WHO IS HUMAN?

The historic progress of human rights has been an uneven, contested expansion of the reach of rights toward universal inclusion across all categories of identity: race, religion, gender, class, ethnicity, descent, and sexual orientation. All forms of dominance and dictatorship thrive by impeding or reversing this dynamic of defining who is human. Historical studies show how dehumanization is exercised through denigration and labeling, physical segregation, and triggering ideologies such as racism and xenophobia. Whether assigning numbers to prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, inciting attacks on Rwandan Tutsi as “cockroaches,” systematic segregation in the United States and South Africa, forced disappearance of dissidents in Latin American dictatorships, or labeling Muslims as terrorists and Mexicans as rapists, dehumanizing strategies facilitate human-rights abuse by triggering public fear and disabling bystander empathy.

Defense against these forms of dehumanization comes through representation, solidarity, and inclusion. Humanizing representation involves projecting an individualized voice that evokes universal themes of agency, dignity, and vulnerability to promote recognition. All movements must cultivate “poster children” to personalize appeals and must not rely solely on abstract statistics or slogans. Solidarity is built by cross-cutting coalitions, which often are based on bridging narratives of common plight; “We are all ___” (Brysk Reference Brysk2013). An outstanding recent example is the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League pledging that if Muslims are required to register, its Jewish members would symbolically join them. Inclusion requires explicit redefinition of invisible or stigmatized groups as worthy citizens and legitimate members of the body politic, which was brilliantly exercised by Khizr Khan, father of a slain Muslim soldier, who spoke at the Democratic Convention. One measure of the strength of this strategy was the subsequent surge of citizens and volunteer lawyers who appeared at American airports to defend immigrants from seven Muslim countries in the wake of Donald Trump’s attempted refugee ban.

WHAT IS RIGHT?

Human rights also rise or falter with social contests over what is right—and why. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous associated treaties that the United States endorsed summarize the doctrine of human rights as “free and equal in rights and dignity” and specify a wide range of universal civil, social, physical integrity, and cultural entitlements. The United States also is bound by human-rights commitments under the social contract of international society to collective protection of refugees; accountability for war crimes; and standards against genocide, torture, and discrimination. These commitments have been translated to the American experience when water activists in Flint, Michigan, appealed to the United Nations; UN bodies condemned US police violence against minorities; and Native Americans received support from global treaties and transnational solidarity (Warikoo Reference Warikoo2016).

What is right is universal, constantly struggling with a historic tendency for American exceptionalism (Forsythe and McMahon Reference Forsythe and McMahon2016). The case for cosmopolitanism—the construction of a liberal world order and global governance for common problems—has been sidelined in American discourse, but it rests on an ethos of reciprocity. Social science has demonstrated the efficacy of reciprocity in theories and history of the evolution of cooperation—especially collaboration to face transnational threats such as terrorism (Brysk and Shafir Reference Brysk and Shafir2007). Robust peer-reviewed research shows that a country’s use of torture increases the incidence and severity of terrorism; conversely, better respect for rights improves a country’s long-term security (Murdie Reference Murdie2017). We must redeploy this evidence in the halls of power and educate unschooled policy makers.

Thus, the case for rights is also the case for community, solidarity, and interdependence. The 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights endorsed by most of the world’s states concluded that rights are “universal, indivisible, and interdependent,” echoing Martin Luther King’s American ethos that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (1963). This means that solidarity is not (only) altruism—it is enlightened self-interest. Because worldwide comparisons show that higher-quality democracies are more peaceful and prosperous and they assure greater well-being for their citizens, civic education should remind mass publics that rights are not only what make countries good—they are part of what make countries great (Landman Reference Landman2013).

Interdependence also means that rights at home are linked to rights abroad and that acting globally is in the national interest. As a constructivist approach reminds us, power is legitimated by purpose, and world order helps to construct sustainable influence—that is, we can help to make rights make sense (Brysk Reference Brysk2009). Moral and material interests are intertwined, and both isolationism and unprincipled intervention generate global commons problems including refugee surges, public health crises, and transnational crime emanating from failed and postconflict states. Concerned policy makers must be reminded that carefully designed international institutions, democracy assistance, civil-society promotion, and multilateral humanitarian intervention are an investment in US security. Perhaps one of the best supported worldwide patterns is the connection among each state’s respect for women’s rights, contribution to international peace and security, and global good citizenship (Brysk and Mehta Reference Brysk and Mehta2014; Hudson et al. Reference Hudson, Ballif-Spanvill, Caprioli and Emmett2012).

