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What One Sees and How One Files Seeing: Human Rights Reporting,
Representation and Action 1
Claire Moon
Sociology 2012 46: 876
DOI: 10.1177/0038038512451530

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DOI: 10.1177/0038038512451530
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Representation and Action1

Claire Moon
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Abstract
This article argues that the forms through which violence and atrocity are expressed – legal,
statistical and testimonial – are important objects of analysis because credo is manifest in form,
and an examination of form reveals something about the relationship between the ‘world view’ of
human rights organizations and the ‘styles of thought’ that shape and inform their representations.
The article considers what the discursive forms that seem indigenous to human rights and human
rights advocacy both express (legalism, scientism) and repress (historicism), and discusses ways in
which these forms of representation potentially facilitate and inhibit action.

Keywords
human rights activism, human rights reports, ideology, knowledge

The single most important activity that human rights organizations (HROs) undertake to
promote human rights is that of documenting human rights violations. As Orentlicher
puts it, ‘human rights professionals believe that no action is more effective in promoting
governments to curb human rights violations than aiming the spotlight of public scrutiny
on the depredations themselves’ (1990: 84). This strategy – promoting change by report-
ing facts – is, she states, ‘almost elegant in its simplicity’.
Evidence of this foundational credo furnishes the various mandates of human rights
organizations and guidelines adumbrated to counsel them. For example, Amnesty
International (AI) aims to translate facts into change by undertaking ‘research … aimed
at preventing and ending grave abuses of these rights’ (2009a). The Lund-London
Guidelines, which provide professional guidance for HROs on fact-finding and

Corresponding author:
Claire Moon, Department of Sociology/Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics
and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: c.moon@lse.ac.uk

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Moon 877

translating fact-finding missions into human rights reports for wider dissemination, state
that ‘fact-finding … is a crucial vehicle for the implementation of human rights in all
countries or situations under examination’ (2009).2 The driving assumption of this credo
– if only people knew they would act – underpins a key cultural form of the human rights
movement, the human rights report, which is now firmly established as a literary genre
‘with its own rules of style and presentation’ (Dudai, 2006, 783). These rules are gov-
erned by two distinctive duties, documentary and interventionist, which condition their
formal aspects and play a role in the social imaginaries within which they are embedded,
and to which they speak. Put otherwise, reports carry both a descriptive and a prescrip-
tive mandate – they document the world in order to change it – that conditions the ‘objec-
tive structures’ of the text and ‘the interpretive categories or codes’ (Jameson,
2002[1981]: ix) through which they represent violence and social suffering as some-
thing to be acted upon.3
The distinctive discursive codes – legal, statistical and testimonial – that seem, now,
indigenous to human rights reports are what drive the knowledge into action principle and
distinguish reports as genre. They are important objects of analysis because credo reveals
itself in form, and there is a rough homology between the ‘world view’ of HROs and ‘style
of thought’ manifest in the genre (Mannheim: 1991[1936]).4 This is not to suggest that the
relationship between the style of thought and worldview is seamless and uncontested, but
it is to assert that these forms of representation have become stabilized to the point that
they seem ‘natural’ to the discursive architecture characterizing human rights reporting
today; that they have become both institutionalized and constitutive of the institutions
within which they operate.5 Consequently, it is both possible and necessary to excavate
human rights as an idea by considering what its primary aesthetic vehicles express (legal-
ism, scientism) and repress (historicism), because these have consequences for the forms
of commitment, action and justice that HROs both facilitate and obscure. This article thus
confirms a recent assertion that ‘we cannot talk about human rights without talking about
the forms in which we talk about human rights’ (McLennan and Slaughter, 2009: 7) by
calling attention to ‘the vehicles and vocabularies’ through which human rights speak.
Indeed, analysis of the cultural and literary forms through which violence and suffering
are mediated is precisely the kind of distinctive contribution that sociology can make to
the study of human rights because it addresses questions about how cultural forms are
constituted in place and time, for a particular society and purpose. As such this type of
analysis helps to locate, properly and empirically, the universalist claims of human rights
within the specific social, historical and political contexts of its emergence, showing how
these are dependent on, rather than independent of, social particularities. To demonstrate
the constructedness of human rights and its claim to universality does not, however,
require an ironic distance from the subject. Hacking (1999) reminds us that there is also a
potentially emancipatory thrust to this approach, which is suggestive (if not explicitly so)
of different ways of seeing, knowing and acting.
So, the questions animating this article are these: how is the assumption – that know-
ing leads to acting – served by the style of thought intrinsic to the human rights report?
What are the consequences of this style of thought (that is, what does it express and
repress)? And what forms of action (and inaction) does this style of thought engender?
My argument proceeds as follows. The first sections of the article analyse the general

