The study of human rights has gone through many phases, and the boom in the scholarly industry of human rights studies has yielded many subspecialties, including human rights in particular regions and the intersections of human rights with different religious traditions. One principal area of discussion likely to be of interest to readers of this journal has been the question of Muslim women's human rights and the role of religion in this respect. The problem was often presented as primarily an ideological one, a conflict between a local tradition, Islam, and the global demands for human rights.

While a long-standing debate had addressed questions of rights and cultural relativism, in recent years a mediating position emerged to show the extent to which Islam and “universal” human rights were or could be compatible.Footnote ¹ Some Islamists claim that human rights are inherent to the shariʿa. Instead of searching for the origins of human rights in Islam's past, others see Islam and rights as part of changing history.Footnote ² In this view, rights traditions and religious traditions are constructed, motile, adaptable, and can overlap if people make them so. There can be no system of thought, action, and belief that is inherently one way or the other, because they are all fields of play.

Feminist anthropologists and others have taken this discussion further, often in more explicitly political and critical directions. Pointing to the ideological uses of human rights and culturalist arguments in the Middle East, these scholars have shown how human rights can be used to set tests of civilization or liberation and to justify torture, military intervention, or first-world feminist intervention.Footnote ³ That rights are fought over and can be translated in ways that may make more sense in a particular context—“vernacularized,” in Engle Merry's formulation—undermines the idea of an objective or universal set of human rights or rights principles.Footnote ⁴ But that the putatively universal principles are politicized and manipulated makes them no less interesting or effective in the world. Anthropologists who pay attention to history have drawn stimulating theoretical attention to the “social life” of rights, and the importance of, as Ajantha Subramanian has observed in an Indian context, the “dialogical relationship between claims and rights in which the practice of claim making is generative of new understandings and subjects of rights.”Footnote ⁵ That is, political activity and social processes are dynamic and reverberate in creative ways, changing the kinds of people who make rights claims and affecting the nature of rights claims themselves. And it is these dynamics to which scholars should attend.

It has long been recognized, perhaps firstly by human rights activists and then by anthropologists, that “human rights” only exist through specific cultures and languages. Their effects in the world are shaped by and come into being through the historical moments, places, institutional frameworks, and surrounding political contexts in which people try to define and activate them. Observing that a chasm exists between human rights ideals on the one hand, and gritty realities on any particular cultural or institutional ground on the other hand, does not tell us much. But since so many were wedded to the notion of universal human rights existing in some abstract universe, that point had to be made, by many and repeatedly, before it could sink in to the scholarly taken for granted. For philosophers, rights could float in the universal mental ether where they “interplay” and “prefigure” each other, where ideas “shift,” traditions “fixate,” and various –isms focus and morph, where concepts such as “humanity” “cannot act as a source of norms” because they have no fixed meaning (as if any meaning is ever stable), apparently unbound from the intentions, ideas, and tragedies of mortals on the ground.Footnote ⁶ Once human rights were wrested from the philosophers’ wet wooly grip, social scientists and historians could look at what was really going on.

From there, the study of human rights could expand into ethnographically and historically specific investigations of how people grabbed onto the abstract ideals enshrined in human rights declarations and principles, interpreted and translated them, made political claims through them, used them to proclaim undeserving the already marginal, and challenged them. In short, we could begin to examine human rights as a type of normative framework, a field of politics, a human construction, subject to definition and revision, implementation and disregard.

