HHRJ Book Review – Human Rights on the Move

HHRJ Book Review – Human Rights on the Move

By Eli Cooper*

“Human rights is a field of play with a set of failures designed in it.”^[1]

“[T]he fact that . . . we had to come together as a human society to say, these are the rules, was another way of acknowledging that we failed.”^[2]

These quotes from the authors, chosen because of their personal impact, highlight the themes of evolution and insufficiency that stand out in Human Rights on the Move, an anthology of nine chapters and five interludes that present distinct perspectives on how the modern understanding of human rights is “on the move.” The anthology does not posture as if it has the correct answer or perspective on what’s shaping the human rights field and the direction it should be moving. Instead, it paints human rights as a “living practice”^[3] made up of “mutable constellations of practices rather than static ideals.”^[4] This idea is presented figuratively and literally through the authors’ discussion of the movement of people, ideas, animals, and art. These pieces are woven together through threads of interdependence, relationality, perspective, and responsibility, each with implications for many of these topics. Although many of the pieces discuss international and domestic policies, the editors call upon the reader to recognize that “policies alone … are insufficient to respond to human rights violations.”^[5]

With nineteen contributors, each with a unique perspective of what it means for human rights to be “on the move,” this anthology has something for everyone, from human rights practitioners to more casual human rights watchers. The variety of styles, emphasis on art, diversity of contributors, and interdisciplinary approaches create a tapestry of human rights perspectives that every reader can appreciate, even if they don’t necessarily subscribe to every argument made throughout the anthology.

Interdependence is a common thread through many of the pieces in Human Rights on the Move as authors tackle human rights issues that are intrinsically interrelated and codependent on one another.^[6] One underlying idea shared, at least implicitly, by many contributors is that human rights are only conferred to actors considered “human,” a definition of which is contested historically and contemporarily.^[7] For example, in the incredibly poignant interlude with nora chipaumire, the choreographer grapples with her role in the human rights field, concluding, “I’m in no position to talk about human rights, because I have none.”^[8] Protection of human rights, even when legally recognized, is further complicated when political and legal systems produce conditions that promote harm and vulnerability for specific communities.^[9] Many authors illustrate this complication in the context of migrant journeys where danger is not inherent and is fostered by border policies that shift the risk and responsibility away from officials and to the migrants.^[10]

One of the most impactful chapters that illustrates the central theme of interdependence is “Disposable, Exploitable, and Essential” by Shui-Yin Sharon Yam. In this chapter, the author discusses the intersection of racist public health policies with government-sanctioned labor exploitation of migrant women.^[11] Illustrating the terrible circumstances thrust upon these migrant workers as the pandemic began, she argues that the transnational aspect of this situation, namely the complicity of “sending governments” and the government of Hong Kong, warrants heightened attention and recognition as a human rights violation.^[12] Additionally, she points to a widening divide “between the ‘human’ and the ‘less than human’” in moments of crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes it significantly more challenging to have the rights of the most vulnerable recognized and protected.^[13] This chapter is emblematic of the quality and attention to detail throughout the book. Most chapters masterfully implicate the general themes of the book by introducing the reader to a specific situation or artist that they are unlikely to be intimately familiar with. Thus, the book keeps the reader engaged while continuously building upon its themes.

Analysis of perspective is another common thread in Human Rights on the Move. Whose perspective has value and how those perspectives are accurately shared or twisted through institutions are common questions. Many authors point to how testimony created for institutions, from asylum processes to international NGOs, often does not adequately represent the experiences of the people providing the testimony because it is sanitized or narrowed to fit the purpose it’s made for.^[14] The international human rights community has an undue focus on what it considers “’exceptional’ violence,^[15] causing it to miss or downplay the “structural violence” that is endemic to many of our institutions and should also be considered exceptional.^[16] The authors’ answers to these common questions show how “[m]emory…is a political act” and choosing whom to credit as trustworthy narrators shapes the stories that human rights defenders can tell.^[17] They also show how perspective can shift blame from perpetrator to victims.^[18] The focus on perspectives also provides a path to integrate the immense involvement of art within the anthology.

