{"id":13470,"date":"2010-05-04T12:02:40","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T18:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=13470"},"modified":"2010-05-04T12:02:40","modified_gmt":"2010-05-04T18:02:40","slug":"michael-barker-human-rights-watch-brings-neoliberalism-to-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=13470","title":{"rendered":"Michael Barker: Human Rights Watch Brings Neoliberalism To Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Michael Barker<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Regrettably the doctrinal human rights community has  largely closed its eyes and ears to the many ways in which its discourse  has been politically and economically sullied. In not undertaking the  task of constructing a political economy, or an ecology, of human  rights, the doctrinal mainstream has allowed the discourse to be  all-too-frequently harnessed to the service of contemporary imperialism  and rapacious global capitalism. The hard political questions are deftly side-stepped.&#8221;<br \/>\n\u2014Nick Rose, 2008. <a href=\"http:\/\/swans.com\/library\/art16\/barker48.html#1\">(1)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>(Swans &#8211; May 3, 2010)<\/em> Doctrinal human rights groups, while attracting the attention and  support of many well meaning citizens, are in fact &#8212; in a perverse  testimony to the logic of capitalism &#8212; protectors of corporate rights  not human rights. As such organizations fail to challenge the primary  driver of human rights abuses&#8230; an exploitative political and economic  system, they ultimately promote the type of legalistic band-aids that  legitimize capitalism&#8217;s systemic violence as occurring as a result of  some sort of unfortunate aberration. &#8220;[T]he great paradox of human  rights is that mirroring the story of an ever-expanding corpus of  international law ratified by ever-greater numbers of states, hundreds  of millions of people have been dispossessed of their land and  livelihoods and thrown into abject poverty.&#8221; Indeed, as activist-researcher Nick Rose concludes: &#8220;The pretense that human  rights are above politics and economics has long outlived whatever  doubtful utility it may once have had, and must be abandoned forthwith.&#8221;  <a href=\"http:\/\/swans.com\/library\/art16\/barker48.html#2\">(2)<\/a> This,  however, is unlikely to happen in the case of groups like Human Rights  Watch (HRW) whose very founding was tightly connected to capitalist  development priorities (see &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.zcommunications.org\/hijacking-human-rights-by-michael-barker\">Hijacking  Human Rights<\/a>&#8220;); consequently, in such cases it is perhaps more  appropriate to abandon the group rather than seek to reform such a  vibrant expression of capitalist &#8220;humanitarianism.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>[<a href=\"http:\/\/swans.com\/library\/art16\/barker48.html\">Read the article<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Michael Barker &#8220;Regrettably the doctrinal human rights community has largely closed its eyes and ears to the many ways in which its discourse has been politically and economically sullied. In not undertaking the task of constructing a political economy, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=13470\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-3vg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13470"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13483,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13470\/revisions\/13483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}