Third World Quarterly

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Struggles, over rights: humanism, ethical

dispossession and resistance

Lara Montesinos Coleman

To cite this article: Lara Montesinos Coleman (2015) Struggles, over rights: humanism,
ethical dispossession and resistance, Third World Quarterly, 36:6, 1060-1075, DOI:
10.1080/01436597.2015.1047193

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1047193

Published online: 02 Jul 2015.

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Third World Quarterly, 2015
Vol. 36, No. 6, 1060–1075, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1047193

Struggles, over rights: humanism,

ethical dispossession and resistance
Lara Montesinos Coleman*
Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

What should we make of appeals to human rights in the context of

struggles against dispossession or armed repression? After the ‘death
of man’ as transcendent ground of all right, critics have highlighted
the disciplinary effects and absolutist tendencies of human rights dis-
course. However, attempts have been made to ‘rescue’ human rights
– and wider forms of humanistic advocacy – as an immanent, self-
grounding ethical practice. Drawing on analysis of struggles over
natural resource extraction and indigenous rights in Latin America,
this paper argues that such accounts mirror the assumptions of a pre-
dominant mode of international humanitarian activism. By reifying
humanistic ideals, without sufficient attention to the effects of prac-
tices within which rights are invoked, both obscure entanglements
between humanist interventions and logics of dispossession. This is
particularly significant at the current juncture. Through these interven-
tions rights have been absorbed into a neoliberal regime of truth in
which the subjects of rights are interpellated as parties to private con-
tract, such that rights themselves become tools of exception. Taking
struggle as a starting point, by contrast, highlights not only the inde-
terminacy of rights but also the potential of human rights discourse to
disrupt these logics. Through ethnographic engagement with ‘people’s
hearings’ into ‘Multinational Corporations and Crimes against
Humanity’ in Colombia, I revisit the questions of ‘the human’ and
‘rights’ and propose a more dialectical approach to the relation
between normative principle and immanent critique.
Keywords: rights; humanism; ethics; resistance; neoliberalism;
Foucault

The Colombian lawyer and sociologist Eduardo Umaña Luna once described
human rights as the ‘opium of the people’.1 The apparently contradictory sub-
text of this assessment – that in 1998 Umaña’s own son was killed by state-
linked paramilitaries because of his work as a prominent defender of human
rights – captures tensions at the heart of human rights discourse. Human rights
are the historical product of a ‘questionable instantiation of the humane’,2 in the

*Email: l.coleman@sussex.ac.uk

© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

 Third World Quarterly 1061

form of the metaphysics of a sovereign subject whose very construction implies

the abjection of others. After the ‘death of man’ as transcendent ground of all
right, are human rights advocates operating under the sedative effects of a delu-
sion? Do appeals to human rights simply blind us to the cultural specificity and
normalising power of ‘the human’? Indeed, given the travesties of human rights
in practice, should human rights discourse incite only scepticism? Why – in the
words of Amnesty International – ‘protect the human’? Why defend ‘human
rights’ at all?
Such questions might appear mean-spirited in the light of self-sacrificing
attempts to defend others. The killing of Umaña’s son – and of many thousands
more human rights defenders in Colombia alone – also testifies to the subversive
potentialities of appeals to rights. It is perhaps fitting, then, that ‘anti-humanist’
scholars have come to the defence of human rights, framing human rights cul-
ture as a set of self-grounding ethical practices. According to this line of argu-
ment, the absence of a transcendent ground of rights does not make the defence
of others any less normatively compelling. This is not to say that appeals to
human rights are never cynical. The point is that the ethical core of humanistic
advocacy needs to be taken seriously. We cannot derive our commitments from
a secure ground outside of actual historical practices; but we can nonetheless
find a normative starting point within history and the contingencies of political
practice.
In what follows I interrogate ‘ethical’, ‘anti-humanist’ renderings of human
rights. Ethical accounts are significant, I argue, not because they succeed in
‘rescuing’ human rights, but because of how they disconnect rights talk from
actual contexts of struggle. The result is a tendency to assess practice with
regard to abstract ideals, with insufficient attention to logics of practices invok-
ing rights. Such concerns are, I argue, particularly pertinent at the current junc-
ture. Although discourses of rights have long been used to rationalise
dispossession and colonial oppression, neoliberal rationality has incorporated
dispossession into the allocation of rights themselves. Ethical assessments of
human rights, I will argue, inhibit critique of the ‘ethical’ logics of contempo-
rary dispossession. They reiterate the assumptions of attempts to defend others,
which – by grounding their efforts in abstract humanistic ideals – occlude their
own entanglement within the dispossession they seek to oppose. These reflec-
tions are the product of extensive ethnographic research in the form of over a
decade working with Colombian social organisations as a researcher, translator
and ‘international human rights accompanier’ (a sort of unarmed bodyguard to
activists and communities under threat).3 While I draw upon this engagement –
supplemented by discussion of others’ studies on Guatemala – in the service of
a theoretical argument, it is nonetheless an argument with important political
implications.
My aim, however, is not to call for the abandonment of efforts to find a
normative starting point within practice or to succumb to absolutist notions of
‘the human’. Nor is it to suggest that human rights are merely normalising or
disciplinary. Notions of ‘the human’ and of ‘rights’ are themselves sites of
struggle, empty outside of the specific practices in which political ideals are
invoked. In the final section I reassess the disruptive potential of human rights
through my own participation in a ‘people’s tribunal’ on ‘Multinational
1062 L.M. Coleman

Corporations and Crimes against Humanity’ in Colombia and wider struggles

framed in defence of ‘life’. Through attention to the (re)making of normative
visions in struggle, I revisit questions of ‘the human’ and ‘rights’, proposing a
more dialectical approach to normative principle and immanent critique.