The use of art and the centering of artists throughout the book creates a unique interplay that creates an engaging anthology. This interplay between the structured, scholarly understanding of human rights and the expressive, artistic understanding highlights how the two work together and is central to the anthology. Although witnessing the work of these artists in person would be ideal, the book still provides representations of their work that build upon the foundations and themes of the anthology. Art provides a method for migrants and other vulnerable communities “to communicate their own experiences” in a way that is valuable to them.^[19] Some use art to “escape momentarily,” “respond to the negative stereotypes that dehumanize them,” or to build community while on their journeys.^[20] Others use art to heal, build bridges between tradition and audience,^[21] reclaim places of violence,^[22] reclaim history,^[23] or push back on negative external perceptions.^[24] In using this anthology to teach the reader about the uses and history of art, the artists also illustrate how when art becomes more mainstream, it can lose a lot of its positive impacts.^[25]

“Contemporary Art Practices and the Human Right to Global Mobility” by Víctor Espinosa and Cristian Pineda was a chapter that was especially emblematic of the successful use of art to illustrate the anthology’s themes. In this chapter, the authors focus on art’s ability to foster “social change,” how “participatory art projects [can] engage undocumented migrants…in the production of” art, and the ability for “migrants to communicate their own experiences and claim their right to global mobility” through art.^[26] Detailing two of Pineda’s art projects, the chapter illustrates the impact of participatory art projects and shows how different approaches to artistic expression can have similar impacts. The first project, Caminates de papel, built upon Pineda’s previous work, El caminante, which “force[d] the viewer to reflect on the violation of the human right to mobility and the violation of the right to a life in peace.”^[27] The second project, Círculos de vida, saw Pineda create concentric rings of “waste or objects abandoned by migrants, found in caves located in the highlands of the Arizona desert.”^[28] These displays were used to “represent the spread of violence” and “the growing social propagation of violence.”^[29] Both projects did not focus on the typical, elite audience of most art; instead, they chose to center on “other migrants, smugglers, vigilantes, the border police, or human rights activists.”^[30] This shift in audience allowed the art to take on a valuable meaning to the community that was creating it, showing the power of participatory art projects. The unique approach to these projects also illustrated Pineda’s and many other artists’ real goals when developing art. They are “not concerned so much with changing legal regimes of human rights” but focus efforts on developing new perspectives that “challenge [practices] that dehumanize and criminalize migrants.”^[31]

This chapter’s approach to discussing the purpose and impact of art is emblematic of the use of art in Human Rights on the Move. Artists are concerned with reflecting a true “notion of being human” that is “evolving all the time” instead of the institutional or legal understandings of human rights.^[32] Many recognize the limitation of the formal human rights regime, choosing instead to highlight “human rights as the very essence that makes us who we are.”^[33] A particularly strong example of this distinction can be found in “Black Womxn and Girls, Corona, and the Pandemix” by Elaine Richardson (“Dr. E”).^[34] This interlude is one of the most powerful portions of the book as it details Dr. E’s one-woman show by the same name. In the book, art is used to illustrate the deficiencies of our contemporary, formalized understanding of human rights while highlighting how the two conceptions can come together to promote change.

Human Rights on the Move is genuinely an anthology with something for everyone interested in human rights. Although this review only covers two chapters in detail, every contribution to the book is worthy of being highlighted. Whereas not necessarily intended for a legal audience, the book could provide any human rights practitioner with an enjoyable read and new perspectives to consider.^[35] As the first installment in the “On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities” series, the book shows potential for the series moving forward.

*Eli Cooper is a first year law student at Harvard Law School.

[1] Wendy S. Hesford & Amy Shuman, Reckoning with Human Rights Incommensurability, in Human Rights on the Move 1, 8 (Wendy S. Hesford, Momar K. Ndiaye & Amy Shuman eds., 2024) (quoting Tiffany Lethabo King, Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight, 3 Critical Ethnic Stud. 162 (2017)).

[2] Faustin Linyekula & Momar Ndiaye, Human Rights and the Fragility of Staying Alive, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 74, 75.

[3] Hesford & Shuman, supra note 1, at 6 (quoting Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights 21 (2006)).

[4] Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at xi; accord Momar Ndiaye, Eleanor Paynter & Amy Shuman, Choreographing Mobility and Human Rights, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 45, 50.

[5] Hesford & Shuman, supra note 1, at 13

[6] See generally Craig Scott, Interdependence and Permeability of Human Rights Norms: Towards a Partial Fusion of the International Covenants on Human Rights, 27 Osgoode Hall L.J. 769, 779 (1989) (presenting an overview of the concept of interdependence in the context of international human rights).

[7] See nora chipaumire & Momar Ndiaye, Decentering Human Rights toward an African Ideology, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 93, 94 (“[F]rom the get-go of the fourteenth century, when Europe meets Africa, it decides immediately that the African is not human.”); Rachel Lewis, Street Cats Human-Animal Interdependencies in Times of Ecological Crisis, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 163, 164–65 (“legal notion of personhood . . . is not an animal-friendly legal category,” but “Indigenous epistemologies reject the false separation of human, animal, and environmental life that characterizes colonial power relations”); see also Tiyi M. Morris & Mary E. Thomas, Countering Carceral Logics with Black Feminist Pedagogies, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 126, 133 (contextualizing Black feminist focus on education as tool for liberation within lack of recognition of human dignity in U.S. carceral system).