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878 Sociology 46(5)

style of representation that characterizes human rights reports to show how it constructs
a ‘correspondence’ between what is represented and how it is represented. These sections
also identify and investigate the key registers – legal, statistical and testimonial – that are
characteristic of the human rights style of thought. I argue that their claims to objectivity
and universality are, broadly, grounded in their dislocation from historical, political and
broader social interpretations of violence and suffering.6 In illustrating my arguments, I
concentrate primarily (although not exclusively) on reports published by Human Rights
Watch (HRW), AI and the recent Lund-London Guidelines. HRW and AI are key agents,
and their reports constitute some of the central, long established and highly visible exem-
plars of the genre and for this reason merit particular attention. The Lund-London
Guidelines are instructive because they give professional advice on how to maximise the
veracity and persuasiveness of HRO reports, and thus grant insights into the construction
of the knowledge-action nexus within the professional practice of reporting itself.
In the final section of the essay I argue that the frequent absence of context in these
forms of representation has important consequences for the ways in which human rights
violations are perceived, amongst which are unpredictable and contradictory effects on
the consumers of humanitarian communication (who are potential actors in the field of
human rights), at once galvanizing and inhibiting action. I show how these contradictions
cause us to rethink the assumption that knowledge leads to action, which is central to the
practice of human rights reporting specifically, to humanitarian communication more gen-
erally, and to the human rights movement of which it is definitional.

Correspondence Effects
The knowing-acting nexus is partly contingent upon a general style of representation which
conjures a ‘correspondence effect’ between what is represented and how it is represented.
This is attributable to the fact that the influence of HROs throughout the 1970s and the
1980s grew ‘in direct relation to the persuasiveness of their factual reporting’ (Orentlicher,
1990: 134). HROs were then reporting in contexts such as Argentina and Chile where
atrocities were a routine feature of political rule, yet states just as routinely denied their
practice. This made ‘breaking the silence’ imperative, and a premium came to be placed on
the qualities of impartiality, fairness and balance in reporting – namely, political ‘neutrality’
– upon which the persuasive authority of HROs came to be contingent. Human rights
reports are not, however, abstract factual accounts: they are advocacy tools. Yet the regis-
ters of truth deployed by HROs work, to some degree, to obscure this fact and rely, stylisti-
cally, on a ‘correspondence model of truth’. This truth model is marked by stock-in-trade
‘elevator words’ (Hacking, 1999: 22), such as ‘facts’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’. For
example, AI describes its reporting as ‘factually accurate’ and ‘impartial’ (2009b); HRW
conducts ‘accurate fact-finding’, ‘impartial reporting’ (2008a) maintaining a need to ‘ascer-
tain the truth’ and to understand ‘reality’ (2008b); the Lund-London Guidelines promote
‘accuracy’, ‘objectivity’, ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’ and ‘efficacy’:

If a report has been compiled in accordance with these guidelines it indicates that the allegations,
observations and conclusions in it can be reasonably relied upon, thus enhancing the efficacy
and credibility of the report. (2009)

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Moon 879

This statement links the credibility of the report (its claim to knowledge) to its efficacy
(action). In effect, the guidelines advise HROs to maximize the correspondence effect,
and, by extension, the persuasive power of what is presented.
Elevator words are marked by two distinctive attributes which make them operate ‘at
a higher level’ (Hacking, 1999: 23). First, they are ‘circularly defined’ which means they
appear to be self-evident, requiring no further explanation. Second, their meaning
appears to transcend time and space, compounding their authoritative effect. As a conse-
quence, elevator words provide an important moral grounding for the claims made in
human rights reports and are critical to the ‘call for action’ that reports generate. They
serve to make the claims advanced seem irrefutable, morally unambiguous, universal
and timeless. Simultaneously, they comfort us with scientism, confirming the corre-
spondence between our representations and the world ‘out there’. This is important
because, on the one hand the human rights report asserts its correspondence with reality
by virtue of its mimetic authority – ‘this is life’ – and yet this authority carries with it a
moral obligation for changing the reality it represents. As a consequence, the mode of
representation (‘objective’, ‘impartial’) conjoins with the objective of representation
(‘advocacy’, ‘persuasion’) and the mimetic truth style thus works to foster the relation-
ship between knowledge and action.
The next sections of the article move from an analysis of the general style of represen-
tation to an identification and analysis of the three specific truth registers (legal, statisti-
cal and testimonial) that characterize human rights reports and facilitate the relationship
between knowing and acting. Each of these registers corresponds to an aspect of the
knowledge-action nexus. Statistics ‘declare’ a state of affairs and provide incontroverti-
ble ‘proof’ of atrocity. Testimonials add an affective dimension: they testify to the human
suffering behind the data, and make emotional appeals that invoke empathy. This mode
of truth constitutes the core of the appeal to action. Finally, law both frames what is
reported (violence as ‘violation of human rights’), and fulfils the promise that something
can be done, thus closing the gap between distant suffering and action. I characterize
these distinctive truth regimes as declarative (‘this is happening’), affective (‘please do
something about this’) and curative (‘here is the remedy’).

