Globalization and Human Rights.

Edited by Alison Brysk. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 310p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

If you approach this book expecting it to illuminate the complex relationship between globalization and human rights, you will be disappointed. The editor's introduction and conclusion reflect, but do not dispel, a pervasive indeterminacy, while the individual contributions head off in all directions.

The terms in which the issue is cast could not but produce highly ambiguous conclusions. Globalization, the independent variable, is defined far too broadly. Encompassing four disparate dimensions—transnational migration and citizenship, global markets and commodification, international flows of information, and transnational norms embodied in governance (p. 7)—globalization inevitably engenders multiple and contradictory effects. To compound the analytical challenge, human rights, the dependent variable, is also multidimensional. It includes security rights, social rights, and collective rights. Furthermore, the editor then points out that the “filtering” effect of national states on global flows is important, but that this effect itself depends on the type of state involved in this filtering process. Hence, we arrive at the obvious but unhelpful thesis: that the threats and opportunities for human rights depend on the type of globalization, the kind of rights affected, and the filtering role of the state (p. 15). But with four types of globalization, three kinds of human rights, and several kinds of filtering states, this framework is unlikely to illuminate an admittedly complex reality. And it does not.

Although the contributions to this volume are disparate in focus, level of analysis, methodology, and normative stance, many are engaging and informative on their own terms. Richard Falk introduces a note of realism and controversy when he asks whether an inherent contradiction arises between the promotion of human rights and the goals of global market forces. He concludes that there is no such inherent contradiction, though reconciling the two will require fundamental global reforms pressed through a “globalization-from-below.” It is refreshing to see human rights treated as an ideology of domination, as well as an analytical concept. Jack Donnelly's penultimate chapter—“Human Rights, Globalizing Flows, and State Power”—is a concise, comprehensive, and insightful reflection on the relationship between globalization and human rights. If the reader reads only one chapter in this book, it should be this one. Donnelly concludes that although several international human rights norms have weakly developed, states must still be treated as the bulwarks of human rights. States are still needed to tame the negative tendencies of global market forces, just as they tamed national market forces in the form of the liberal-democratic welfare state.

Globalization and Human Rights concludes with a potentially useful discussion of “policy possibilities.” Although one agrees with many among the myriad prescriptions proffered by the editor, one often wonders who is to be the agent of the deep reforms that transform power relations. For example, if it is true that “human rights require cosmopolitan democracy” (p. 255), how will cosmopolitan democracy be achieved? The apparent answer is unpromising: “[T]ransnational campaigns for greater accountability should balance policymaking insiders with grassroots outsiders” (p. 254). This sounds like a prescription for paralysis or co-optation.