Human Rights and Empire: The Political

Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism
By Costas Douzinas (New York:
Routledge-Cavendish, 2007)
Margaret Denike
Dans son ivre intitul Human Rights and Empire, Costas Douzinas traite des
consquenees possibles de l'utilisation des droits de la personne pour justifier des
guerres humanitaires et pour rationaliser l'idologie du nouvel imprialisme.
Il traee la gnalogie des droits de la personne et des philosophies cosmopolites,
fait la lumire sur leurs paradoxes inhrents (en aspirant l'universel tout en
se fondant sur l'exclusion) et indique comment les idologies normatives
sous-tendent une anatomie politique de l'imprialisme. Il cherche comprendre
le type de communaut internationale et de droit international reflt dans ces
dveloppements et dans les appels normatifs aux droits de la personne pour
justifler la violence.

In Human Rights and Empire, Costas Douzinas addresses the implications of

utilizing human rights as a justification for humanitarian wars and as an
ideological gloss for a new imperialism. He provides a genealogy of human rights
and cosmopolitan philosophies, elucidates their inherent paradoxes (in aspiring
to universalism yet building on exclusion), and provides a political anatomy
of the imperialism in which he situates them as its composite normative
ideologies. Its interest is to understand the type of "international community"
and international law that is reflected in these developments and in the normative
appeals to human rights as a justification for violence. Elucidating the main
themes of this work, this review maps the paradoxes of rights and sketches the
forms of bio-political power that they express and serve.

What business do human rights have in the "new moral order" of liberal
cosmopolitanism, economic imperialism, and their "humanitarian" wars?
What do they say about post-modern technologies of power and how they
operate through "suffering humanity," within and despite law, and at what
human cost? What might an analysis of the relation between rights ideology
and state violence conducted in their name tell us about the future of rights?
The critical inquiries that drive Costas Douzinas's latest book. Human Rights
and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, offer an analysis of
CJWLIRFD
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174 Book Reviews / Clirotiiques bibliographiques

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the political philosophies of human rights and cosmopolitanism and sketch a

topography of contemporary imperialism in which these philosophies can be
seen to operate as tools and strategies of empire.' It spells a political crisis that
should concern anyone who is invested in the meaning of human rights and
how they areor might beutilized to produce social inequalities or to resist
them.
This work is a sequel to his book The End of Human Rights^ which, while
having seen the invasion of Kosovoan international intervention
widely described as the first war conducted "for purely human rights
purposes"^had not yet witnessed the terror-mongering freedom-fighting
humanitarianism that proliferated in the wake of 9/11, however much this
book had predicted its escalating violence. Just as Htttnan Rights and Empire
develops the Utopian philosophies of cosmopolitanism. The Ettd of Human
Rights offers a remarkably detailed genealogy of the Western ideologies of
human rights, tracing the development of rights doctrine from classical Greek
stoicism through Christian theology, the philosophies of natural law and
natural rights, the French and American revolutionary declarations of the
rights of man and proclamations of freedom, and, finally, to the international
humanitarian law and human rights conventions. Having in mind that this
history ends where humanitarian wars begin and where human rights become a
justification for armed force, Douzinas provides a rather grim account of the
fate of the idealism of human rights, all the while pondering whether there is
something about the way in which these principles were forged that necessarily
returns them again to the scenes of violence and sovereign law making.
Hitman Rights attd Etnpire picks up on this question from out of the fog of
the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraqwars launched in the name of
"freedom" and "democracy" and justified in part as a fight for the human
rights of the oppressed other (and, notably, of Muslim women and other
innocents suffering under the strictures of the Taliban or "rogue" regimes of
terror-harbouring tyrants). As Douzinas puts it, human rights have become
the post-modern justa causa of such humanitarian wars,'' making them
1.

2.
3.

4.

Costas Douzinas defines cosmopolitanism as a form of "globalization with a human face."

Cosmopolitans, as he sees them, promote global social processes, institutions, and world
citizenship and are critical of patriotism and nationalism as well as hegemonic and imperial
designs. Costas Douzinas, Human Righls and Empire (New York: Routlege-Cavendish, 2007)
at 125
Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford; Hart Publishing, 2000).
David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kahut and Beyond: Human Rights and International
Intervention (London: Pluto Press, 2006) at 9. For an exhaustive study of recent international
humanitarian inventions and their justifications, see also Simon Chesterman, Just War or
Just Peace: Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001).
Douzinas, supra note 1 at 178. See also Costas Douzinas, "Postmodern Just Wars: Kosovo,
Afghanistan and the New World Order," in John Strawson, ed.. Law after Ground Zero
(Portland: Glasshouse Press, 2002) 21 at 21.