What One Sees:The Optic of International Law

What HROs ‘see’ is framed by international human rights and humanitarian law, which,
frequently, provide the criteria for the mandates determining the ambit of HROs, the
selection of events they investigate, and the practical recommendations they make. A few
prominent examples bear this out. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel cam-
paigns ‘in accordance with standards set … in international law’, noting that ‘torture …
is incompatible with the moral values of democracy and the rule of law’ (2009); HRW’s
mission statement calls upon governments and power holders ‘to end abusive practices
and respect international human rights law’ (2008c). It requires researchers to ‘frame the
violation as it relates to international human rights and humanitarian law’ (HRW, 2008b);
AI demands ‘that all governments and other powerful entities respect the rule of law’
(2009a); and the Lund-London Guidelines advise HROs to ‘reference the applicable
international law’ in order to ‘enhance quality and credibility’ of reporting (2009). Taken

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880 Sociology 46(5)

together, these statements are striking because they seem to suggest that HROs need only
formulate their mandates, methods and recommendations in relation to law, and the qual-
ities of morality, objectivity, quality and credibility are, in turn, injected into the reports
themselves.
Law provides the first and final point of reference for HRO mandates and reports. It
is the first point of reference because mandates are adumbrated with reference to inter-
national human rights and humanitarian law, and because the crucial first step in report-
ing requires the legal definition and classification of the atrocity under scrutiny. Law is
the final point of reference because reports make recommendations with respect to inter-
national law, either by appealing for its application or calling for ‘more law’. Hence,
there is often a logical circularity at work: everything begins and ends with law, which
works to marginalize other interpretations of action. This legal framing is crucial in com-
pleting the ‘knowledge into action’ effect: law provides the answer to the question ‘what
can be done?’
There are several important consequences of note. First, it makes contemporary
human rights advocacy seem ‘naturally’ indivisible from the international legal para-
digm. However, advocacy did not develop in a linear and cumulative relationship with
international law: the relationship is, rather, historical and marked by rupture (Cmiel,
2004). Second, human rights reports invoke the legal framework as their objective
animator, authenticating their core aspiration to impartiality. International human
rights and humanitarian law are conditioned by practices of argumentation that rely for
authority on their self-presentation as divested of interest (Koskeniemmi, 1989). Yet,
this presentation conceals the fact that law is itself a framework for the exercise of
power, which facilitates the switch in control from the political to the legal sphere. It
is thus neither disinterested, nor objective, nor self-evidently superior to other frame-
works of power. Third, law often does little to change the social and political condi-
tions that make violations possible in the first place, making tenuous any special claim
that law makes to preventing atrocities from recurring in the future. Indeed, law treats,
primarily, the violent symptoms rather than the root causes of historically profound
social and political injustice, the remedy for which must, surely, be sought elsewhere,
beyond the realm of technical administration. Yet much human rights advocacy per-
sists in its investment in the ability of law to change social and political reality and to
instantiate the conditions necessary for prevention of repetition of violations in the
future.

How One Files Seeing: Statistical and Testimonial Truth

Regimes
Two further, albeit different, registers of truth carry authoritative power and together
facilitate the knowledge-action nexus: statistical and testimonial. These truth paradigms
also converge to forge a correspondence between what is reported and how it is repre-
sented. Statistical data play a ‘verification’ role and equip the activist with ‘hard facts’
which underpin the moral certainty upon which action must be based. By contrast, victim
and witness testimonials represent the ‘truth of suffering’ in order to make an emotive
appeal that aims to spur action by mobilizing empathy.

