Category: Commentaries

Violence Committed by Americans against (Foreign) Americans

by Dr. Barbara Harlow

10 DEC 2015

Mark Danner’s portrayal of the muted denunciation of human rights abuses during the now more than decade-long U.S.-led global “War on Terror” and the remission of the once honorable paradigm of the exposure of injustice leading to redress were especially poignant reminders of the current crisis in humanitarian thought and activism. In her post, Natalie Davidson speculates that the lack of public protest and political accountability derives from the fact that the abuses “mainly affect foreigners living outside U.S. territory.” That explanation, however, is complicated, if not obviated, by the death-by-drone of Anwar al-Awlaki (also al-Aulaqi) in Yemen on 30 September 2011. Awlaki, a U.S.-born and U.S.-educated radical Muslim preacher, had been the target of a protracted mission to eliminate him, in an operation code-named “Objective Troy.” In his recent book, which takes its title from that code-name, prize-winning journalist Scott Shane reads that assassination mission to “eliminate” the compatriot as a near-epic mortal combat between the “president” and the “terrorist,” assisted by none other than the “drone.” Barely two weeks after his own violent demise, Awlaki’s teenaged son Abdulrahman was also killed while eating at an outdoor café in Yemen (some say accidentally, others aver the teenager’s alleged own “radicalization” as the rationale), again in a lethal drone strike. He, too, was a U.S. citizen.

In April 2014, the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. granted the defendants’ “motion to dismiss” in the case of Nasser al-Aulaqi v Leon Panetta et al. (2012). Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Nasser al-Awlaqi, father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman, had charged the named U.S. officials with the unlawful deaths and extrajudicial executions without “charge, trial, or conviction” of his near relatives. The senior al-Awlaki had brought a similar charge in an earlier case against Barack Obama, Leon Panetta (director of the CIA), and Robert Gates (Secretary of Defense) for violations of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibiting “unreasonable seizure.” His claim in Al-Aulaqi v. Obama (2010) that “targeted killing” of U.S. citizens violated the Constitution had likewise been dismissed, with the Court noting in a lengthy opinion that the plaintiff’s claims raised “non-justiciable political questions.”

The District Court’s repeated, if predictable, dismissals have so far failed to galvanize concerted rejoinders from a larger U.S. citizenry. Yet, the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the death by drone of the imam and his son, and their elder’s enduring insistence on the rule of law and the integrity of the U.S. Constitution have not been dismissed from either the political annals of contemporary history or their popular cultural re-enactments. In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill’s 2013 monumental account of the construction of “the world as a battlefield” and George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s nefarious waging of the “global war on terror,” Scahill interweaves Nasser al-Awlaki’s personal struggle for justice for his son and grandson with what Scahill calls the “story of how the United States came to embrace assassination as a central part of its security policy” and the “story of the expansion of covert U.S. wars.” The latter includes imbroglios that feature “stories of insiders who have spent their lives in the shadows,” or, in the words of Dick Cheney, “on the dark side.” This storied history of Anwar al-Aulaki’s political odyssey and ensuing family saga is also featured in Shane’s Objective Troy (2015). The book narrates the parallel lives of Barack Obama and Anwar al-Aulaki, although, as Shane tellingly if cynically admits in his Prologue, the two “men would never meet, except virtually, clashing in the battleground of ideas, where the cleric’s mastery of the internet would serve his jihadist cause, and violently, when Obama dispatched the drones that carried out Awlaki’s execution.”

Scahill is adamant, even against the opinionated rulings of the U.S. District Court and the apparent lack of interest on the part of Awlaki’s “fellow Americans,” that “Awlaki’s case would cut to the heart of one of the key questions raised by the increasing role targeted assassinations were playing in U.S. foreign policy. Could the American government assassinate its own citizens without due process?” And Shane predicts that Awlaki would become a “bigger brand,” a veritable living legend, given that, as the investigative journalist describes the phenomenon, “One factor in the dark portrayal of drones [is] that stories trump facts in the human imagination, and drone strikes produced compelling stories.”

If the story has not compelled the political or legal change that some might have anticipated, Anwar al-Awlaki’s biographically tragic fate has served, whether in sinister martyrdom or with heroic mien, as legal – and cultural – precedent, as drones themselves are set to become the very stuff of the contemporary international thriller. Indeed, in Drone (2013), the first of political scientist Mike Maden’s fictional Troy Pearce trilogy, the protagonist – a former U.S. government employee and current CEO of a “private security firm specializing in drone technologies” – explains that “a considerable plurality of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum were still troubled by the use of lethal force against American citizens without benefit of trial, whether or not drones were used, even if the threat was imminent and catastrophic.” The same issue, however paraphrased, will haunt Maden’s two subsequent Troy Pearce novels, Blue Warrior (2014) and Drone Command (2015). It also underwrites former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism Richard A. Clarke’s Sting of the Drone (2014) and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’s Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage (2012).