Vol. 20

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175

reminiscent of the pre-modern righteous crusades against the evil of the

uncivilized infidel.^ As he argues in Chapter 3, "The Many Faces of
Humanitarianism," the justness of the cause is supported by images of
suffering innocents in God-forsaken lands. The dissemination of these faces,
together with those ofthe tyrants and terrorists behind them, which is a "core
strategy" of contemporary humanitarian campaigns, provides a moral gloss
for military violence, while also working to cast all resistance, including selfdefence, as acts of terror, evil, or the savagery of the uncivilized. Tapping the
promises that human rights offer, and the urgency of their appeal for
"suffering humanity," these faces call upon armed saviours to save them from
their evil, all the while preventing the exodus of refugees or their admission to
the "homeland."^ They also implicate human rights and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, who also become bit players in the war effort, as
Douzinas puts it, donning khakis, riding bombers, and applying the World's
Constitution.^ In light of these developments, the question remains how can
human rightsand the campaigns behind thembe an effective tool against
state oppression?
The answer suggested by Human Rights and Empire is quite simply that they
cannot, or at least they will not, for as long as they remain in the service of
humanitarian war and act as "an ideological gloss of an emerging empire," coopting the voices, strategies, and human resources of well-intentioned human
rights advocates and advocacy campaigns.** The severity of his critique seems
to overwhelm the prospect of hope and to conceal the functional and effective
strategies of human rights claims to ameliorate specific inequalities, which
have also been a part of their history.
The spirit of this book lingers in the gap between dreams of "justice" or
"just causes" and the bloody lawlessness ofthe recent US-led "humanitarian"
wars and between the cosmopolitan aspirations or abstract ideals of universal
humanity and the material reality of the human suffering produced by the
interventions that promise to take us there. This book hears the refrain of
Beyond state policies, such as the US National Security Strategy and President Bush's
addresses that speak of their crusade against "evil" in literal terms, Douzinas also considers
the moral interventionism of the human rights campaigns of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their role in producing empire's "enemy" and justifying the use of force
against them. For this point, he draws on the arguments of Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri that NGOs are fully immersed in the bio-politics of the new imperialism's moral
interventionism. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000) at 36; and see Douzinas, supra note I at 62.
For a brilliant discussion on the processes and effects by which interventionist violence is
legitimatized, while the local other is criminalized and demonized, see Anne Orford, Reading
Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Foree in nternationat Law
(New York; Cambridge University Press, 2003). The insight of Orford's work resonates
throughout Douzinas's text, supra note 1.
Douzinas, supra note I at 228.
Ibid, at 8.

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promises of a peaceful future free of degradation and enslavement, yet sees

how the human rights "victories" are heing drowned in the disaster of the local
people. Reckoning with what David Kennedy calls the "dark sides of virtue,"*
the hook is caught up in its own war of sorts: calling on "good people" to
"defend rights against attacks by fearful and fear-exploiting governments,"
including liberals such as Michael Ignatieff, who have pushed for a "benign
imperialism" or "empire tite" as "the only way of protecting human rights and
humanitarian values in a brutal world."' The deep skepticism of the book's
account gives little, if any, reason to think that such a battle is worth fighting,
much less being possible to win, as long as the compassion, idealism, and
protectionism of human rights advocacy resonates so readily with the interests
and tactics of empire.
Chapter 1 begins with "The End of Human Rights?" and a hard look at
how human rights have "triumphed" as the "only ideology in town." It notes
how human rights have been adoptedor so Douzinas claimsby both Left
and Right, North and South, and rebels and state officials alike" and have
heen used hoth to advance the claims of the most powerless and deployed as a
strategy of power and a normative force of international relations. To account
for these processes, Douzinas begins Chapter 2 by examining the subjective
elements of rights, including the needs they express and the demands they
make for recognition and social inclusion. His point is that human rights do
not betong to humans but, rather, that they construct humans: depending on
how successfully one can mobilize rights in relation to others, they serve to
determine just how "human" one is.'^ Political power simply codifies and
institutionalizes this insight.
Human Rights and Empire reiterates throughout its chapters a maxim that is
long familiar to feminist equality advocacy and women's engagements with
constitutional lawthe fact that "rights have only paradoxes to offer."'^ Such
is the catch phrase famously formulated by Olympe de Gouges, the eighteenthcentury French feminist activist who wrote the Dectaration of the Rights of
Woman and Citizen during the French Revolution and who knew well that
"man's" revolution had little to do with women and that women's access to
political rightsand to the citizenship that remains the underlying condition
of such accessentailed a denial of the very (sexual) difference that she argued
on behalf of. She also knew, as many critical commentators have since
observed, that rights declarations could perhaps provide a remedy for such
9,

