Let's Discuss

I'm taking a class on human rights in which we discuss whether human rights exist, whether they are natural or positive law (meaning are people born with them or are they created by men and institutions?), and whether there will ever be any consensus on universal rights. Along with those questions come attendant issues of dialogue, language, power dialectics and political struggles, and what happens when some (powerful) countries start naming what's going on in other (less powerful) countries. The problem of countries naming and condemning what goes on in other countries is a difficult one, particularly given the force of state sovereignty in foreign relations, but when those countries' power is unequally weighted, it can get really tricky. This is an interesting article I read a while ago in the London Review, but am reading again now as I begin to rethink these questions.

LRB
8 March 2007
Mahmood Mamdani

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
Mahmood Mamdani

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html