It would seem after all, as Natalie Davidson has noted, that if “Danner asks how we can return to legality,” it is all the more the case that “the story he tells can also be understood as one in which law, with its indeterminacy and malleability, its sometimes absurd fictions and bureaucratic vocabulary, plays a key role in reassuring government officials that even acts such as torture and execution are acceptable” (emphasis added). In a world where legal and political discourse are imbued with fictions that enable violence, might fiction ironically be the most promising arena in which to challenge targeted killing?

Perhaps not. Jeremy Corbyn might not write international thrillers but the newly elected British Labour leader did protest strenuously – to the thrill of some of his constituents and the indignant ire of others – the death-by-U.S.-drone of one of his compatriots. Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John,” was slain in November 2015 in the targeted killing of a British citizen, a deed that the nation’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, had condoned as committed in “self-defense.” Cameron’s reference to self-defense echoed the rationalizations of his U.S. counterparts in their rendition of ratiocination in the waging of the “forever war” executed by UAVs (“unmanned aerial vehicles”) or, as some weapons analysts and “whodunnit” fans might prefer, RPAs (remotely piloted aircraft). Whether disarticulated in legal language or spellbound through generic whodunnit intrigues, the questions persist, “loiter” in drone-speak. Might the still muted decibels of denunciation yet become a mobilized chorus of dissent and resistance? What would such a raucous uproar require? And will the culprits at last be brought to justice?

Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin and is on the WPS Editorial Committee. She is the author of Resistance Literature, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention, After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing, and co-editor of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook and Archives of Empire: Vol I and Vol II. 

What Do We Do With What We Know? The War on Terror and Human Rights

by Natalie Davidson

9 DEC 2015

We at the Rapoport Center were privileged last month to hear journalist Mark Danner talk about human rights and the War on Terror at the inaugural Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights, titled “Spiraling Down: Human Rights, Endless War.” Danner offered an incisive analysis of the current state of the United States’ War on Terror, an analysis that should not only sound alarm bells among European leaders as they choose military strikes as their response to the latest attack by ISIS in Paris, but also raises difficult questions about the part a human rights framework could play in putting an end to torture, indefinite detention, targeted assassinations and wiretapping by the U.S. executive.

Danner nostalgically described the Watergate scandal, which exposed the Nixon administration’s illegal activities against political opponents and led to the president’s resignation under threat of impeachment, as his political coming-of-age. Watergate, in Danner’s view, is a demonstration of “how the system is supposed to work”: a revelation of governmental wrongdoing by journalists, followed by investigations by Congressional committees and the courts, and finally punishment when the President resigns.

For Danner, contemporary American politics operate according to a very different logic. Instead of cycles of injustice-revelation-justice, human rights are now in a state of “frozen scandal.” Torture by and at the instigation of the U.S. military has been widely written about, including in a long Senate report. The practice has been denounced by President Obama, but other forms of gross human rights violations soon emerged. The Obama administration has made extensive use of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia, killing between 3,500 and 5,000 individuals. Meanwhile, prisoners cleared for release continue to languish at Guantánamo under the legal fiction that they can neither be tried nor released, for they are prisoners held captive until the end of hostilities. Although these governmental abuses are well-known, there is no change, no expiation. The liberal assumption that exposing injustice will lead to its correction has not been borne out. This insight leads Sissy Farenthold to ask, when introducing Mark Danner: “what are we going to do about what we know?”

Danner sees the “frozen scandal” of human rights violations as one facet of the state of endless war inaugurated in September 2001 when Congress authorized the use of military force in the aftermath of September 11. The War on Terror has not only failed spectacularly to reduce terrorism, as the rise of ISIS and reemergence of the Taliban indicate. It has also provided the key infrastructure for torture, for it transforms “prison without trial” into “wartime detention,” and “torture” into “enhanced interrogation technique.” The war, though indiscernible in Americans’ everyday life, allows gross governmental violence to appear legal. Drone killing is permitted by government lawyers when there is a “continuous imminent threat”. Danner reports that lawyers in the Obama administration are now developing the concept of “elongated imminence” to further detail the conditions under which targeted killings is justified.