In the field of Middle East studies, scholars such as Ilana Feldman, Arzoo Osanloo, Susan Slyomovics, and myself have done this kind of work, and there is much room for more.Footnote ⁷ In different ways these authors have examined how human rights and humanitarian claims circulate and are shaped through nation-state and international institutions and ideologies, how they become available for justifying political actions and underwriting claims for resources. There is additional productive potential in bringing together the anthropology of policy and the social study of human rights in the Middle East. This could open new lines of inquiry about what becomes relevant and credible knowledge in political debates; about the production, implementation, and experience of policy beyond its own terms of reference; about the methods and motivations of government bureaucrats who institutionalize or pay lip service to human rights; and about what are the political, economic, and ideological roadblocks in achieving political change through law and rights norms. More specifically, one might ask about the institutional, organizational, and bureaucratic structures and political actor networks shaping the work of human rights lobbyists at the UN in Geneva and New York, for example.Footnote ⁸

There are also few studies of specific human rights organizations, and especially few focused on the Middle East.Footnote ⁹ Questions inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS) about knowledge production could be used to explore how, in the midst of the chaos of war or revolution in Syria or Cairo, for instance, certain human rights nongovernmental organizations become the go-to sources of credible information for journalists, legislators, and others. Such investigations would be challenging for many reasons. They would require “studying up” (involving not just critique of, but also primary research on, the elite of the policy and lobbying worlds), and incorporating an understanding and analysis of grassroots activists as they attempt to engage elites from far down on the hierarchy of political and economic power.Footnote ¹⁰ If human rights have become the “lingua franca” of global politics, this language is ever more clearly being shown to be spoken with a forked tongue tied by donor demands. A more detailed understanding is needed of the role of economics and budgets in how state development agencies, philanthropists, and humanitarian markets determine whose suffering merits victimhood status and succor.Footnote ¹¹ This may also be an angle from which to explain why (or whether) the language and institutions of the human rights system have become hegemonic, for whom, and to what political effect.

Also suggesting potential new directions for Middle East studies is the recent explosion in human rights historiography, which has delved into the political origins of human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the human rights system. With a focus on real politics, and real-politik, these historiographical discussions have usefully troubled the triumphalist narratives that portray the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as some kind of halo anointing western Enlightenment's angelic apex, and have called into question any necessary connection between the tragedies of World War II and the human rights system.Footnote ¹² Curiously, the most famous example in this trend is Samuel Moyn's upstart argument that human rights did not mean very much or have much traction until the 1970s, a point he repeatedly asserts (but does not very well prove or explain) in The Last Utopia, and again in a book of essays, and once again in a volume co-edited with Jan Eckel.Footnote ¹³ The short shrift Moyn gives to efforts to claim collective rights, and the unapologetically Euro-American centrism and elitism of his whole narrative, are quite remarkable given how important human rights instruments have been in struggles throughout the Global South.Footnote ¹⁴

Rather than axiomatic assertions that “human rights” can only refer to individual rights against the sovereign nation-state, or undertheorized assumptions about the ideological package of human rights coming fully formed to fill in the vacuum supposedly left by the demise of preceding political schemes and revolutionary politics, a more careful historical look is required to understand when and how human rights talk entered Arabic and other languages, and how the Middle East entered and shaped the human rights world. So there is a wide open space for research into the history and current (mal)functioning of the United Nations that goes beyond stories of elite political actors or normative denunciations of its “pathologies.”Footnote ¹⁵ There is little fine-grained scholarship, for example, on how political and ideological relations across the Third World were conducted through the United Nations, the changing levels of legitimacy of that world organization, or when and why political actors came to find human rights a feasible political instrument.Footnote ¹⁶ There is a fair amount of theoretical assertion that the human rights system has been a capitalist, or neoliberal, conservative tool that has quashed more authentically liberatory or progressive aspirations. But more detailed studies are needed to understand how the institutionalization and spread of human rights work affected class formation, political action, and consciousness over the last several decades of continuous upheaval throughout the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁷

The desperate plight of masses of refugees and migrants moving across the Middle East and Europe may be this century's paramount human rights issue, and obviously warrants careful scholarly attention, especially if it can help those trying to help these people cast aside by war, neoliberalism, and environmental degradation. We need more historical research to understand how humanity has reached this sorry state, and more ethnography to help us understand how people have been lured by, and posed challenges to, the feeble mechanisms that have been developed to protect or dupe them.Footnote ¹⁸