10,
11,
12,
13,

Douzinas critically engages with the recent work of David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of
Virtue: Reassessing Inlernalioiuil Humaniiarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004).
Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite (London: Vintage, 2003); and Douzinas, si4pru note 1 at 138,
Douzinas, supra note I at 33,
tbid. at 50,
bid. at 8, 33, 50, 100, 113, 122, 129, 231, and 235,

Vol. 20

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exclusion, even though the "inherent dignity" of the "man" that was
trumpeted by the revolutionaries turned on the fact that this subject excluded
the many individuals (women and slaves, for instance) who lacked it. This
problem is similarly expressed by Hannah Arendt, to whose Origins of
Totalitarianism Douzinas frequently turns, when in the wake of the Second
World War and the newly minted UN Declaration on Human Rights, she
described certain "perplexities of the rights of man" for the countless refugees
who were denied them but who may have needed them most. Although these
rights are "supposedly inalienable," they have "proved to be unenforceable
even in countries whose constitutions were based upon themwhenever
people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state."'''
A consideration of the paradoxes of rights^and the processes of exclusion
that they perform and reproduceremains a focal point in feminist and antiracist engagements with the law and in our ongoing efforts to grapple with the
fact that rights are something that we "cannot not want,"'^ especially for those
who do not yet have them.
Human Rights and Empire draws on such critical insights and contributes
substantially to this ongoing historical conversation about the inherent
quandary of rights. The text frames the problem as follows: built on "endless
exclusions" yet proffering a universal application, the very (paradoxical)
design of international human rights renders them a perfect tactic for the "biopolitics" or bio-power'^ of states and empires, which codify them in
international law as their normative principles and utilize them to facilitate
14.
15.

16.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1994 [1948]) at 290-1.
Gayatri Spivak, Outside the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993) at 45-6,
describing the paradox of liberalism and citing the way of describing liberalism, in Wendy
Brown, "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights," in Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, eds.. Left
LegatismILeft Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 420 at 420. For general
discussions of the "paradox" of rights in varying historical and geopolitical settings, see, for
Europe, Arendt, supra note 14; for France, Joan Scott, Only Parado.xes to Offer: French
Feminists and the Rights of Man (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997); for the United
States, Wendy Brown, "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights," in Brown and Halley, eds., supra
note 15; for Canada, Mary Jane Mossman, "The Paradox of Feminist Engagement with the
Law," in Nancy Mandell, ed.. Feminist Issues: Race. Class and Sexuality, 2nd edition
(Scarborough: Prentice Hall, 1998) 180; and, internationally, Orford, supra note 6, and
Ratna Kapur, "Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Take a Walk on the Dark Side"
(2006) 28 Sydney Law Review 665.
This refers specifically to Michel Foucault's increasingly utilized notion of the "biopower,"
which describes forms of power that produce and control subjects through the management
of human life and the "protection of society." He distinguishes this from "sovereign" or
"disciplinary" forms and technologies of power. See Michel Foucault, "Society Must be
Defended": Lectures al the College de France 1975-1976, edited by Mauro Bertani and
Allesandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003). See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998). Through the figure in classical figure o homo sacer or "bare life,"
the form of life that can be sacrificed with impunity, Agamben demonstrates that, contrary to
what Foucault suggests, bio-politics may well be a tactic of sovereign power and is not
necessarily distinct from it.

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the production, tnanagement, and regulation of human lives and populations.