Where do we go from here? Sitting in the audience and listening to Danner, it seemed to me that it is not only the Watergate model that seems to have waned. If exposure and knowledge of human rights abuses do nothing to curb their commission, the traditional model of human rights reporting also seems insufficient. Or perhaps these two models are not so much broken as inapt to address violence committed by Americans against foreigners. The Watergate model assumed governmental abuses of American citizens; the human rights model traditionally targets repression by a foreign government of its own citizens. The human rights abuses in the War on Terror, in contrast, mainly affect foreigners living outside U.S. territory. What avenues of justice-seeking can address this sort of violence?

One path currently popular among international human rights activists around the world for addressing state-sponsored violence is criminal prosecution. Yet Danner does not think that prosecutions of offenders, whether high-ranking officials or low-level torturers, are feasible. Nor will they achieve much change in his view. He suggests instead that a truth commission might lead to a profound political acknowledgment and rejection of torture. Most importantly, Americans must combat the politics of fear fueling their country’s permanent war.

What part should law and human rights activism play in pulling the United States out of the state of exception? Danner asks how we can return to legality – but the story he tells can also be understood as one in which law, with its indeterminacy and malleability, its sometimes absurd fictions and bureaucratic vocabulary, plays a key role in reassuring government officials that even acts such as torture and execution are acceptable. Is talk of “continuous imminent threat” to justify targeted killings a perversion of law, or is this legal logic at work? What tools do human rights activists have at their disposal to effectively combat such uses of legal discourse? If denunciation is insufficient, and what is needed is political mobilization, how does human rights activism retain its relevance?

Natalie Davidson is a PhD Candidate at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law, and  a 2015-16 research fellow at the Rapoport Center where she chaired the WPS Editorial Committee.

Nike’s Girl Effect and the Privatization of Feminism

by Megan Tobias Neely

21 NOV 2015

This commentary is a response to Maria Hengeveld’s paper, “Girl Branded: Nike, the UN and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Adolescent Girl Subject.”

In 2009, Nike launched the Girl Effect, a “brand-led movement” targeting the alleviation of poverty among girls worldwide. The initiative advocates for investing in adolescent girls to create future workers and stimulate economic growth. For those who associate the Nike brand with anti-sweatshop movement protests over labor standards the Girl Effect may seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Nike moved to eliminate child labor in its factories only fifteen years ago, and the poor working conditions at Nike factories remain a concern for activists today.

Activists here at UT-Austin have taken up this issue. Our chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops demands the university to rethink its $250 million dollar contract with Nike. Last April, former Nike worker and worker’s rights activist Noi Supalai spoke on campus. She described how in Thailand—where women constitute a majority of garment workers—workers face unrealistic expectations for production, round-the-clock schedules, months of back wages, and little time to care for their families. Supalai led a worker’s union to negotiate improved conditions; however, Nike never responded to their requests.

Nike’s track record on worker’s rights raises the question as to whether the Girl Effect is a “brand-led movement” or a movement to re-brand Nike. In the winning paper for the 2015 Audre Rapoport Prize, Maria Hengeveld astutely argues that the Girl Effect only serves to legitimize Nike’s reputation and image by obscuring its own role in creating poverty while it rebrands itself as a proponent of human rights and gender equality. Hengeveld calls attention to how the campaign suggests simplistic solutions to alleviate poverty in the Global South that fail to consider how companies like Nike contribute to creating a global economy that exacerbates poverty among women and girls. By blaming gender inequality on the girl’s communities and placing the burden of alleviating inequality on the girls themselves, Nike does not offer viable solutions to patriarchy, explains Hengeveld.

The problem with Nike’s approach to girls’ empowerment, according to Hengeveld, stems from its neoliberal ideology that places the market as the appropriate avenue for promoting liberty, opportunity, and equality. Although the Girl Effect may have positive outcomes for individual girls, Hengeveld demonstrates how campaigns like Nike’s do little to alleviate poverty among women, because the employment available to them is low-paid and insecure.

Scholars like Radhika Balakrishnan and Jason Hickel, who spoke at the Rapoport Center’s recent Inequality & Human Rights conference, echo Hengeveld’s concerns. Balakrishnan has argued that women’s empowerment in the workforce cannot be achieved without improving conditions for laborers generally. Hickel (2014) too has examined the contradictions of the Girl Effect in which “women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for boot-strapping themselves out of poverty that is caused in part by the very institutions that purport to save them” (p. 1355).

Indeed, Hengeveld explains how Nike’s corporate agenda contributes to a neoliberal system that exacerbates poverty and inequality worldwide, with disastrous consequences for both women and men. An in-depth investigation of these consequences is the next step in Hengeveld’s research: Earlier this year, she interviewed 25 women who work for Nike in Vietnam about the factory and living conditions they face.