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Moon 881

Statistical Knowledge
Statistics play a critical role in the documentation of atrocity because they appear to
deliver ‘a world … purged of value’ (Eagleton, 2009: 20) thus furthering the aim of neu-
trality in reporting. They help to establish the scale, spread and frequency of violations,
and, crucially, to establish whether they are occurring on a scale sufficient to convince us
that violent repression was planned and executed (Orentlicher, 1990: 132). How much
torture? How many victims? How much, how many, how often …? These are the urgent
questions to which answers must reveal themselves in statistical form. Statistics help to
make it difficult for governments to deny that torture and disappearances took place, and
reduce ‘the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse’
(Ignatieff, 1996: 113). The exercise in statistical stockpiling is a characteristic and per-
suasive technique of human rights reporting. Establishing scope, intensity and range is a
first step in demonstrating that a government is not fulfilling its obligations under inter-
national human rights law, and can both constitute supporting evidence in prosecutions
and facilitate the design of ameliorative policies and laws.
Statistics seem so natural a feature of the human rights report, now, that it is worth his-
toricizing their incorporation as a way of penetrating their constitutional power. The bur-
geoning power – visibility, status and numbers – of HROs in the 1980s is inextricably
linked to their turn to statistics in that decade, up until which time human rights reporting
had been dominated by more qualitative assessments of violations.7 Significant symposia
on statistics and human rights simultaneously bore witness to, and helped generate, the
shift to metrics in human rights documentation.8 Calls for measurement spoke, in turn, to a
broader modern faith in the power of statistics to get ‘the facts straight’, provide objective
accounts, and deliver recommendations. This turn was itself driven and endorsed by the
broader epistemological status that statistics enjoy, which is derived from their purported
proximity to the paradigm of natural science: numbers are seen as the ‘bedrock of system-
atic knowledge’ because they appear to be pre- or non-interpretive (Poovey, 1998: xii).9
From the 1980s onwards, statistics were to play a crucial role in human rights advo-
cacy, resulting in a complex reciprocity between the authority of HROs and the metrics
they deployed. This authority resides in two qualities with which statistics historically
have been endowed, and to which HROs aspire: veridical and persuasive. First, the turn
to statistics helped to proclaim the veridicality of the claims of HROs themselves, under-
lining their scientificity and hence authority. Statistics furnish the truth status of human
rights reports by seeming to endow them with objectivity, which in turn consolidates
their credibility and authority, making them appear to be invulnerable to political contro-
versy and contestation. As De Neufville puts it, statistics help to make reports not only
‘appear more objective, but actually to become more objective’ (1986: 696).10 In turn,
this helps HROs to survive the scrutiny of those who might deploy, act upon, or indeed
refute the claims they make. In addition, statistics seem to serve human rights particu-
larly well because their seeming neutrality puts them beyond the ‘local’/‘universal’
impasse that dogs both thinking and practice in human rights. These social consequences
are, however, bound up in the epistemological power of statistics, in which statistical
representation appears to guarantee truth claims. Yet this is a contingent consequence of
the ways in which political economies of truth are characterized by the forms of scien-
tific discourse and the institutions that produce them (Foucault, 1991).

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882 Sociology 46(5)

Second, statistics underscore the connection between knowledge and action: ‘nothing
is more effective than verified counts of specific types of violations in convincing us that
something needs to be done’ (Claude and Jabine, 1986: 565). Statistics persuade us to act
on the world, they invite, indeed incite, us to change it.11 HROs, it is argued, are ‘more
likely to produce the desired condemnation of violations (or changes in policy) when
there are quantifiable standards with which to present data on the attainment or abuse of
rights’ (Claude and Jabine, 1986: 556). And yet, as Durkheim has shown us, statistical
representations also obscure certain realities. For example, the quantification of disap-
pearances in Argentina meant that other, concomitant, violations were concealed: typi-
cally, a person ‘disappeared’ had been kidnapped, interrogated (tortured), and sentenced
(killed), in a violent parody of the regular legal process (Brysk, 1994: 676). Statistical
data make legally codified regularities appear, and irregularities (events that do not yield
to legal codes) disappear. That is to say, they work to reinforce legal outcomes because
they furnish the attempt to establish ‘objective’ legal facts. Statistics, in tandem with
legal codification, construct commensurability across cases and appear to universalize
violence and suffering. Yet neither the particularities of state terror nor the thicker dimen-
sions of social suffering can be captured by a body count: ‘the economistic measurement
of suffering leaves out most of what is at stake’, the narratives, ethnographies, and social
and political histories that cannot be squeezed into an econometric index (Kleinman and
Kleinman, 1997: 15).