[8] chipaumire & Ndiaye, supra note 7, at 97.

[9] See Eleanor Paynter, Migration Imaginaries: Wreckage, Ruination, and Recovery, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 27, 29 (“necropolitical bordering practices [which are] policies and actions that govern migration not by supporting rescue and arrival but by ensuring migrants must risk their lives to reach Europe”) (emphasis removed); Víctor M. Espinosa & Cristian Pineda, Contemporary Art Practices and the Human Right to Global Mobility, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 56, 70 (“regimes of (in)visibility and surveillance that dehumanize and criminalize migrants”); Shui-Yin Sharon Yam, Disposable, Exploitable, and Essential : Transnational Domestic Labor in Hong Kong, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 98, 101 (“Since the worker’s immigration status in Hong Kong is tied to their employment, migrant women do not usually find recourse to the abuse and exploitation they experience.”); Morris & Thomas, supra note 7, at 136 (“[I]gnorance is not a personal deficiency but a reflection of an educational system that is premised on racist and imperialist legacies of knowledge production.”); Paloma Martinez-Cruz, María Sabina as Vanishing Indian: Writing Cultural Mazatec Culture out of Mushroom Medicine, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 177, 189 (“Patterns of settler hegemony are asserted by renaming lands, places, and resources to naturalize dominance, and this was particularly egregious in the Mazatec context.”).

[10] See Ndiaye, Paynter & Shuman, supra note 4, at 48–49; see also Paynter, supra note 9, at 40 (“Sorry we didn’t drown” is a political message from surviving migrants that shows that “Italian leaders … would prefer migrants died at sea.”).

[11] Yam, supra note 9, at 98–99.

[12] Id. at 102.

[13] Id. at 103.

[14] See Wendy S. Hesford, On the Move: Human Rights and Humanitarian Violence, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 15, 16–17 (detailing impact of testimony by a mother in U.S. Congress); Bridget M. Hass, Transforming Subjectivity through Testimony, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 149, 150 (“[T]estimony within the human rights context is often curated by international experts, potentially leading to the alienation of the witness from the very meaning of their testimony.”).

[15] Quotations added around exceptional as the authors call into question what violence is considered “exceptional,” arguing that all violence, including structural violence, should be considered exceptional.

[16] Hesford, supra note 14, at 18.

[17] Paynter, supra note 9, at 27 (quoting Irene Caselli, This Museum Documents the Tragic Past and Present of Migration, Info Migrants, 26 Aug. 2019, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/18781/this-museum-documents-the-tragic-past-and-present-of-migration); see also Martinez-Cruz, supra note 8, at 178 (discussing how “Indigenous intellectual property” is coopted and primarily trusted by the West when presented as scientific research by elite institutions).

[18] See Hesford, supra note 14, at 17 (narratives change victims from migrant children to U.S. citizens); Ndiaye, Paynter & Shuman, supra note 4, at 48 (discussing how migrants are blamed for attempting the dangerous journey).

[19] Espinosa & Pineda, supra note 9, at 57.

[20] Id. at 65–66.

[21] Ndiaye, Paynter & Shuman, supra note 4, at 53.

[22] See Espinosa & Pineda, supra note 9, at 67.

[23] Linyekula & Ndiaye, supra note 2, at 79.

[24]Guisela Latorre, Border Embodiments and Ethical Arts Practices, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 81, 86 (“By equating border crossers with fallen heroes, Aguiñiga is elevating their social status while also actively disrupting the criminalizing discourses imposed on them that can strip them of their human rights.”).

[25] See Paynter, supra note 8, at 36 (discussing how a “memorial problematically erases the violence and politics of the actual incident” it sought to reflect); Latorre, supra note 23, at 81 (discussing how border art lost many of its proponents and participants when it “became embroiled in a controversy about the problems of marketing a community-engaged and site-specific arts practice that was openly critical US immigration policy and abusive practices”).

[26] Espinosa & Pineda, supra note 9, at 57.

[27] Id. at 62.

[28] Id. at 67.

[29] Id. at 67-68.

[30] Id. at 69.

[31] Id. at 70.

[32] Ndiaye, Paynter & Shuman, supra note 4, at 48, 50.

[33] Linyekula & Ndiaye, supra note 2, at 76.

[34] See Elaine Richardson, Black Womxn and Girls, Corona, and the Pandemix, in Human Rights on the Move, supra note 1, at 111, 111–125.

[35] Especially Transforming Subjectivity through Testimony by Bridget M. Haas, supra note 14, which details new approaches to testimony that could be implemented in practice, and Disposable, Exploitable, and Essential by Shui-Yin Sharon Yam, supra note 9, which details labor policy interactions in the pandemic.