Tracking the operation and exploitation of these paradoxes of rights in a
contemporary geopolitical framework, Douzinas profiles various moral-legal
features of the "new world order"'^ and, through their explication, broaches a
radical theory of modern imperialism, which exposes it as being similar to the
Utopian cosmopolitanism of the "international" community that graces its
history. Modern imperialism is also characterized by the erosion of national
sovereignty (or at least of the so-called "rogue" or "failed" states or
"repressive regimes") and its re-consolidation and condensation of such lost
sovereign power into a new hegemonic centre, namely a paternalist, protective,
and productive (US) empire that promises peace while launching war. Despite
the weakening of sovereignty, which the discourses of international human
rights and their demands for accountability have always promised was coming,
an "international community" of global governance is not on the horizon.
While the first part of the book explores the paradoxical ways in which the
ideal, transcendent position of human rights has been reversed into tools
of public power and individual desire, the second part assesses the place of
rightsand their legal-moral characteristicsin the constitutive formation of
the new world order, its configurations of political, economic, and military
power, and its harnessing of international law in the interest of imperial
hegemony. As recounted throughout Hutnan Rights and Empire, the paradoxes
are structural and systemicthe contemporary rights agenda has been set by
the great powers, which are the very figures and institutions against which
individual rights are defended.'** An appeal to human rights takes the form ofa
rescue operation of the symbolic, tragic faces of cultural oppression and ethnic
conflict and reduces them to what Wendy Brown calls an "anti-politics,"
which lacks any consideration of the operations of power that produce these
faces or any interest in the collective action that would change their causes.'^
Moreover, rights are exported to the Third World as a form of ethical
consumerism and justification for economic policies by the very state
governments that actively seek to curtail and quash them domestically. As
addressed in Chapter 4, "The Politics of Human Rights," although
declarations of rights once expressed the opposition of revolutionaries to the
very design of the law, these rights have since become the normative tools for
producing sovereign exceptions to the law, giving shape to the "boundless
power of the nation state and its law."^** This power is now writ large as
17.
:8.
19.

:!0.

Douzinas, supra note 1 at 148.

Ihid. at 180.
Ihid. at 84. Wendy Brown. "Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism" (2004) 103(2/3)
South Atlantic Quarterly 453. See also Wendy Brown, "Moralism as Anti-Politics," in Russ
Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds.. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized
Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 368.
Douzinas, supra note I at 98.

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empire's now-normalized exceptionalism, as is manifest in its repeated

justifications for making exceptions to the UN Charter's ban on use of force
against sovereign states; the suspension of domestic rights through policies
warranting the indefinite detention and use of torture against "terrorist"
suspects; and the draconian reforms to criminal procedures and immigration
laws through security certificate schemes, deportations, and extraordinary
renditions, for example.
For the purpose of this study, the most revealing paradox returns Douzinas
to Arendt's insight that human rightsnamely the "universal" guarantees and
entitlements that are granted to "all" by virtue of their humanity, as described
by liberal philosophysimply "do not exist."^' Whatever they are, they have
never been available to humans generally but only to the fortunate citizens
who are tolerated by power and included among dignified "humanity."
Furthermore, they are built on the "endless exclusions" that, by political, legal,
and military means, keep them out of the reach and sight of the most
powerless, the "one-use humans"^^economic migrants, refugees, prisoners
in detention camps, and torture victims. And it is these individuals who most
need them and who are often forced into such situations by economic
and military interventions: "They are just no part; they are the indispensible
precondition of human rights but at the same time the living, dying rather,
proof of their impossibility. The law not only cannot understand the surplus
subject, its very operation prevents the emergence of such subjects."^^
As this summary makes apparent, Douzinas's critical analysis of the
paradoxes of rights elaborates a theoretical framework for understanding the
interrelationif not inseparabilityof various forms of power, which are
expressed negatively through exclusion, domination, exploitation, and appropriation and constitutively through the salvation and protection of vulnerable
life. To account for how these paradoxes are operative in and through the new
imperialism and its lawlessnes, Douzinas takes as a starting point the
Foucauldian hypothesis that modalities of modern power are not reducible
to "negative" or sovereign/monarchical forms that have dominated the
political,theory ofthe past and that speak of power as repressive, restrictive,
and prohibitive. Rather, they are also productive and constitutive of their
subjects, including "humans," through institutional practices of surveillance,
discipline, regulation, and control and, further, as in this instance, through
the protection of life against its internal and external threats. Giorgio
Agamben's analysis of the figure of homo sacer or "bare life" reinforces this
idea. Appearing in the metaphysics of classical Rome, it is a figure that
falls outside of the polis or political life and beyond the purview of the citizen.
21.
22.
23.

Ibid. M 99.
Bernard Ogilvie, cited in Douzinas, supra note 1 at 100.
Douzinas, supra note 1 at 108, citing Jacques Rancire, "Who Is the Subject of the Rights of
Man?" (2004) 103(2/3) South Atlantic Quarterly 297.