Testimonial Knowledge
Victim testimonials are the third characteristic truth regime of human rights reports,
often recounting extreme suffering.12 The normalization of testimonial truth to human
rights reporting is attributable to its broader social importance, which in turn is con-
sequent upon a complex set of social and historical conditions: from the rise of testi-
monial autobiography in the wake of the Holocaust; the post-war rise of the therapeutic
model in various aspects of the administration of liberal states, from education, health
and penal reform (Rieff, 1966); the more recent rise of ‘victimology’ (Elias, 1986) in
domestic restorative justice processes in the UK, USA and Australia; to the privileg-
ing of victim accounts in transitional justice. These contexts together have converged
to authorize the testimonial as a privileged mode of truth, and serve as the backdrop
against which the representation of victim suffering in human rights reports should be
read, interpreted and understood. Victim and witness testimonies service a number of
core functions in human rights research: they seem to restore the human subject to
technical accounts of horror, and thus redeem human rights reports from more tech-
nocratic schemes of knowledge; they claim to have both a probative and therapeutic
value; and they aim to elicit emotional responses from readers in order to promote
action.
Testimony invites a physical and emotional proximity to suffering, making it more
palpable. It aims to engender an emotional response in the reader in order that s/he might
be moved to act. Testimonies help to translate knowledge into action by, as AI puts it,
mobilizing both ‘outrage’ and ‘hope’ in its supporters (2009c). As Seu puts it, HROs are
‘animated by the hope that by provoking the emotional responses of compassion and

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Moon 883

empathy, people would become involved with the fight against human rights abuses’
(2003: 183).13 Reports sometimes deliver victim testimonials in italics, forging a formal
relationship between aesthetics and action. They deliver to the page immediacy, urgency,
a sense of ‘here and now’, of terror in real time: terror that the reader is being implored
to stop. This appearance renders a stark visual counterpoint to the rational, legal-scien-
tific framework – statistical tables, legal conventions – within which they are enclosed.
HROs also charge testimonial knowledge with both a probative and a therapeutic
value. This is confirmed by HRW’s methodology statement on the practice of interview-
ing victims and witnesses:

… the principles by which Human Rights Watch conducts interviews with victims and witnesses
are standard … guiding principles, such as the need to ascertain the truth, to corroborate the
veracity of statements … to remain impartial … Some of the most commonly employed
techniques … are to conduct interviews in private settings … and focus the interview on the
details of what occurred. Conducting interviews in private helps to avoid false statements,
exaggeration and conjecture by ensuring interviewees make independent statements.
Researchers will always attempt to ask other witnesses and victims questions about the same
incidents, attempting to corroborate factual details, confirm witness accounts, expose
exaggerations, or discount unverifiable statements … By focusing on details such as ages,
names, locations, times and other descriptions, researchers can identify false or misleading
statements … Asking interviewees to repeat or clarify information that they have given earlier
in an interview is another technique used to expose false statements … Our researchers are
careful to avoid re-traumatizing people who have suffered serious abuses. They … are trained
to communicate with sensitivity … in addition to understanding the reality of what has occurred,
Human Rights Watch interviews victims and witnesses in order to give them an opportunity to
have their voices and stories reach a wider audience. (2008b)

Here, HRW wants to align itself with and simultaneously distinguish itself from a court
of law. This is due to a conflicting imperative at work: the victim interview constitutes
both ‘hard evidence’ and ‘therapy’. On the one hand, HRW needs to demonstrate the
forensic perspicuity of its practices: the interview data must stand up in a court of law,
hence the description of interviewing techniques more familiar in a policing or legal
context. This description helps to establish that HRW’s procedures are objective, impar-
tial and designed to elucidate the truth. On the other hand, it wants to demonstrate its
attentiveness to the potentially re-traumatizing effects that such an investigation might
incur. Here we can see the influence of therapeutic truisms that have more recently
become the common currency of humanitarian practices (Moon, 2009; Pupavac, 2004),
to which the claim to ‘give voice’ to victims is a striking example. This idea has gained
particular credence in the context of transitional justice processes where victim testimo-
nies are deemed the privileged sites of truth production.
There are several problems with these claims. First, it is not always possible to trans-
late terror into story because its experiential structure either defies narrative re-ordering
(Scarry, 1985) or resists narration because shame, stigma and other social consequences
are contingent on telling. Victims of rape, for example, might be stigmatized because
they are deemed to bring the community into ill-repute. These conditions place limita-
tions on the quality of the truth that the reporter claims to advance, and the alleged

