and human rights. These bias heavily towards discussions of the United States and France, partly because these are the states whose various revolutionary declarations are seen to have operationalized Enlightenment notions of the ‘rights of man’ in laws and constitutions.19 Discussions involve three broad categories of colonial practice. These will be considered not as the snapshots or discrete contemporary episodes so common to legal human rights focuses, but as enduring violations with past and contemporary manifestations in Western countries. The forced extraction of labour, colonial occupation and assimilation programmes, and expropriation of land will be considered. While it is true that human rights offences occur everywhere and many of them are not connected to colonialism or Western powers but to local forces, histories and exertions of power, these will not be a specific concern of this book. Likewise, space does not permit analysing all the human rights violations occurring in contexts of inequality, corruption, violence and autocracy which may be directly related to Western foreign policies and blowback from military invasions that have distinct colonial dimensions.
I understand colonized peoples as divided into various groups that were subject to one form of colonization or another. Memberships sometimes overlap, but principally my focus is on: (1) the Afro-descended peoples of the Americas and the larger Black Diaspora whose ancestors were captured, bought and transported from Africa as slaves from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries; (2) those who came under formal European colonial rule in Africa and Asia during the occupation of their lands, including the North African and Middle Eastern territories within the Mandatory system implemented after World War I to divide up the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France; (3) indigenous peoples of the Americas, whose lands have been appropriated, and over whom an external European-style state authority has been imposed. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will roughly correspond to these divisions.
Although not formally within the remit of this book, another category consists of those under legal, military and economic occupation who are subject to similarly differential, largely inferior, rights from those who form part of the occupying society. This would prominently include Israel, where a chiefly settler Jewish population supplanted a pre-existing Palestinian Arab population, and whose Basic Laws assert that it is a Jewish and democratic state. This gives primacy of citizenship rights to one ethno-religious group. In 2018, this was embedded further by making self-determination a unique power of Jewish people. In a policy of ‘juridical erasure’ deriving originally from exceptions within the British Mandate,20 Palestinians have no such rights. Additionally, Israel imposes military occupation and martial law over the Occupied Palestinian West Bank and, to a lesser extent, Gaza, territories which are to be the basis for a future Palestinian state. Large parts of the West Bank have been annexed for Jewish-only settlements. The 2018 addition to the Basic Laws formalize