(Mere) ethics
It is commonplace to note that many anti-humanist philosophers have been
vocal defenders of ‘human rights’. Neither acknowledgement of the historically
contingent nature of human rights discourse nor recognition of its potentially
absolutist tendencies has prevented passionate defence of actual human beings –
much to the annoyance of humanists like Jürgen Habermas, who considered
stable normative grounds to be necessary for evaluative judgements about politi-
cal action. Michel Foucault was a particular target of this disquiet.4 Foucault,
‘walks like a social constructivist’ with his emphasis on systems of knowledge
as the product of power relations but nonetheless ‘talks like a normative
philosopher’.5 Yet Foucault approached normativity quite differently. For
Foucault, although norms are contingent effects of historical ‘regimes of truth’,
the very impossibility of a stable ground for political practice is itself the basis
of a certain freedom. This is not an originary freedom definitive of ‘humanity’
but a freedom that we shape ourselves as we test the limits of the present, and
find possibilities of being otherwise.6
Foucault did not, however, delineate a more substantive ground for political
commitment – an apparent difficultly that has led some to seek to excavate one
from within his work. An influential example is David Campbell’s attempt to
re-politicise independent humanitarianism. Campbell finds within Foucault’s
notion of freedom a particular conception of what it is to be human. Although
freedom exists only within historically specific configurations of power and
resistance, it is the hinge point of struggles for rights – indeed of ethics and
critical thought in general. Resistance to power is integral to life and to the
ways we make ourselves as subjects, meaning that it cannot be assessed in rela-
tion to a ready-made moral architecture. Still less should our political bonds be
assessed in accordance with the minimal humanism and metaphysics of subjec-
tivity underpinning technocratic approaches to humanitarianism as a politically
neutral practice. Campbell suggests that we should assess interventions to pro-
tect and defend others in terms of an ‘anti-humanist economy of humanity’
embodied in a commitment to ‘life’, which explicitly avoids the authoritarian
move of imputing a logic to others. For Campbell we cannot legislate for poli-
tics before its materialisation, but such commitments nonetheless respond to an
imperative to defend alterity, and to oppose power relations that oppress, repress
or eradicate difference.7
Campbell adeptly preserves ethical universalism without recourse to any
foundational view of humanity or right. The difficulty, however, is that he offers
scant means of evaluating actual or potential practices of resistance other than in
relation to the values or commitments they embody. If efforts to defend life or
alterity are undertaken in the spirit of solidarity, they are automatically opposi-
tional, critical, ethical. Yet what makes Campbell’s argument so significant is
that it mirrors the assumptions often displayed by humanitarian activists them-
selves. The benefits of intervention are assessed in relation to values, to good
 Third World Quarterly 1063

intentions, to a desire to rescue or improve the lives of others. The struggles of

others are forcibly inserted into an ethical matrix of intelligibility – read as
being ‘for’ the abstract values that those from outside also seek to promote. The
problem can be illustrated with a story of humanistic advocacy in practice.
Between 2007 and 2008 I worked in Colombia with a small NGO estab-
lished by peasant leaders forcibly displaced from around BP’s oilfields. In the
mid-1990s local organisations had begun to protest against the ecological
devastation and armed repression visited on the population by the oil industry.
British NGOs were quick to act on their behalf. Concerned to protect the lives
and livelihoods of the population around the oilfields, they commenced a dia-
logue with BP. They visited the region, wrote reports, and made a series of
recommendations about how BP should protect human rights. The initiatives
were an apparent success. BP was one of the first corporations to recognise
human rights as a matter of concern for business, becoming one of the first
signatories of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights for the
extractive sector. However, as I have argued elsewhere, corporate recognition of
human rights has a very specific logic: rights are assigned only to subjects com-
prehended within the terms of existing commodity chains (the ‘stakeholder’ or
the ‘worker’). The very recognition of human rights was premised upon the
practices of accumulation – and consequent dispossession – that the peasants
contested. Those absent from this exclusionary recognition of rights, who could
or would not be interpellated as docile subjects, continued to be killed with
impunity.8
Colombian activists considered the British NGOs’ intervention part and par-
cel of a process of annihilation of social organisations, complementary to the
armed repression. Yet at play here was not simply co-optation. The NGOs were
not loath to criticise BP. Their mistake was their commitment to abstract values,
without interrogating the potential interactions between ‘human rights’ and
wider logics of dispossession which the peasant organisations had identified as
incommensurable with rights. For the peasant organisations rights were claimed
not as abstract values, but strategically, to highlight contradictions between
rights enshrined in the constitution and an economic model that negated those
rights.9 For the NGOs, as one participant in the dialogue subsequently reflected,
what was missing ‘was consideration of how corporations were extracting
wealth from Colombia’.10 Rights were taken up as if they were positive values
to be respected by the oil companies. They sought to support the peasants in a
struggle for ‘rights’, without attention to how rights might be conferred upon
subjects in ways that embodied a ‘differential allocation of humanness’ – to
borrow Athena Athanasiou’s evocative phrase.11
By the same token, absent from Campbell’s account is any sense of the
relations between the espousal of abstract values – such as a commitment to
‘life’ – and the actual contexts in which attempts to enact such commitments
play out, or to the logics of practices intended to defend others. This reading of
Foucault’s late engagement with human rights is not, however, the only register
of Foucault’s ‘critical (yet ambivalent)’ provocations regarding rights.12 Foucault
also invites us to put our concepts, including ideals (even those ideals derived
from a reading of Foucault’s own onto-political comments, as per Campbell),
‘through the grid of practices’, to ask what we might make of events and
1064 L.M. Coleman

