In their new contributions to the scholarship on human rights, Jean Quataert and Wiktor Osiatyński appear, at first blush, to be engaged in quite different projects. Quataert's book is a social historian's study of the impact of transnational human rights movements on the development of human rights. Osiatyński's project, meanwhile, is a theoretical and practical contribution to debates in four contested human rights themes. Nevertheless, the books reveal some significant intersections, which illustrate the emergence of new areas of interest in the field of human rights scholarship. Specifically, both works evidence a growing attention to narratives of history, and historical re-interpretations, in understanding current and future possibilities for human rights.
In Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics, Jean Quataert “blends historical methodologies with readings in political science and case studies of international relations theory” (p. 297) to build a thesis that the human rights system is best understood as constructed through waves of human rights mobilisations responding to specific “obstacles of power and privilege arrayed against it” (p. 6). Quataert structures her book around key transnational social movements which, she argues, first challenged existing orthodoxies, and then changed and were in turn absorbed by them. Her work represents a social history of the operation of the human rights system, particularly focussing on developments in the United Nations (UN).
In Part I, Quataert details the emergence of a post-World War II human rights “orthodoxy” through three transnational movements: the anti-apartheid struggle, the Soviet dissident movement, and the struggles by Mothers' Courage in Argentina to highlight the disappearance of individuals in central and South America. These social movements, she argues, were based on and reinforced an understanding of human rights as related to personal liberty, life, and security against state agents (p. 112).
In Part II, Quataert studies how transnational mobilisations around gender raised new issues of universality and the role of private actors, while at the same time, labour migrations brought up issues of citizenship, socio-economic rights, and the role of courts, to challenge the previous human rights orthodoxy. The success of these transnational networks can be seen in the increasing influence of NGOs working in these areas, and the cautious embrace of economic, social and cultural concerns, along with gender, by courts, and ultimately UN bodies (p. 187).
The author then looks, in Part III, at the drivers behind the insertion of individual criminal accountability into the UN human rights system, noting how “memory and history intruded in new ways into human rights advocacy” (p. 223). She examines these new challenges through responses to ethnic violence and the concept of humanitarian intervention (particularly in Israel/Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda). Perhaps Quataert's most refreshing contribution comes in her final chapter, Chapter 7. Here, she details the “long decade” from 1989 to 2005. She considers the decade not through the lens of September 11th 2001 and the “war on terror”, but through the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, an event overshadowed in practice and in scholarly reflection by the events of September 11th. By examining the preparatory work of the NGOs and individual advocates involved in the WCAR, and the grassroots concerns they struggled to bring to the debates – in the face of State hostility or disinterest – she places the events of September 11th into a context of un-redressed historical injustice, and exposes the links between historical racism, the motivations for terrorism, and responses of humanitarian intervention (p. 289).
Wiktor Osiatyński's Human Rights and their Limits is the “personal culmination of a lifetime's involvement with rights and other values” (p. xi) in which he addresses four major themes in human rights thought. These include the main practical and theoretical questions in rights and democracy in Chapter 2; the relationship between rights and needs in Chapter 3; the question of rights and cultures in Chapter 4; and the juxtaposition of human rights and other values in Chapter 5. These issues are considered and analysed with reference to the work of major legal thinkers and political philosophers, to which Osiatyński adds his theoretical contribution. His particular take on each topic is evidently based on considered reflection, and he adopts a conciliatory approach. For example, in attempting to reconcile the claim for universal rights with the diversity of cultures and traditions across States, he advocates a “soft universalism”, which would “focus on the universality of values and standards and leave room for differentiated cultural practices and institutions” (p. 185). Likewise, in discussing rights and democracy, he notes that the two are interdependent, but also in tension and potential conflict (pp. 72–73), a situation that gives rise to the need for a new concept of democracy in which a justification for limited rights, and limited government, may be sought (pp. 102–104). The author concludes the book with a letter he includes with the exam results of his human rights students. In it, he sets out a plea for the prudent, sensitive and ethical approach to human rights that emerges from this book, including an entreaty that human rights not be distorted beyond sustainability by inflated – or inflationary – claims made in their name (pp. 214–215).
Perhaps because both books are so broad in scope, neither is fully convincing in its argument. Quataert's thesis that transnational social movements have been the key drivers behind different waves of human rights orthodoxy is not fully made out. Although such movements have been influential, the book lays too little weight on the relevance and importance of other factors and actors, particularly on powerful states and their interests at different historical points. This will be noticed particularly by international lawyers, who will be struck by the failure to tackle head-on the position of states as international law makers in advancing a thesis based on change driven by non-state actors. Several specific issues are also worth noting. The precise historical “moments” (p. 13) Quataert uses to build her thesis are unlikely to offer many surprises to those familiar with previous histories of the UN human rights system, having been the subject of numerous books and articles. In addition, and surprisingly for a historian, Quataert refers to few primary sources, whether cases or UN documents, relying instead on secondary material. This is unfortunate, as the breadth of her work would have opened up a wealth of such documentation to welcome historical analysis. Moreover, given the decades-long struggles undertaken by these social movements, the designation of the events Quataert investigates as “moments” might be contested.