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884 Sociology 46(5)

therapeutic value that giving testimony carries. Second, victims have complained about
the way in which their stories have been appropriated, commodified and circulated with-
out their consent by human rights entrepreneurs (Ross, 2003). Far from being ‘given
voice’, some have complained that they have lost control over their stories. Third, there
is a hierarchy of relations implicit in HRW’s account, and the passivity of the victim is
reinforced: their opportunity to speak, to reach a wider audience, must be ‘granted’ by
the human rights reporter. This is one way in which human rights work ‘gets pleasure’,
by ‘making the victim speak and thereby be human again’ (Lemaitre, 2007: 16). That
said, identity categories such as ‘victim’ carry both repressive and productive potential.
Hacking captures something of these contradictory effects through the idea of the ‘loop-
ing effect’ through which persons wittingly interact with and adopt certain subject cate-
gories, for example ‘refugee’, in order to pursue certain ends (Hacking, 1999).
These values – probative and therapeutic – do not have equal weight. HRW’s state-
ment, in which ‘factual’ truth is privileged, reveals that whilst testimonies ostensibly
serve to render visible the subjective experience of violence, they are subservient to its
attempt to engender an ‘objective’ account of ‘reality’. Testimonials serve to bolster the
truth of allegations already statistically recorded, to provide verification of already estab-
lished technical evidence, to maximize ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’, and to eliminate
‘false statements, exaggeration and conjecture’, upon which, critically, their credibility
relies. This credibility is, in turn, contingent upon the violation being codified in legal
terms and upon it being stripped of contextual information that might suggest a particular
political proclivity on the part of the reporting HRO. As such, the claim to objectivity and
universality is grounded in the dislocation of testimony from the historical, political and
broader social interpretations of violence and suffering. The inclusion of testimonies in
human rights reports thus preserves and consolidates the scientific status of the report
(Wilson, 1997). Victim statements are meticulously pared down, stripped of any infor-
mation – social and especially political – that might confer meaning on the reported
violence. They appear as abstract, universal, timeless accounts that rely for effect on
being elevated above all contextual interpretation. The consequence of this is that the
structural conditions and consequences of violence are rarely actually raised and
addressed (Dudai, 2009; Mamdani, 1998; Moon, 2008).

The ‘Hubris of the Zero Point’:14 Consequences of

Decontextualization and Universalism
The ability of reports and organizations to ‘survive scrutiny’ has come to rely, generally,
on HROs evacuating reports of detailed historical, social and political context and on the
representation of social and political violence as a technical and legally codified sequence
of ‘gross violations of human rights’. Cohen remarks with customary acuity on this pro-
clivity: ‘decontextualization’ … is ‘the deliberate result of the human rights credo that no
context … can ever justify the violations of universal prohibitions’ (Cohen cited in
Wilson, 1997: 149). This alerts us to the idea that credo is tied to form and that cultural
forms are regulatory, allowing some ideas, histories and politics to travel whilst curtail-
ing others. Decontextualization thus represses the real conditions of political violence in
order to service ‘objectivity’ and ‘universalism’, which puts a number of crucial issues at