practices organised around those concepts – and what are their effects.13 For
concepts themselves are in struggle. Rights are historical and political artefacts,
made and unmade as ‘implement-effects’ of struggle.14 The NGO intervention
in Colombia also indicates the importance of reasoning through attention to
struggles over rights, with an eye to the logics of practices in which rights are
invoked. We need to ask how life, alterity, humanity or rights are codified
within those practices, to consider the normative and normalising terms upon
which humanness is recognised. For even the most well-intended ascription of
value to others may impute to them a logic that cements their disposability.
En route to discussion of other struggles organised around humanistic values,
we might consider the rejoinder that this is too hasty a dismissal of an imma-
nent, self-grounding ethics. It might be argued that corporate recognition of
human rights – hitherto unprecedented – was a step forward, in that it at least
served to expand ethical horizons previously foreclosed. Perhaps we should take
a more open-ended approach to the effects of such interventions. Tom Osborne
has suggested that what matters is the ethical innovation performed through the
practices of human rights advocates.15 As with Campbell, we find here a sort of
anti-humanist economy of humanity: universal in aspiration, but not grounded in
foundational definitions of humanity or power. However, in Osborne’s framing,
global human rights culture embodies an immanent, performative and expansive
set of ethical practices, generating recognition of rights as ideals to which
humans can aspire (a claim invoking Claude Lefort’s notion of democracy as
inherently malleable and elastic, such that rights once excluded – such as labour
rights or women’s rights – can be tested and accepted).16 What is achieved
through the work of Amnesty International on cases of human rights violation,
for example, is the recognition of people simply qua people. The definition of
victim and perpetrator enables a restoration of the humanity of victims otherwise
forgotten – in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, ‘the recognition of each person in his or
her place’.17 So, too, the disclosure enacted through truth commissions in transi-
tional states serves to affirm a public domain of universal rights, effecting a sort
of contract that atrocities such as those in South Africa, Chile or El Salvador
‘cannot happen again’.18.
Once again, however, this ethical framing relies upon speculative engage-
ment with the practices of human rights advocates. Here, too, it is important to
look more closely at the logics of these practices, in other words at who counts
as human, how ‘proper places’ are recognised. Such concerns are no less perti-
nent to understanding how recognition is conferred upon past abuses through
the pursuit of truth. Take, for example, the Historical Clarification Commission
established in Guatemala as part of one of the first peace processes shaped by
the UN Agenda for Peace. The Commission found the military guilty of the
genocide of indigenous peoples in four regions of the country.19 Many of the
victims of this campaign of massacres, forced displacement and torture were
also members of grassroots social movements and/or leftist guerrilla forces. Yet
the lives and struggles of the dead cannot be told within standard narratives of
violations of the mere ‘humanity’ of victims, which tends to represent victims
as ‘silent sufferers’.20 This erasure of real lives, of actual struggles, and of the
use of armed violence in neutralising dissent, preserves memory so as to simul-
taneously enact a process of forgetting – both of others in the past and of
 Third World Quarterly 1065

alternatives imagined for the future. Recalling Jacques Derrida’s comments upon
the need to live with ghosts, to engage with what is not, and upon the impossi-
bility of a notion of justice that ‘does not recognize in principle the respect for
those others who are no longer there or for those other others who are not yet
there’,21 we might rethink the affirmation of rights through the pursuit of truth.
The (mis)recognition of the (mere) humanity of victims serves to exorcise ghosts
from a present in which rights are now affirmed as presence.
The significance of this is apparent if we consider how pursuit of truth about
the past is interwoven with wider recognition of rights as values in the context
of ‘post-conflict’ transitions. Guatemala is an instructive example of the effects
of human rights as the signature tune of transitions to ‘peace’ over past decades.
The emphasis on rights in the peace process gave rise to an upsurge of indige-
nous struggles and to popular participation in a Civil Society Assembly set up
to make proposals for the peace accords. These proposals included recognition
of collective territorial rights for indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, the rights that
made it into the peace agreement – and even more so into the Constitutional
Reforms which followed – were those broadly commensurate with neoliberal
economic policies – individual political rights, for example.22 Meanwhile,
reforms of law, such as the 1997 Mining Code, served to undermine legal
recognition of economic, social and cultural rights by protecting the interests of
foreign and domestic companies over those of local populations and delegating
to companies responsibility for social rights in their areas of operation.23 Even
political rights have continued to have limited purchase in practice. In a pattern
characteristic of truth commissions elsewhere, attempts to prosecute those
accused of massacres, forced disappearances and other violations were hampered
by legal provisions for amnesty. Meanwhile, threats, torture and killings – sup-
posedly consigned to the ‘never again’ through the recognition of rights – have
continued where the economic model has been contested or an end to impunity
sought.24
I am not suggesting that we should judge the productivity of human rights
discourse with regard to successes in achieving positive rights. For this recogni-
tion of rights has not meant nothing: it is not simply that rights are declared as
ideals but trumped by the dictates of neoliberal economic policies. For example,
restrictive visions of rights in Guatemala have not precluded ratification of
International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and
Tribal Peoples or an emphasis on multiculturalism (albeit weaker than elsewhere
in Latin America). Meanwhile, the exclusion of indigenous territorial rights from
legal recognition has gone alongside use of World Bank funds for what Charles
Hale calls ‘market-driven land reform’. This has involved paying-off coffee-
farming oligarchs, whose lands were occupied and claimed by indigenous peo-
ples, as part of a reconfiguration of the governance of ‘empty spaces’ no longer
of use to capital.25 The recognition of rights has, in a sense, been expansionary.
Yet, here too, we have to delve deeper into the logics of the practices through
which rights are recognised. This respect for indigenous alterity has not only
coexisted with, but actually facilitated, economic policies destructive of indige-
nous life chances.26
Elsewhere, land can be readily commoditised and concessions handed to
corporations in processes that discard both ILO 169 and World Bank rules
1066 L.M. Coleman

