Emerging Threats to Human Rights: Resources, Violence, and Deprivation of Citizenship, edited by Heather Smith-Cannoy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. 288 pages. ISBN-10: 1439917191; ISBN-13: 978-1439917190. RRP: A$93.00, paperback.

Abstract

Increased migration and forced displacement of people across the globe is a fact of our contemporary world that demands further attention from scholars. While traditional approaches to understanding the drivers of such migration have emphasised the political structures that incentivise and facilitate movement, contributors to Emerging Threats to Human Rights: Resources, Violence, and Deprivation of Citizenship, edited by Heather Smith-Cannoy, argue that a human rights focus is necessary to comprehensively investigate contemporary migration patterns and challenges. To this end, contributors to this book analyse threats to human rights as a driver for migration from three interrelated but analytically discrete sources: resource degradation, violence, and deprivation of citizenship. According to Smith-Cannoy, these emerging threats to human rights pose an existential threat, which, in line with Alexander Betts’ (2013) notion of “survival migrants,” drives displacement. Through an analysis of each threat to human rights, presented as separate studies organised by type of threat, the book ultimately concludes that variation in the extent to which each threat drives migration can be understood on a spectrum from low to high drivers of migration. Although there is little evidence that resource degradation through climate change is currently leading to mass migration, deprivation of citizenship and violence appear to be correlated with moderate and high levels of mass migration respectively. As Smith-Cannoy argues, “a core theme that emerges from this investigation is that there is value in looking across issue areas to understand threats to human rights and causes of migration” (257). Resource degradation is the first threat to human rights analysed in the book. The three chapters analysing this threat do so through examinations of the climate change–migration–human rights nexus; violations of the right to water by nonstate actors; and global trade-offs between environmental protection and human rights. The analyses in these chapters together present a multifaceted view of the relationship between resources and human rights, highlighting the structural threats to resource-based human rights in international law and accountability processes. While the chapters each contribute an interesting perspective to academic debate surrounding resource deprivation and human rights violations, there is little analysis of migration. Smith-Cannoy does provide a summary in the book’s concluding chapter that argues that such resource deprivation creates human rights threats, which in turn act as push factors for survival migrants. While this conclusion indeed has merit, the empirical evidence to support the argument is lacking in the associated chapters. Overall, the chapters on resource degradation lack analytical clarity. In chapters 1 and 3, an overreliance on normative arguments and circumstantial relationships between policy goals and environmental factors detracts from the explanatory power of the analyses. Similarly, the central assumption that environmental protection and human rights protection are mutually exclusive is problematic. However, the analysis of barriers to nonstate actor accountability in chapter 2 presents an innovative perspective on the structural challenges to holding actors accountable for human rights violations. The analysis and findings are thought provoking and undoubtedly contribute to academic literature on human rights. In order to analyse violence as the second threat to human rights, the contributors examine violence perpetrated on forced migrants in host states; continued violence after ceasefires; and the efficacy of transitional justice mechanisms (TJM) for increasing levels of human rights. The chapters together present a comprehensive analysis of militia and state-based violence and peace efforts as threats to