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Moon 885

stake. First, it draws attention away from social and political issues such as class or eth-
nic power, with the effect that violence remains virtually incomprehensible, an ‘irrational
outburst devoid of meaning’ (Wilson, 1997: 148). It follows that decontextualization is
mystificatory: it conceals real material antagonisms between social and political groups,
rendering violence unintelligible. This consequence is revealed through a comparison
with the appearance of a similar, but deliberately historicized, regime of truth in a num-
ber of truth commission reports, whose aim is not to mobilize action but to understand
the past in order to address and ‘move on’ from it. This demonstrates the ways in which
the genre, properly historicized, can service very different aims.
A second consequence of this proclivity is that it obscures the fact that human rights
violations are the symptoms and not the cause of profound and enduring social inequali-
ties and injustice, which international law is ill-equipped to address. The causes of vio-
lence, suffering and injustice thus remain invisible to law’s optic. Revelation of the
broader contexts of violence might in fact lead away from rather than towards law, in
pursuit of amelioration, and also might require wider social and political responsibility
for violence and suffering.
A third and related consequence concerns the knowledge-action nexus. Whilst the
effects of reporting violations remain generally ‘unknown and unmonitored’ (Cohen,
1996: 518), some recent studies can be drawn upon, and their implications extended, to
speculate on the assumed causal ecology between the two. These studies render a mixed
verdict, however, and lead me, finally, to make two observations to advance the argu-
ment that the dehistoricized mode of truth indigenous to human rights reports and to
other forms of humanitarian communication generates contradictory consequences,
forms of action and inaction, which problematize the knowing-acting doctrine in spe-
cific ways.
My first assertion is that dehistoricization can serve to reinforce the knowing-acting
nexus, albeit to problematic effect. The success of the ‘Save Darfur’ campaign in the
USA is testimony to the persuasive and mobilizational power of numbers, demonstrating
the importance of technical, statistical knowledge to popular action. Here, the public bat-
tle for and against the application of the genocide label was fought on statistical grounds.
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times columnist most closely associated with raising
awareness about genocide in Darfur, posted a ‘genocide counter’ on his website with a
running total of the dead. The success of the campaign can only be understood in the
context of popular rather than legal interpretations of genocide, a consequence of the
Genocide Convention’s historical conditions, which invest statistics with a special power
as an affective animator. However, Mamdani argues, the post-Rwanda mantra of ‘saving
before it is too late’ that drove the Save Darfur campaign requires that we ‘act before
seeking to understand’ (2009: 3). Mamdani shows how the Save Darfur campaign
advanced an abstract account of political violence, concentrating on the numbers killed
rather than on the history and politics of the region. It promoted the labelling of political
violence as genocide, which in itself begged the ‘pursuit of revenge as punishment’
against Sudan’s President al-Bashir (2009: 8). This call, Mamdani argues, was based on
a misunderstanding of the situation (an effect of abstraction) and threatened to worsen
political violence with the effect that Save Darfur ‘must … bear some of the blame’ for
delaying amelioration of the situation. His argument recalls, in a different key, Sontag’s

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assertion that ‘moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action’
(2003: 105).
My second, and contradictory observation emerges from Cohen and Seu’s studies of
responses to humanitarian appeals (Cohen, 1996, 2001; Cohen and Seu, 2002; Seu, 2003,
2011). Their research is animated by a question invoked in the opening gambit of Cohen’s
States of Denial (2001) in which a ‘nice middle class couple’ are depicted breakfasting
on coffee and croissants whilst browsing the weekend papers, concealed in the pages of
which are a sheaf of humanitarian appeals. What, Cohen asks, does this information do
to the croissant eaters, and what do they do with it? Their research demonstrates that
consumers of humanitarian communication often engage complex strategies of denial in
order to avoid responding to such appeals. In place of action they discover detachment,
apathy, denial, self-justification. They discover a particular suspicion of the effort to
invoke guilt, compassion and empathy: the ways in which HROs try to ‘move you
beyond knowing by moving you to feel’ (Cohen and Seu, 2002: 189). In their investiga-
tion respondents drew upon a stock set of ‘bystander alibis’ that justify detachment from
the issues – ‘it’s just one thing after another’, ‘it will just go back to how it’s always
been’, ‘it’s always gone on, that’s just the way it is’ – which reflect a range of culturally
acceptable responses to information about violence and suffering. These range from
expressions about human nature (‘they have been doing this kind of thing to each other
since the beginning of time’), to cynicism about the work of NGOs (‘they just want our
money’), to culturally acceptable justifications of selfishness (‘it’s not my problem’).
These ideological justifications masquerade as ‘common sense’.
These findings suggest something else of interest: the way in which the ‘compassion
fatigue’ thesis has turned from being a description of a condition, to a justificatory dis-
course of inaction. However, this ‘apathy’ has its roots in helplessness rather than indif-
ference and over-exposure (Sontag, 2003: 90–1), and leads me to extend the analysis
presented in Cohen and Seu’s careful catalogue of the forms of ‘denial’ to argue that this
helplessness is in part a consequence of the generic style of representation that HROs
deliberately advance: abstract, universal, timeless, decontextualized. Decontextualization
itself creates the effect that ‘this has always gone on’, that ‘it will always go on’, that
there are people towards whom ‘this kind of thing will always happen’, that ‘nothing will
change’. As a consequence, this deliberate style of thought potentially debilitates under-
standing and in its place generates helplessness and inaction.
Thus the absence of context in the representation of violence and suffering has unpre-
dictable and contradictory effects on the consumers of such knowledge, and these con-
tradictions force us to rethink the belief – that knowledge leads to action – central to the
practice of human rights reporting specifically, to humanitarian communication gener-
ally, and to the human rights movement of which it is characteristic. Whilst the dehistori-
cized genre of humanitarian communication serves the governing protocols – objectivity
and universalism – of human rights representation and advocacy, it is also a source of
disconnection from social suffering, thus potentially debilitating activism, or promoting
courses of action that are based on a misunderstanding of the events under representa-
tion. What all of this suggests is that it is by no means obvious that the style of thought
‘natural’ to the genre leads to the kind of action we might assume it to promote, which in
turn begs us to recognize the complexity of, and investigate further, the social and
political potential of human rights representations.