regarding obligations to consult indigenous peoples about development.27 Like

corporate recognition of the rights of ‘stakeholders’, this privately grounded
extension of rights to indigenous peoples operates according to what Elizabeth
Povinelli might call a ‘cunning recognition’ of difference.28 Recognition here is
premised upon dispossession of indigenous peoples (although in this case the
dispossession occurs elsewhere). It involves quite literally assigning people to
‘proper places’ consistent with economic rationality, while simultaneously insert-
ing indigenous demands for autonomy and their related contestation of private
property within ‘an intelligible, predictable and market-friendly grid of property
rights’.29 Even expansionary articulations of rights can serve to fence-in the
holders of those rights at sites of violation,30 because of how rights are affirmed
as present, how subjects of rights are defined and recognised.
These examples of human rights in practice indicate that exclusion and dis-
possession can be written into the recognition of rights. The point is not simply
that rights exclude those falling outside their scope, but that dispossession can
be cemented through the very recognition of rights, by fixing subjects in place
symbolically (such as in the case of corporate ‘stakeholders’), or literally (as
with indigenous populations consigned to ‘empty spaces’). Ethical accounts end
up with no means of assessing humanistic practices, or the recognition and
expansion of rights, beyond the values and ideals produced – or pursued –
within those practices. They enact a naturalistic fallacy, in which ‘ought’ is
derived from an ‘is’ whose justice is self-evident. Rather than starting with an
immanent ethics, we need to consider the norms of intelligibility through which
ethics is made a concrete presence in the practices of human rights advocates.
We must consider how possibilities of recognition are shaped through – or
against - wider relations of power. The subject of given rights is always haunted
by the dissident, the abject, the disappeared – by those who remain unrecognis-
able. As I will now discuss, it is the very indeterminacy of ‘the human’, of
‘rights’ – and of related notions such as ‘life’ – which enables humanity to be
conferred in injurious ways. This indeterminacy likewise lies at the heart of the
subversive potential of rights. Herein lies the dual potentiality of human rights.
It is this very indeterminacy which renders rights not only means of exclusion,
but also potent resources for contesting injurious modes of recognition and
allocations of proper places. ‘The human’, after all, ‘has no “proper” place to
take outside of social situatedness and allocation, including exposure to the
possibility of being undone’.31

The indeterminate ‘human’

Humanistic ideals have long been applied to the exclusion of those deemed not
to conform to them. The ‘differential allocation of humanness’ is not new. Colo-
nial violence, for example, was rationalised in part on the basis that colonised
populations did not conform to the standards of natural law.32 So, too, the legal
recognition of citizenship rights has not only been emancipatory and expansive
in the way Lefort, for example, emphasised but has also facilitated logics of clo-
sure.33 The ‘rights of man and citizen’ in the classical declarations of the 18th
century harboured an aporia from the start. ‘Man’ was only ever an absent pres-
ence who bequeathed his rights to those constituted as citizens, on the basis that
the collective will of a sovereign people was the ground of all legislative power.
 Third World Quarterly 1067