180 Booti Reviews j Chroniques bibtiograptiiques

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"ahandoned hy law."^'* This figure (historically incarnated in stateless

refugees, prisoners of war, or targets of colonization and genocide) can be
"sacrificed with impunity," as Agamben and Douzinas characterize them.^^
Nonetheless, this figure is one whose exclusion is the very condition on which
the potis is established, and it is the cause and limit of law, the hare life from
which "man" must separate himself in order to he a citizen of the empire and a
bearer of rights. The point is that social orders past and present invariably
"establish and perpetuate themselves hy rejecting, silencing, and banning
certain others as mad, foreign, criminal, inhuman" and unahle to represent
the universal in whose name inclusion is asserted, and these figures always
haunt the terrain from which they are excluded,^'' Symholic to Douzinas's
critical examination of the philosophy and politics of cosmopolitanism, they
are the reminder that, while human rights might help emancipate people,
they are based on exclusions and serve among the instruments of power to
distinguish expendahle from protectahle life."^ A reminder that a dream
of human rights "for all' is something that can only ever he a promise that has
yet to come.
In one of the few moments that Douzinas explicitly and succinctly
summarizes the objective to this hook, he explains that in examining
the politics and metaphysics of "our age," his leading question is "what
conception of community and of self do political developments at the
international level reflect? Specifically, he asks, what do they indicate about the
rise of a global cosmopolitan community and the waning of sovereignty or
about a new imperial configuration?^** The hook's position is that there is little
difference hetween the two,^^ however much those who applaud the demise of
national sovereignty and identify with the cosmopolitan dreams of universal
rights, world citizenship, and global social processes might insist that they are
not in the same business as those driven hy the imperial interests of capitalist
penetration and economic expansion.
Exploring this question in the second part of the hook, Douzinas sketches a
genealogy of cosmopolitan philosophies, as he does earlier in the hook with
respect to human rights. And, again, this rich historical context reveals the
contemporary configurations of power. He traces the trajectory of cosmopolitan ideals from Cynic and Stoic teachings of universal morality and notions of
just and virtuous conduct to its espousal by the Roman empire as the jus
gentium that was to be binding on all of the empire's subjects. He provides a
historical snapshot of how what was once a philosophy of an ideal world could
24,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29,

Douzinas, supra note 1 at 116,

Agamben, supra note 16 at 133; and Douzinas, supra note 1 at 69,
Douzinas, supra note I at 113,
tbid. at 113,
tbid. at 148,
tbid.

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become "a strategy for world power."^^ Looking at ideas of the

Enlightenment, he tracks this world utopianism through Immanuel Kant's
belief that the cunning of reason would overcome human conflict and lead to
"the perfect civil union of humankind";^' through Hans Kelsen's vision of an
international system of federalism and citizenship; and, fmally, to Jrgen
Habermas's blueprint for cosmopolitan law and the endorsement for the
invasion of Kosovo. Arriving again at the war that then Prime Minister Tony
Blair described as being "fought not for territory but for values,"^^ Douzinas
explains that the point of this story and its historical returns is that the ideal of
a peace-loving international community that transcends national sovereignty
can readily lend itself to an ethos of world domination, showing that the
cosmopolitan impulses are hardly incongruous with imperialism.
Told in these terms and through these sites and voices of Western "man's"
philosophical idealism, what this genealogy elides are the countless and
faceless voices of resistance, those who have nothing to say or do about how
"the world" might ideally be or how a good fight might help get us there; those
who do not count as making history, much less as being human; and those for
whom gaining access to human rights might mean access to food, basic shelter,
or the HIV/Aids medication that is otherwise restricted by the property rights
of imperial pharmaceutical corporations. A genealogy of this silence, were it
possible to air the voices of those who have none, would surely furnish claims
other than these. This history also needs to be written, to tell the tale of how,
and for whom, human rights have failed and what they might still mean for
those who do not, or have not, had them.
As he has previously argued elsewhere, a significant thesis of Human Rights
and Empire concerns the role of violenceand particularly that of warin the
making and reforming of law.^^ Put quite bluntly, war is "the father of states,
violence the midwife of law."^'* Wars impose new sovereigns, states, and
orders, and they suspend existing laws and constitutions and put others in their
place. And these laws carry within them this originary violence (against those it
excludes, sacrifices, and exploits), however much it is masked by selflegitimacy. Such is Anne Orford's insight in Reading Humanitarian
Intervention that "at the heart of the establishment of international law was,
and is, the legitimacy of the violence exercised as sacrifice or punishment of
those constituted as law's savage, barbaric, others."^^ Human rights or
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.