The solution to improving these conditions, according to Hengeveld, does not lie in resolving inequality between men and women workers in the Global South but in changing a neoliberal system that rests upon the disenfranchisement of the poor. As Hengeveld contends, “in practice, equalizing the labor standards, market access and wages of women in Nike’s factories with their male counterparts will hardly be emancipatory or liberating if male workers are not protected by decent job protections, collective bargaining rights and living wages” (p. 12).

While I agree with Hengeveld, I fear that campaigns to improve labor standards overall will not necessarily empower women unless addressing gender inequality is a central goal. Garment work is devalued precisely because it has been deemed “women’s work,” which is crucial to understanding the shortcomings of Nike’s gender campaign. Moreover, as Joan Acker (2004) argues, “gender is embedded in the structuring and ongoing practices of globalizing capitalism” (p. 23). Thus, finding a solution requires an analysis of how gender structures the exploitation of these workers in the first place. In particular, an intersectional lens can shed light on how garment work is gendered, racialized, and nationalized.

For example, in 2013, the deplorable conditions of garment workers came to the world’s attention when a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,138 workers and injuring 2,500 others. Yet mainstream media coverage of the disaster paid little attention to the fact that women comprise 80 percent of Bangladeshi garment workers, who face precarious working conditions and unsustainably low pay.

In fact, women compose a majority of garment workers throughout the Global South and are at the frontlines demanding change. Ethnographers Leslie Salzinger (2003) and Melissa Wright (2006) demonstrate how corporations portray these women’s labor as pliable, temporary, and surplus to devalue it in the pursuit of capitalist profit. Thus, gender, race, and poverty are deeply connected in global capitalism.

Yet, liberal feminists maintain that employment will liberate women by providing them with more bargaining power in their families and communities. Nike’s Girl Effect is part of a resurgence of neoliberal feminism (also called transnational business feminism), which contends that the best avenue for women’s empowerment is through the private sector. This movement has gone global through campaigns led by U.N. Women, the World Bank, and the IMF to promote economic opportunities for women.

Socialist and women of color feminists, however, have long contended that greater participation in paid employment does not liberate women, because capitalism has been contingent on the exploitation of women of color and low-income white women (see Hartman, Hooks, Davis, and Nakano Glenn). Transnational feminist scholars like Esther Chow and Aihwa Ong pioneered intersectional scholarship on global capitalism, identifying how it constructs hierarchies according to nationality, race, class, and gender that perpetuate inequality.

While paid labor may, to an extent, improve some women’s status in society, it may also subject them to precarious and risky working conditions inextricably tied to their position as women of color in the Global South. Moreover, it is the devaluation of women’s labor that makes the profits of corporations like Nike possible. How might recognizing this lead to more effective campaigns to empower women in this neoliberal era?

Megan Tobias Neely is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the WPS Editorial Committee. Her current research is on gender and work in the financial services industry.

The Human Right to Education and Economic Inequality

by Samantha Chammings

19 NOV 2015

Craig Lauchner’s working paper was written as part of the Fall 2015 law school class and Rapoport Center Colloquium on Inequality and Human Rights. The Colloquium brought together scholars, academics, practitioners, and students from the UT Law School and LBJ School of Public Policy to ask the question: can human rights do anything to alleviate economic inequality?

The answer to this question was often a resounding “no”: human rights law does not have the tools to close the wealth gap between rich and poor. Indeed, the “age of human rights” has coincided with the entrenchment of neoliberalism, to paraphrase Samuel Moyn. Lauchner’s paper also comes to this conclusion, through an in-depth study focusing on one particular human right—access to education—in one particular region of the world: the Mercosur Region (which includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela). In fact, his paper concludes that not only have human rights policies failed to alleviate economic inequality in the region, but they have also, in some instances, perpetuated those very inequalities. Lauchner provides a compelling account of the ways in which human rights policies can actually entrench existing power, and by extension economic, inequalities.

In particular, Lauchner describes a policy developed in 1998 by the Sector Educativo de Mercosur (SEM) to ensure that university degrees obtained in a SEM country are recognizable in every country in the region. While this aimed at decreasing inequality between countries, in actuality it had the unintended consequence of forcing smaller countries with less well-established university institutions to invest money into subsidizing university attendance by wealthier segments of society. Focusing policies on tertiary-level education, Lauchner argues, rather than on primary and secondary education, has disproportionately benefited elites and perpetuated existing inequalities in society. While many governments are spending the same on university-level education as on primary and secondary-level education, the preexisting privileges of those individuals able to attend university means that human rights policies, which by definition are applied indiscriminately, result in a fundamentally unjust outcome.