Natural rights that had been invoked as limitations on sovereign power became
the basis of government’s boundless power to act in the name of the people,34
while the very formulation of universal rights served to ‘mask, by depoliticizing,
the social power of institutions such as private property and the family’.35 By
establishing the life of the population as the basis of state power, rights were
readily entangled within modes of governmental intervention geared toward the
population as a whole. Albeit in diverse ways and to different degrees, these
were processes determined less by the inalienable rights of individuals than by
political-economic reason.36 By the mid-19th century natural right had tended to
give way to legal positivism, utilitarian government and the organisation of mass
populations for exploitation.37 Rights were an anaesthetising presence at the
birth of biopolitics.
Nevertheless, none of this has been without contradictions and struggles. At
the heart of the tensions inherent within humanistic discourse is the question of
the subject of rights. For, paradoxically, in order to be a subject of ‘human
rights’, one must be more than mere, abstract ‘human’ – as critiques as far flung
as those of Burke and Marx – and more recently of Arendt, Lyotard, Agamben
and Rancière – have highlighted. The impossibility of ‘merely human’ rights,
the fact that rights must always mediate between abstract humanity and the
matrices of intelligibility within which humanness is conferred, invests human
rights with a contradictory potential. On the one hand, since abstract ideals
mean little in themselves, rights are readily ‘fixed’ to certain sorts of subjects
deemed eligible for inclusion or protection. As Marx was quick to note, the very
emptiness of the abstract and universal subject of rights was a cipher for a
specific subject – the (male, white) property-owner.38 On the other hand, the
subject of rights is inescapably fluid and unstable precisely because of the gap
between the eternal, abstract human and the range of possible claims to rights
(or to wider humanistic ideals such as ‘life’ or ‘alterity’). As Jacques Rancière
has underscored, there is an inherent openness and disputability to political
ideals, as well as to names such as ‘the human’ or ‘the citizen’. Rather than
designating actual bodies or actually existing subjects, these are empty signifiers
or, in Rancière’s formulation, ‘litigious’ terms which open up disputes about
who is included in their count.39 In other words, it is the very gap between the
abstract human and possible subjects of rights that makes it possible to insert ‘a
division…in common sense’,40 to unravel the injurious interpellations through
which humanness is allocated. If Lefort was correct that Marx missed the open-
ness of rights, what Lefort himself missed were precisely these contradictions.
Indeed, we can say that – rather than ‘filling’ an endlessly elastic ‘empty space’
at the heart of democracy - rights in effect are the empty space: precisely
because the ‘human’ or ‘citizen’ apparently designated as their subject is only
ever an empty name.
The reduction of human rights to abstract values and ideals obscures the
aporetic formulation of rights and glosses over the gaps between right and fact,
between the indeterminate ‘human’ and those who can be recognised in their
proper place. By starting with ideals – or with the production and recognition of
ideals – ethical accounts of the self-grounding nature of human rights culture
dissolve these distinctions. With the triumph of human rights on the world stage
in the post-cold war years, the ideal of rights has become indistinguishable from
1068 L.M. Coleman

the empirical facts of a nexus of interventions – configured around ‘peace build-

ing’, ‘corporate responsibility’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘sustainable development’
– carried out by NGOs, international institutions and even corporations in the
service of ‘humanity’.41 Yet at play in this apparent expansion of ethical hori-
zons is an ethics that Rancière himself would equate with ‘police’. ‘Ethics’ in
this rendering does not imply moral judgements on reality, but the subsumption
of norms to the way of life of a community, with conflict reduced to the
negotiation of a balance of interests between parts of the population, each in
their allocated place.42 Ethics leaves dominant regimes of recognisability
untouched, injurious allocations of humanness unchallenged. It affirms an order
of things which constrains all action by its apparent self-evidence, a present
from which ghosts – in Derrida’s terms – are absent.
In making this point, I do not adopt a ‘Rancierian’ understanding of politics.
Rancière’s own concepts emerged from specific dissatisfaction with the pacified
consensus of much European politics in the 1990s. The result is an analysis that
is not only logocentric (limiting politics to the speaking subject), but also a
state-centric – and implicitly Eurocentric – separation of the international from
the national domain. Rancière’s focus on the European managerial state leads
him to present a singular counterpart to the reign of ethics on the international
stage. This is a ‘humanitarian police’, wherein (Western, state) action on behalf
of the rights of ‘victims’ overseas has been a mere ‘detour’ en route to rights
being rendered inoperative through humanitarian warfare and counter-terrorism
operations.43 Starting elsewhere, with the fluid relations between global config-
urations of power and situated humanistic interventions, leads me to a different
argument. Rather than being inoperative, the expansion of human rights is alive
and kicking. Yet, disconnected from actual contexts of struggle, rights are read-
ily ascribed in ways that consolidate disposability. The emptiness of rights is
eclipsed by the self-evidence of ethical discourse.

Ethical dispossession
The apparent paradoxes at play in the fact that the expansionary recognition of
human rights has coincided with neoliberal economic restructuring and with
what David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ are well-rehearsed.44
However, rather than being a mere façade, I have argued elsewhere that the
expansive recognition of rights has been integrated into the very means of clos-
ing the gaps between political norms and the ‘facts’ of the market.45 To make
sense of this, consider how dispossession plays out through law. Boaventura
Santos has written of an emergent regime of ‘neoliberal contractualisation’,
according to which citizenship rights are increasingly replaced by private con-
tracts (for example between service providers and users of once-public services,
or the market-oriented contract law used for transnational business).46 These
have proliferated alongside previous legal forms, leading to an increasingly
complex intersection of legality and illegality.47
Discourses of human rights tend to be held to run counter to neoliberal
forms of contract. However, what is revealed in the examples above is the
incorporation of rights into neoliberal contractualisation, the reduction of rights
to precarious and private contract. For example, rights are reduced to a
 Third World Quarterly 1069