Ibid, at 157.
Ihid. at 160; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated J.C. Meredith (Oxford;
Clarendon, 1985).
Tony Blair, "A New Generation Draws the Line," Newsweek (19 April 1999).
See Douzinas, supra note 4 at 24
Douzinas, supra note 1 at 251; see also Douzinas, supra note 4 at 24.
Orford, supra note 6 at 197. For a fascinating discussion of the colonial foundations of
international law, see also Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of
International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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humanitarian concern for the plight of the savage has always been the
moral gloss of their sacrifice, traces of which imbue international law. As
Douzinas argues, perhaps the greatest normative effect of the recent
humanitarian wars has been the wholesale undermining of existing laws,
not least of which are the constitutions of "conquered countries," the
reformation of which is part of the process of bringing them into the
"international community."-'^ Harnessing cosmopolitan and human rights
idealism to legitimize and justify state violence has facilitated the substantial
reorganization of international legal institutions,^^ including the abrogation
of the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force, the unilateral declarations
of war on sovereign territories, and the UN's recent endorsement of the
doctrine of "responsibility to protect," which provides a moral gloss for
intervention that promises to save the suffering humanity from humanitarian
crises that have yet to come.
Attending to the violent foundations of a new imperial order and its
international law remains a critical exercise, especially for the task of
understanding just what kind of community "we" are after all. In this sense,
as Orford describes it, this community "shares something with those national
or 'tribal' communities against which it constitutes itself -^ the wounding and
killing of its others as an organized and necessary part of its foundation."^**
When all is said and done, we know well that human rightsas imagined by
those who live their paradox, those consigned to "bare life," or those who have
been sacrificed by the violence of empire's capitalist and colonial interests-are
not, properly speaking, the "cause" of war, much less a justification for the
lawlessness and laws born of its violence. As Hilary Charlesworth has noted,
the tens of thousands of faceless forms dying daily from hunger or from HIV/
Aids are actually of little concern to much of international law and certainly
not enough to amount to a crisis of the order ascribed to the states that
harbour "terrorists."^^ However much they speak of a love for suffering
humanity, the so-called "humanitarian" wars of the rising imperialism are
fundamentally utilitarian, driven by a sacrificial logic of neo-liberal capitalism'*'* and by the expansion of capital markets. Human rights simply serve as
the gloss for the violence required to impose them.
In the epilogue, the sliver of hope that Douzinas holds out for the future of
human rights requires, first, that the human-rights-for-export and neo-liberal
capitalism, which are part of the same sacrificial economy and imperial
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.

Douzinas, supra note I at 253-4.

Ihid. at 253-4.
Orford, supra note 5 at 197.
Hilary Charlesworth, "International Law: A Discipline in Crisis" 65 Modern Law Review
377; and Douzinas, supra note I at 193.
Anne Orford, "Beyond Harmonization: Trade, Human Rights and the Economy of
Sacrifice" (2005) Leiden Journal of International Law 179; and Douzinas, supra note 1
at 190.

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project, be severed from each other.'" He calls for an end to human rights that
act as imperialism's moral gloss and as a pursuit of well-meaning khakiwearing saviours. For such rights can promise no emancipation, no social
justice, and no redemption until they are returned as tools to those who are
engaged in the resistance and struggle against domination and control,
including against the moralism of empire.''^ Douzinas's account makes it hard
to see the scenes where these tools might well be already in the hands and
minds of those engaged in political resistance. Were Human Rights and Empire
to divert its gaze from the horizon of Western metaphysics, it might better
afford a glance at how these revolutionary struggles, including those that
oppose the exploits of Western imperialism are all around us. Among others,
activists who are engaged in collective struggles for self-determination, those
who are fighting for the release of prison detainees, those launching rightsbased challenges to archaic discriminatory laws or to the regressive reforms to
immigration and refugee policy that have been conducted in the name of
"security," or those who have worked to extend existing rights to previously
excluded groups, such as sexual minorities, all know well that rights are also
indispensible tools for challenging forms of state-authored domination and
control. We know as well that "human rights" have very different meanings in
different contexts and different usages in different hands, and it remains our
challenge to enable them to be the most meaningful for the most powerless.

41.
42.

Douzinas, supra note I at 293.

/hid.