For Lauchner, the SEM case is an example of how human rights policies are blind to inequality. They seek to raise everybody above a certain minimal threshold, but, as Moyn concluded, place no limits or ceiling on wealth. Lauchner gets to the crux of this when he notes that in Latin America, the right to education is enforceable by the courts, but this does not signify a right to equal education. And by definition, those who are poor are less able to enforce those very same rights. However, Moyn argues that it is by virtue of a small elite amassing unrestrained wealth that other people are forced to go hungry. Human rights policies, if not a part of this system, at the very least sit idly by and allow economic inequality to exist and even increase.

In Lauchner’s account of the right to education in Latin America, human rights policies do at least have the capability to decrease inequality and do provide some benefits to the poor. However, he argues that the specific policies have also resulted in furthering inequality. Unlike Moyn, he does not conclude that human rights are fundamentally incompatible with efforts to decrease inequality, but rather, they simply may not be the best tool to do so, at least in relation to access to education within Latin America.

Samantha Chammings is an LL.M. Human Rights and Comparative Constitutional Law graduate from the University of Texas School of Law. She was a Rapoport Center Scholar in Spring 2016.

Beyond Purely Legal or Economic Analyses of Migrant Laborer Abuses

by Safa Peera

15 NOV 2015

Ryan Jones’ paper, “Beyond Kafala: Remedying Human Rights Abuses of Migrant Workers in the Persian Gulf,” examines the kafala system in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. The kafala is a system of laws and customs used to govern migrant workers in these countries. Some of the more egregious laws tie workers to one employer, enabling the confiscation of the workers’ passports during their stay in the country.

The paper is thought-provoking in that it challenges two existing and quite opposite interpretations of kafala, one legal and the other economic. The legal analysis focuses on the laws in the system of kafala, and sees the repeal of those laws as the key to alleviating the human rights abuses. One case study is Bahrain, which reformed some of the most restrictive laws within kafala. As the Bahraini case illustrates, however, the legal system may not be the ultimate cause of the problem, for the legal reform has failed to curb the human rights violations suffered by migrant workers. Jones sees the focus on legal rules within kafala as an instance of what Susan Marks calls “root cause” analysis in international human rights. Despite their objective of unearthing the “root causes” of human rights abuses, human rights institutions halt the investigation into causes too soon; treat effects as causes; and dismiss certain causes without proper consideration. In the case of kafala, NGOs focus on legal rules, ignoring the role of economic inequality in contributing to migration and to workers’ vulnerabilities vis-à-vis their employers.

Jones then turns to an economic analysis of kafala and the use of migrant workers in the Gulf countries. He examines the assertion made by Professors Eric Posner and Glen Weyl that the current system of migrant workers is doing more to reduce global inequality than any other system in the world—that by allowing the high flow of migrants from some of the poorest countries, the GCC nations are increasing the earning power of migrants in an unparalleled manner. Posner and Weyl recognize that empowering the migrants with political, social, and economic rights will dampen the enthusiasm of the GCC countries to welcome migrants. This in turn will reduce the high amount of remittances sent by the migrants back to their poor home countries, which Posner and Weyl claim are critical to reducing inequality. Posner and Weyl’s claim is more attentive than the legal analysis to the economic inequality underlying the migrant workers’ experiences. Yet Jones is also skeptical of their argument. He points out that it excludes important factors in its analysis including the cost of migration for these workers. He also points out that Posner and Weyl seem unconcerned by the inequality the very system of migrant workers is propagating. So long as the poor migrant class and their home countries are getting richer, they seem content to ignore the resulting proportional increase in wealth in the GCC countries through the cheap, migrant labor.

Perhaps one way to integrate legal and economic analysis would be to compare the condition of the migrant workers who are the focus of this article to migrant workers in the Gulf countries who are governed by the same kafala system but are not subject to similar human rights abuses. The kafala system—with all its legal underpinnings—is used to govern any worker within the country who is not a GCC national. While the abuses are rampant amongst migratory workers due to the lack of leverage they wield, the same laws govern Western and other nationals who work the lucrative jobs at Saudi Aramco (the state owned oil company) and elsewhere. Perhaps a comparison with this class of workers can provide clues as to how to best address the abuses against the non-professional, low-income workers. The answer may or may not have to do with the laws in kafala. While Jones’ paper does not go so far as to examine such a claim, perhaps because of the common perception that kafala only affects the powerless migrant workers, his research helps lay the foundation for such an exploration.

 Safa Peera is a JD candidate at Texas Law, and a 2015-16 scholar at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.