voluntary contract between companies and ‘stakeholders’ unavoidably exposed

to corporate profit-making operations. These rights are, moreover, made neces-
sary not by political principle but on the basis of market necessity.48 Likewise
the rights of indigenous peoples to ‘empty spaces’ are granted through private
agreements (the paying-off of landowners, for example), so as to protect prop-
erty rights in more profitable areas. Foucault once characterised neoliberal
rationality in terms of the role of ‘the market’ as the measure of truth in every
ambit of the social.49 Within the terms of these efforts to promote and extend
rights, rights are bound, comprehended and necessitated in relation to the mar-
ket. It is the economic rationality that defines the very subjects of rights, assigns
people a value and fixes them in place. In the process rights are severed from
notions of citizenship: populations are effectively dispossessed of citizenship
rights through the recognition of human rights.
This is not to offer a romantic valorisation of citizenship rights. Even the most
egalitarian forms of liberal democracy have implied in practice an allocation of
rights according to social functionality, in the context of capitalist, colonial and
hetero-patriarchal social relations. In Latin America, moreover, the liberal demo-
cratic principles upon which independent republics were founded overlay racia-
lised fissures that already ran deep between those included as subjects of rights
and majorities exposed to exception and armed social control.50 Nonetheless, the
various incarnations of liberal democracy have maintained some sort of ‘modest
ethical gap’ between political principle and economic rationality,51 while notions
of generalised citizenship rights had purchase as resources to be drawn upon in
rupturing the suture of right and fact. It is these gaps that are closed by neoliberal
codifications of rights. The subjects of rights are comprehended only in relation to
the truths of the market. The beneficiaries of these apparently expansionary ‘ne-
oliberal rights’ are exposed to precarious and exclusionary forms of inclusion,
their humanity or difference recognised in ways that serve, paradoxically, to
underscore their disposability in accordance with economic necessity. At the same
time, they facilitate disciplinary interventions towards those in struggle who do
not recognise themselves as subjects of precarious, private rights, such as those in
Colombia who refused to recognise themselves as stakeholders in BP’s project
and continued to contest oil-driven ‘development’. These articulations of rights
serve to interpellate us within an ethical present, affirming dispossession as ‘not
here’ or ‘no longer’ while reiterating its logic.
This market-based grammar of rights is recurrent within contemporary
humanistic interventions. It coheres – importantly - with post-Washington
Consensus approaches to development, where social concerns are incorporated
into development agendas in order to improve the functioning of markets. For
instance, the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda makes ‘market forces’ – including
‘social preferences’ that might influence markets – more important to economic
outcomes than ‘mediation through social actors, legal norms or State interven-
tion’.52 This has led Global Union Federations to promote labour rights through
negotiated, private agreements with multinational corporations under the ratio-
nale of improving economic efficiency. Here, too, workers are only subjects of
rights in relation to the market – not in relation to principles of citizenship. This
has resulted in active opposition to Southern unions’ attempts to bring
corporations to justice for human rights abuses.53 For example, US-based
1070 L.M. Coleman

solidarity activists reported that, when a Guatemalan union filed a lawsuit

against Fresh Del Monte Produce, alleging detention and torture of workers, the
International Union of Food, Agriculture, Restaurant, Catering and Allied Work-
ers (IUF) actively opposed the case on the basis that an agreement signed
between the IUF and Del Monte had waived the IUF-affiliated union’s right to
bring the lawsuit. So too, when the Colombian Foodworkers’ union launched a
civil action against the Coca-Cola Company alleging complicity in the murder
of union leaders, the IUF spearheaded an international campaign against them.54
This post-Washington development rationale has also been key to so-called lib-
eral peace building. Indeed, despite claims that dominant approaches to peace
building are ‘liberal’, there is something characteristically neoliberal about these
processes: not just in economic terms but with regard to configurations of rights,
as the case of Guatemala exposed.

Struggles over rights

There is much at stake in attempts to rescue human rights culture as immanent,
ethical practice. Ethical anti-humanisms reiterate the core assumptions of these
‘ethical’ modes of dispossession. For both sorts of approaches to rights, practice
is assessed in relation to abstract values and ideals. By framing practice as self-
grounding with regard to commitments enacted or ideals performed, ethical
accounts occlude the emptiness of political ideals. If human rights culture has
become handmaiden to dispossession, it is precisely because of a failure to pay
attention to the logics of the practices through which rights are invoked. Once
reified, disconnected from actual struggles, rights are readily ascribed to subjects
in ways that consolidate their disposability.
Yet struggles over rights do not end with ethical dispossession. If the empti-
ness of notions of ‘the human’ and ‘rights’ also enables their strategic use to
disrupt these injurious modes of recognition, then perhaps we should look to
struggles against dispossession for normative visions displaying a more critical
attitude towards the present and its limits. In Colombia, for example, recognition
of the rights of ‘stakeholders’ or ‘workers’ gave rise to further struggles in
which rights were effectively thrown back at corporations. Between 2006 and
2008 I was involved as a researcher and translator in the preparation of the Peo-
ple’s Permanent Tribunal (PPT) Colombia Session into Multinational Corpora-
tions and Crimes against Humanity, convened by a network of ‘grassroots’
organisations and human rights NGOs. The Tribunal took place in the context
of ongoing ecological destruction and killings around BP’s oilfields, continued
labour casualisation and violence against Coca-Cola workers, and numerous
other allegations implicating multinational companies – as well as state-linked
paramilitaries and the armed forces – in massacres, selective killings and forced
displacement of communities occupying lands targeted for natural resource
extraction or agro-industrial megaprojects.55 The PPT is an international
‘alternative justice’ mechanism designed predominantly to put pressure on state
authorities where crimes remain in systematic impunity, by drawing international
attention to the situation.56 The Colombia Session comprised a series of six
two-day hearings. At each hearing expert judges received extensively
documented evidence relating to specific cases and heard numerous testimonies
 Third World Quarterly 1071