Osiatyński's book also has its limitations. First, one of the author's main contributions is in seeking to provide solutions to major tensions in human rights that would be acceptable across traditions, political philosophies, and religious persuasions, in order to rescue human rights from abuse and potential oblivion (p. 188). Given his hopes for a theory of rights acceptable in a cross-cultural consensus, it is disappointing that Osiatyński draws so heavily on a small group of American and Western-European legal theorists and philosophers to ground his theory. An additional and related point is that in presenting his theory as reasonable, sensible and generally uncontroversial, the author skates over significant questions, which deserve attention in greater depth. These questions include whether universal standards can indeed be maintained in the absence of a universal rights philosophy, which is touched on in Chapters 4 and 5, but not adequately addressed, and the related issue of whether the practical contestations of human rights are, as the author claims, far more problematic than any ideological challenge could ever be (p. 43). A second unresolved issue is whether the relationship among rights, human dignity, and basic needs – addressed in Chapters 3 and 5 – is sufficiently explained so as to ground the basic standards for which the author argues.
Despite these weaknesses, both Osiatyński and Quataert provide an interesting contribution to one of the major debates occurring in human rights scholarship at the present time. This is the changing role of history in human rights scholarship.
Both books illustrate the recent surge of interest in the history of human rights. This reflects what Quataert identifies as the “distinctive flavour” of the period from 1989–2005, during which “the need to address historical wrongs as part of present-day agendas in order to create a future that would be different from the past” was central, and lay behind the development of truth commissions, individual criminal responsibility, and ideas of “contingent” sovereignty (p. 223). These legal changes are now being reflected in scholarly attention to issues of memory and history. Quataert's book joins other recent publications by historians, including Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass. 2010) and Eve Darian-Smith's Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law (Oxford 2010) which seek to re-examine critically the history of human rights and the way this history is narrated in human rights scholarship. At the same time, human rights scholars from within the legal discipline – particularly on the critical-legal left – are exhibiting a new interest in history as a central issue. This might be traced to Martti Koskenniemi's earlier publication The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge 2001), which offers a rich exploration and critique of the history of international law, and has fostered broad debate about the role of history for the left. Works reflecting this trend include those seeking to re-write human rights history such as Rosemary Hunter, Clare McGlynn and Erika Rackley (eds.), Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (Oxford 2010) which supplies “missing” feminist judgments in past legal cases, or Emmanuelle Jouannet's historical re-evaluation in Vattel and the Emergence of Classic International Law (Emer de Vattel et l'émergence doctrinale du droit international classique (Paris 1998)), to be published in English in 2011.
Renewed questions about the place of history in human rights scholarship are also reflected in Osiatyński's inclusion of a major chapter on the history of human rights, despite the fact that the balance of the book is thematically focussed, and the chapter sits somewhat awkwardly in the overall structure. In this chapter the author argues that rights emerge in waves, with “each upsurge of freedom” followed by “a period of regress or oppression” resulting in the disappointment of those relying on the ideal (p. 67).
Osiatyński's chapter charting these waves offers its own re-imagining of the development of human rights. He writes that the reader “may find many surprising ideas in the historical chapter”, given that he was motivated to include it by personal experiences that “awakened” him to a reinterpretation of human rights history (p. xvii). Interestingly, he focuses particularly on the 1970s as the true beginnings of human rights (pp. 33–37). This is itself a new reading of the history of human rights, which has until now located the birth of human rights in the horrors of World War II. Interestingly, this re-writing may come to represent a new orthodoxy, reinforcing Quataert's thesis that bold challenges to dominant human rights understandings are, eventually, absorbed and accepted: this is also the period in which Quataert situates the development of the first wave of human rights movements (Chapters 2–3), and where Moyn positions the crystallisation of the human rights idea.
In the first chapter of Advocating Dignity, Quataert writes that “even in the face of a known outcome” an “engagement with the past … has no automatic or predetermined path to the present” (p. 20). The new scholarly interest – particularly from the critical or left perspective – in re-imagining the past of human rights can be traced to this sentiment. Both Quataert's and Osiatyński's recent books illustrate this broader trend, and can thus be located within an interesting new wave of human rights scholarship, which adds to their importance over and above the contributions made by each author alone.