Another aspect of thinking globally falls on the civil-society side. US activists must move beyond artificial separation of international human rights from civil and constitutional rights, and they must engage the lessons and networks of international partners and global trends to confront worldwide illiberal populisms (Rodriguez-Garavito Reference Rodriguez-Garavito2016). Just as the global circulation of Gandhian modalities empowered the US civil-rights movement, in the current era, we can learn new repertoires of contention and frames from comparative studies of our peers. For example, the struggle to defend health rights as human rights in the United States may be informed by AIDS activists’ worldwide struggle to define access to essential medicines as a human right. A key constituent of the Los Angeles Women’s March, attended by more than 700,000 citizens, was Planned Parenthood—which marched and chanted under the banner of “health rights as human rights.”

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

Human-rights scholarship also broadens the question of who is responsible—the fundamental question of governance. Institutions matter—from international treaties to the worldwide “justice cascade” of human-rights trials to national institutions such as Ombudsman and civil-rights agencies (Cardenas Reference Cardenas2014; Sikkink Reference Sikkink2011; Simmons Reference Simmons2009). We must bring this knowledge back to defend against “electoralist” regressions and backlash in institutional guarantees, as outlined by Nexon (2016). Another cautionary note is the emerging human-rights scholarship that claims that weak states and institutional power vacuums may worsen the level of violations (Englehart Reference Englehart2009). This means that along with guarding against state overreach, we also must be vigilant regarding the haphazard dismantling of rights-protective institutions and the privatization of legally accountable, state-based coercive institutions (e.g., prisons and police forces). The majority of immigration detainees are held in private prisons, which have been sued for sexual abuse, medical neglect, and forced labor—and the stock prices of these companies have risen sharply since the inception of Trump’s expansion of immigration enforcement (Picchi Reference Picchi2017; Tchekmedyian Reference Tchekmedyian2017).

However, human-rights scholarship also shows how law and national institutions are necessary but not sufficient. We can expand the rights repertoire by crafting new frames, vernacularizing global norms, building horizontal transnational networks, granting standing to new stakeholders, and installing “sticky” rights benchmarks in both law and policy standards. Studies of the politics of rights show that institutional-reform efforts must be complemented by rights-based public policy, socially responsible business and economic development, rights education, and norm promotion (Brysk Reference Brysk2002; Brysk and Stohl Reference Brysk and Stohl2017). These pathways to rights are especially salient when threats to them come from above and below the state—such as displacement of labor rights by globalization and women’s protection against violence within society, which are at issue in the Trump presidency. As the director of an international network of 270 social-change movements recently affirmed, a wide range of social-justice campaigns worldwide are using the human-rights framework to build broad coalitions against inequality and illiberalism that touch these issues—including campaigns in the United States (Grove Reference Grove2017).

Reconstructing an American human-rights movement is our work as citizens of both republics. The January 21 wave of Women’s Marches, the growth of a grassroots democracy movement called “Indivisible,” solidarity movements for undocumented migrants such as “United We Dream,” and the April March for Science defending academic freedom—all rights-based citizen action beyond traditional political-party structures—suggest that communicative action is beginning to reconstitute rights norms, bridge constituencies, and deepen democracy. At the institutional level, an energized American Civil Liberties Union and associated rising community-of-“cause lawyering” defeated the Muslim travel ban, defended voting rights against racially discriminatory restrictions, and protected women’s access to reproductive rights in several jurisdictions. Human-rights education projects are flourishing, building on K-12 Holocaust and tolerance education requisites in key states and the growth of human-rights majors, minors, and masters’ programs in universities (University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute, available at http://humanrights.uconn.edu/teaching-human-rights-database). In the years to come, human-rights scholarship must guide this burgeoning mobilization along the path “from moment to movement”—thinking globally and bringing to bear the lessons of history. Our vocation is to stand with our students, our communities, our democracy, and global civil society, speaking rights to power.