from witnesses. At the end of each hearing a verdict was delivered according to
the provisions of national and international human rights law.
The struggle against impunity waged through the hearings was not only an
attempt to confine such abuses to the past. It also served to preserve memory of
the past within the present, to highlight contradictions between the recognition
of rights and the disposability assigned to the population in real life, and thus to
mount a challenge to that made present through the ethical dispossessions of
corporate responsibility and market-driven labour rights. If ‘human rights’ were
to be recognised by the state and corporations, then the facts of this recognition
were to be judged – not only according to juridical standards of rights but also
by means of a judgement irreducible to law and rights, offered under the eyes
of those no longer present. Here, the victims of ‘crimes against humanity’ were
not ‘mere victims’, still less were they subject to the interpellations of ethical
dispossession: they were named explicitly as humans rendered abject by the eco-
nomic model itself – survivors claimed rights in the company of the dead, with
abuses situated in stories of lives and struggles told by friends, parents, children,
compañeros.
Thus verdicts on past abuses were explicitly connected to visions of another
future. Each hearing was followed by a day in which the proposals of trade
unionists were discussed alongside those of peasants and indigenous activists.
Even in the hearings themselves the indeterminacy of the ‘humanity’ that was
the victim of corporate crimes also created space to extend minimalist notions
of the human through an expanded definition of ‘crimes against humanity’. As
well as considering extensive evidence of corporate responsibility for massacres,
torture and selective killings, the hearings also incorporated violations of social,
economic and cultural rights into this expanded definition. Likewise, under the
influence of indigenous cosmo-visions (which emphasise the organic unity of
humans and nature), ‘crimes against humanity’ were presented as inseparable
from crimes against nature. The very impossibility of ‘merely human’ rights
thus enabled the ascription of human rights to a militant and expansive human-
ity-in-struggle, in which ‘now’ (this humanity that had suffered crimes against
it) was connected to the ‘not-yet’ (to what it might mean to live otherwise, or to
be otherwise in the future).
In this regard it is significant that the two-year period of hearings was clo-
sely articulated with struggles across Colombia that breathed life into such
visions. Known as ‘planes de vida’ (plans of/for life – an expression whose dual
temporality is better captured in Spanish), these were struggles born as rural
communities attempted to reclaim their land, following state-sponsored mas-
sacres and displacement in the pursuit of foreign investment in natural resources.
Here, too, ‘life’ was invoked among the ghosts of the dead – not as an abstract
value calling forth humanistic assistance, but in explicit contrast to logics of
death and dispossession. ‘Life’ itself was an empty name, to be filled with con-
tent through a collective and participatory ‘diagnosis’ of the power relations that
had made living impossible.57 Here – albeit imperfectly and to different degrees
– an analysis of international capitalism as inimical to life was developed along-
side an analysis of power relations at sites of struggle, and a related critique of
those hierarchical modes of resistance which reproduce ‘a logic of war, a logic
that annuls, that marginalizes, that tells the other “not you”’.58 The ‘convergence
1072 L.M. Coleman

in space time’ between peasant struggles and those of indigenous communities

also engendered critiques of the epistemic violence of notions of the human as
sovereign subject, alongside redefinitions of life in terms of ‘a dynamic equilib-
rium between the physical, the biological and the human’ and a critique of
linear notions of ‘development’.59
While these struggles dance on the grave of ‘man’ as sovereign subject of
rights, this has not precluded organisations from demanding ‘all rights’ from the
state – through the tribunal and beyond. However, demands for rights have been
explicitly made as a ‘party in conflict’, to call the state to account for dispossession
and armed repression.60 These are demands always haunted by the dead, by those
‘abandoned by the state’. They are made so as to contest given definitions of lives
worth living and the rights made present through ethical dispossessions.
Rights here feature not as ends but as something like what – following Ernst
Bloch61 – we might think of as a ‘principle of hope’, concerned with lives to come.
They are not the demands of a reified consciousness but demands made in pursuit
of ‘life’ in the company of the dead, opening up a forward-looking vision – with
all its uncertainty and potentiality intact – of what it might mean to be ‘human’.

Concluding reflections
Struggles over rights outlive ‘man’ as their ground, but they point us beyond
reductions of humanistic discourse to mere, immanent ethics. While ‘mere
ethics’ slips quietly into a reduction of norm to fact and settles into a sedentary
sense of present possibilities, struggles such as those over rights are deeply
aware of their place in the world and of the limits of historical conjunctures.62
They work their normative visions not by appealing to ‘life’ or ‘humanity’ in
the abstract but only as terms to be filled with content by exposing and cri-
tiquing relations of power that have made real lives unliveable. From among the
ghosts of the dead and disappeared, and out of the experience of being routinely
deemed ‘less than human’, they effectively reclaim notions of life, humanity and
right as transcendent principles which allow the present to be judged. Yet these
configurations of life, humanity and right are nonetheless immanent to struggle;
hope for others in the future is forged in relation to those lost in the past, in a
persistent to and fro between transcendent principle and immanent critique.
By invoking ‘human rights’ and setting out visions for ‘life’ in opposition to
dehumanising, life-negating logics of power, neither ‘humanity’, ‘right’ and
‘life’, nor the understanding of the present to which these ideals are opposed,
are given once and for all. Rather, they are defined and redefined in relation to
one another. In contrast to the naturalistic fallacy of ethical anti-humanisms,
‘ought’ is given form in persistent dialectical tension not only with a sense of
what ‘is’, but also with a sense of what is ‘not’ (the concern not to betray those
who are no more, the hope for others who are ‘not yet’). The ethics of life and
sense of the human forged and reworked in struggle embody a sense of justice
irreducible to right. The survival of transcendence does not depend upon
recourse to static notions of natural right, but embodies the hope of another
possible world. If transcendence lives on, it is because the horror of atrocity, of
grinding poverty and of the ghosts of lived lives belies the conceit that we need
grounds for such principles.
 Third World Quarterly 1073

