Mark Goodale

The practice of human rights : tracking law between the global and the local

Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.

Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights

Some 17 years after the end of the cold war, the international and transnational human rights regimes that emerged in the wake of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are at a crossroads. On the one hand, the political openings created by the end of the bipolar postwar world have allowed what Eleanor Roosevelt described as the curious grapevine of nongovernmental actors to carry ideas and practices associated with universal human rights into different parts of the world as part of broader transnational development activities. On the other hand, this spread of human rights discourse has only magnified the different problems at the heart of human rights, problems that are theoretical, practical, and phenomenological. Anthropology has an important part to play in addressing these problems and in suggesting ways in which human rights can be reframed so that their original purposes, those embodied in documents like the UDHR, stand a better chance of being realized.Some 17 years after the end of the cold war, the international and transnational human rights regimes that emerged in the wake of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are at a crossroads. On the one hand, the political openings created by the end of the bipolar postwar world have allowed what Eleanor Roosevelt described as the curious grapevine of nongovernmental actors to carry ideas and practices associated with universal human rights into different parts of the world as part of broader transnational development activities. On the other hand, this spread of human rights discourse has only magnified the different problems at the heart of human rights, problems that are theoretical, practical, and phenomenological. Anthropology has an important part to play in addressing these problems and in suggesting ways in which human rights can be reframed so that their original purposes, those embodied in documents like the UDHR, stand a better chance of being realized.

Human Rights, Anthropology of

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by K. Hastrup, volume 10, pp. 7007–7012,

Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City. By Daniel M. Goldstein. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 344. Acknowledgments. Notes. References. Index.

In addition, the book provides three main contributions. First, the treatment of the image of the Tupamaros in the United States, one of its most interesting elements. The book shows how the aims of the MLN-T were disseminated and conceptualized throughout the United States, by the US radical left. This is in line with very recent works on Tupamaro influence in radical European organizations, and thus opens up a very interesting area for comparative research on both dissemination and adaptation of ideologies and action repertoires. To what extent did this happen in the BPP? This examination could have been completed with an analysis of possible direct connections between organizations, which were not addressed here, in particular the repercussions of conceptualizations forged in the actions of each group, especially among US radicals. The second main contribution is the chapter on solidarity and human rights struggles during the Uruguayan dictatorship. The examination of selected solidarity practices and the construction of an associated image in (not necessarily radical) sectors of the US left is the most valuable contribution in this regard.

89.95 cloth;

This Article reviews the history and current status of Legal Anthropology, a subfield of the general field of Sociocultural Anthropology. It describes successive transformations in the anthropological study of law and law-like systems across cultures and through time.

24.95 paper.

Ugo Mattei and Laura Nader, Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, 283 pp. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea-something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.... -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness I begin this review of Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal, by the Italian comparative legal scholar Ugo Mattei and the American anthropologist Laura Nader, with this pungently ironic excerpt from Conrad, for two reasons. First, this is the way in which the late-great Edward Said chose to end the last section of his masterwork Orientalism and Plunder is dedicated revealingly to the memory of Said. But more importantly, both the style and importance of Plunder are derived from the same form of intellectual and ethical engagement, in which clear-eyed history, polemic, and radically purposive reframing are brought together in order to very much look into it, to shine a piercing light onto the idea at the back of it, to ask the question whether the unselfish belief in an idea of transcendent importance does not, in fact, serve other, far less, sympathetic interests. The idea here is the idea that something called the rule of law is universal, essential to the development of progressive legal, political, and economic institutions, and the natural bedrock of the contemporary transnational humanitarian impulse. The belief is the belief that the rule of law will-even if forcibly introduced at the point of a gun-provide a structural cure for all ills as a kind of normatively neutral animating principle that symbolizes the presence of values that are both irreducible and unassailable. Mattei and Nader subject both this idea and belief to a withering and interdisciplinary critique that will be of considerable interest to anthropologists and others who find themselves knee-deep at the ground level of contemporary normative practice, where the rule of law continues to exist as one of the few remaining shibboleths to have resisted the complete Saidian treatment (others include dignity and justice). After Plunder, the rule of law should no longer be understood in quite the same way again. Even if the overly doctrinaire political economic framework within which Mattei and Nader explain the relationship between rule of law ideologies and crude economic imperialism does not, in my opinion, completely capture the ways in which the belief in the rule of law-and legality more generally-masks different forms of will to power, the authors archaeology of the contemporary moment leaves no doubt that the internationalization of law has been, and will continue to be, imperial in ways that demand close and unsentimental scrutiny. Plunder is both a sustained and coherent argument and an intensely factual book. Nearly every assertion about the relationship between legal ideology and practice, and economic exploitation and enforced dependency is illustrated with reference to a case study drawn from both earlier and much more recent history, from the machinations of the East India Company at the beginning of the 18th century to the multilayered economic crisis in Argentina in the early 2000s. Despite its wide range and inherent importance, only so much of Plunder will be of academic interest to anthropologists, even if anyone concerned with contemporary global assemblages should take the time necessary to understand the ramifications of the authors thesis in light of the case studies drawn from political science, current affairs, economics, international relations, and, above all, international law. Plunder arrives at a historical moment in which the ideological pretensions of the great powers-or, perhaps, great power-are no longer treated with deference, respect, or even the kind of forced and artificial credulity that weaker nations were inclined to adopt as part of a wider realist strategy of instrumentalist accommodation (at least by elites). …

Comparative Anthropology of Law

Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.

Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (review)

Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.

The Practice of Human Rights: REGISTERS OF POWER

Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.

The Practice of Human Rights: Contents

Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.