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Moon 887

Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was first presented at the international conference Human Rights and
the Social: Making a New Knowledge, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 4–6
November 2009. I would like to thank Anthony Woodiwiss for his kind invitation to that conference
and for his helpful comments, and other participants in the conference for their thoughts on this paper.

Notes
1 The title is adapted from a note in Jason Rhoades’ installation ‘The Creation Myth’ (1998),
http://openfileblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/jason-rhoades-creation-myth.html.
2 Whilst it might be argued that fact-finding is distinct from the practice of reporting, the Lund-
London Guidelines conflate the two and see them as mutually constitutive rather than distinct.
The Guidelines provide advice for HROs on fact-finding missions and simultaneously on
translating fact-finding into report writing. Reports are treated by the Guidelines as indis-
solubly linked to fact-finding: reports emerge as central artefacts of fact-finding exercises. As
such, fact-finding and report-writing are mutually constitutive since what constitutes ‘robust-
ness’ and ‘objectivity’ in report writing is carried over into the methodology by which fact-
finding is carried out, and vice versa.
3 Attention to form risks over-determining the object of enquiry but, in the spirit of Jameson’s
work, this analysis requires that we contend with the conditions of emergence of cultural and
literary forms in order to explore their (contingent) regulatory force.
4 The theoretical assumptions that underpin this argument, although not the object of the analy-
sis, are rooted in the insights generated by Mannheim’s work on ideology, world views and
cultural products and Jameson’s work on ideology and literary form. These frames are aug-
mented by insights from other theorists central to the sociology of knowledge (Foucault,
Hacking and Poovey).
5 This is also not to suggest that the current, stabilized, forms of representation have not under-
gone contestation within HROs, but they are dominant amongst the settled ways in which
violence and suffering are represented.
6 The lack or presence of historical narratives can vary depending on the topic and country, and
can be more prominent in some reports than in others. However, where context does appear, it
is often subordinate to the core style of thought marked by the particular truth regimes I set out
here.
7 Cmiel testifies to the increased visibility and power of HROs in the 1980s when they engaged
with an agenda – health rights, women’s rights, social and economic rights, indigenous rights
– much expanded upon than that of the 1970s. During the 1980s the end of the Cold War marked
a reinvigorated interest in international law, renewing the connection with the UN for many
HROs.
8 Significant examples include symposia organized by the American Statistical Association (1984),
the International Statistical Institute (1985), the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (1986), and Human Rights Quarterly’s special issue on statistics (1986).
9 A distinctive modern history emerging in 19th-century social management and reform under-
pins the contemporary scientific status of statistics (Poovey, 1998). Statistics opposed other
‘pre-modern’ discourses – rhetorical and religious – and came to be equated with the values
conditioning modern knowledge, securing the schism between fact and value, measurement
and interpretation.
10 This recalls Weber’s famous argument that Verstehen could not be underpinned by ‘intuition’
alone, but required the establishment of statistical laws (Weber, 1978[1956]: 10–12). Weber
implied that ‘Verstehen is something that is logically incomplete and needs supplementing by
… statistics’ (Winch, 2008[1958]: 106).

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888 Sociology 46(5)

11 Statistics perform two epistemological functions: that of objective measurement, and evi-
dence of the validity of the argument being advanced, both of which are preconditions of
knowing about and acting on the world (Poovey, 1998). Numbers have long been harnessed
to persuasion precisely because of their veridical power, evidenced by their historical service
to law and social policy, a relationship that is heavily evident in human rights work where law,
numbers and social progress are intimately entwined.
12 So normalized is the use of testimony in the genre that there is sometimes little reflection by
report writers on the purpose of its inclusion (Dudai, 2009: 261). This lack of reflection is
often the consequence of ‘socialization’ and unspoken rules within organizations.
13 Emotion ‘is not action per se, but it is the inner energy that propels us toward an act’ (Illouz,
2007: 2–3).
14 Castro-Gómez (2007).

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890 Sociology 46(5)

Claire Moon is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Human Rights in the Department of
Sociology/Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics and
Political Science. Her fields of interest include transitional justice, truth commissions
(South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in particular), atrocity and social
suffering, forgiveness in politics, war trauma and its therapeutic management, and knowledge
in human rights.
Date submitted July 2011
Date accepted April 2012

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