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Independent Social Research Foundation for enabling me to pursue this project by means
of an Early Career Fellowship. I am also grateful to Louiza Odysseos and Anna Selmeczi for inviting me to
write this paper, to Louiza for helping me work out what it was about with her comments on an earlier draft,
and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights. The paper has also benefited from conversations
for co-authored work with Doerthe Rosenow, from bickering with Stefanie Ortmann and from discussions with
those attending a panel at which it was presented at the 2014 Critical Legal Conference at the University of
Sussex. An earlier version of the discussion of ‘ethical dispossession’ was presented as a plenary talk at a
workshop on ‘Neoliberal Legality’ at the University of Oxford, June 2013. Thanks to Honor Brabazon for the
invitation and to Illan rua Wall and other participants in the workshop for conversations that led me to pursue
the ‘positive’ aspects of human rights further. As ever, all shortcomings remain my own.

Notes on contributor
Lara Montesinos Coleman is a lecturer in International Relations and Interna-
tional Development at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on ques-
tions of ethics, dissent, law and the politics of knowledge. She has published
widely in English and Spanish, and in various leading journals. Her book,
Dissent and Dispossession, is forthcoming.

Notes
1. Cárdenas and Marín, La Biodiversidad, 19.
2. Campbell, “Why Fight”, 505.
3. A monograph discussing more fully the ethnographic research upon which this article is based is
forthcoming.
4. Habermas, “Questions,” 282–284.
5. Hyder, “Foucault,” 107–108.
6. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 42–46.
7. Campbell, “Why Fight”.
8. Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent,” 179–183.
9. Ibid., 177–179
10. Interview, November 2007.
11. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 13.
12. Golder, “Foucault’s Critical (yet Ambivalent) Affirmation.”
13. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 3. For discussion of this sort of deployment of Foucault’s method-
ological orientation (and the differences from accounts adopting concepts like ‘biopolitics’ as if they
provided a theory of power or rule), see Coleman and Hughes, “Distance,” esp. 147–149.
14. Golder, “Foucault’s Critical (yet Ambivalent) Affirmation,” 290ff.
15. Osborne, “What is Neo-enlightenment?”
16. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 254–258.
17. Cited in Osborne, “What is Neo-enlightenment?”, 527.
18. Osborne, “What is Neo-enlightenment?”, 528.
19. Amnesty International, Justice and Impunity.
20. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 26, 90.
21. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii.
22. Brett, “Peace Stillborn”; and Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 252–253.
23. Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 254–255.
24. Amnesty International, Justice and Impunity.
25. Hale, “Resistencia para qué?,” 191ff.
26. Ibid; and Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 246ff.
27. Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or ‘Regulation’?,” 256.
28. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition.
29. Hale, “Resistencia para qué?,” 195.
30. Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” 232.
31. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 33.
32. Abello, Violencias y Culturas, 17–19; and Jahn, “One Step,” 630–631.
33. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, 175.
34. Foucault, Biopolitics, 4–21.
35. Brown, “Right and Identity,” 89.
1074 L.M. Coleman

36. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 29–39.

37. Brown “Right and Identity,” 96; and Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, 110ff, 175.
38. Marx, “On the Jewish Question.”
39. Rancière, Dissensus, 67.
40. Ibid., 69.
41. For example, Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, 115ff; and Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human
Rights.
42. Rancière, Dissensus, 72, 184–185.
43. Ibid., 190–191.
44. Harvey, The New Imperialism, Chap. 4.
45. Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent,” 174–177.
46. Santos, Towards a New Legal Commonsense, 451–454. See also Seider, “‘Emancipation’ or
‘Regulation’?,” 243–245.
47. Ibid., 244–245.
48. Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent,” 182.
49. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 247.
50. Abello, Violencias y Culturas, 17–19.
51. Brown, “Neoliberalism,” 56.
52. ILO, 1999 .
53. Coleman, “The New Social Pact and Histories of Violence.”
54. Ibid.
55. See, inter alia, Amnesty International, A Laboratory of War; Gill, “‘Right there with You’”; and
Coleman, “The Making of Docile Dissent.”
56. Aeberhard and Coleman, “Accused,” 9.
57. Interview with member of the rotating leadership of the Committee for the Social Integration of
Catatumbo (CISCA), June 2008.
58. Interview with popular educator from the Social Organisations of Arauca, June 2008.
59. Ibid.
60. Interview with CISCA leader, June 2008.
61. Bloch, The Principle of Hope.
62. This is far closer to Foucault’s own critical attitude toward the present than those accounts that have
taken up the ethical dimension of his work. However, a discussion of the differences between this
framing and that of Foucault himself is beyond the scope of this paper.

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