The Universal Periodic Review As A Public Audit Ritual: An Anthropological Perspective On Emerging Practices in The Global Governance of Human Rights

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'The Universal Periodic Review as a public audit ritual: An anthropological

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The Universal Periodic Review as a public

audit ritual
An anthropological perspective on emerging practices
in the global governance of human rights
jane k. cowan
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a mechanism established to provide

an alternative to the ‘politicisation’ and the ‘naming and shaming’ practices
of its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, has now entered its
second cycle. It has reached the point in its institutional life where people
are asking ‘does it work?’ in relation to its explicit task of improving human
rights on the ground. As an anthropologist studying the UPR, I pose a
different question. I ask: ‘what is it?’ and by extension, ‘what does it do?’ and
‘what is the nature of its effects?’. Whereas the UPR’s ‘effectiveness’ is a
subject of intense interest, with much attention so far focused on recom-
mendations and their implementation,1 I wish to argue in this chapter that
I want to thank Hilary Charlesworth, Emma Larking, Julie Billaud, Sally Engle Merry, Eleni
Papagaroufali and, especially, Charles Gore, for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of
this chapter. Although I do not engage directly with his argument in this article (as I hope to
do so in a future work), I also want to express appreciation for Shane Chalmers’ stimulating
intervention which commented directly on and further developed ideas from my presenta-
tion during the conference that preceded this volume: Shane Chalmers, ‘The “Call and
Answer” of the Universal Periodic Review: Against “Ritualism”?’ Regarding Rights Blog, 22
February 2013, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/regarding-rights/.
1
See, among others, Christian Tomuschat, ‘Universal Periodic Review: A New System of
International Law with Specific Ground Rules?’ in Ulrich Fastenrath et al. (eds.), From
Bilateralism to Community Interest: Essays in Honour of Judge Bruno Simma (Oxford
University Press, 2011) pp. 609–28; Leanne Cochrane and Katherine McNeilly, ‘The
United Kingdom, the United Nations Human Rights Council and the First Cycle of the
Universal Periodic Review’ (2013) 17(1) International Journal of Human Rights 152;
Edward R. McMahon, ‘The Universal Periodic Review: A Work in Progress – An
Evaluation of the First Cycle of the New UPR Mechanism of the United Nations
Human Rights Council’ in Dialogue on Globalisation Report (Geneva: Friedrich Ebert
Stiftung, September 2012).
42
the upr as a public audit ritual 43

the effects of the UPR are both wider and deeper than a list of recommen-
dations which may be accepted or rejected, and implemented or ignored.
The chapter draws on an ethnographic study of the UPR that I carried
out, in collaboration with Julie Billaud, which sought to explore the
social processes and contested meanings of the UPR in the final year of
its first cycle, which ended in October 2011. Methodologically, our study
uses primarily ethnographic methods. However, it also situates the UPR
within a longer-term historical context of international oversight of
states’ policies toward citizens’ rights and protections.2 Conceptually,
the study is underpinned by ongoing anthropological, and wider inter-
disciplinary, debates on human rights as a global social practice, and on
an interdisciplinary literature on ‘audit culture’. Drawing on these two
arenas of discussion, in autumn 2009 I proposed to approach the UPR as
a ‘public audit ritual’.3 This intuition has turned out to be productive.
The three public moments of UPR – the three-hour review (the UPR
Working Group), which is the UPR’s most visible element, the Adoption
of the Report and, finally, the one-hour Adoption several months later in
the Human Rights Council plenary – can indeed be seen as an emergent
public audit ritual. Moreover, this way of conceptualising the UPR
provides important insights into the broad question set out by this
volume’s editors, namely: ‘How does the UPR function as a regulatory
mechanism?’.
The chapter is organised in four sections. First, I set out the elements
of the anthropological perspective which I use. Secondly, I discuss what
it means to frame the UPR as a public audit ritual and why such an
approach can be potentially more productive than seeing the mechanism
merely as a peer review or a public performance. Thirdly, I outline in
skeletal form how the UPR functions as a public audit ritual. This
involves close attention to how actors produce the UPR and how the
UPR, in turn, has effects for actors. It also involves attention to the ways
in which the public audit ritual produces a new political field which,
together with the public ritual that takes place in Geneva, constitutes an
evolving structure which constrains and enables actors’ practices.
Finally, I ask what the UPR disables or disallows: what is left off the
2
Jane K. Cowan, ‘Before Audit Culture: A Genealogy of International Oversight of Rights’
in Birgit Müller (ed.), The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy-Making in Multilateral
Organisations (London: Pluto Press, 2013) pp. 103–33.
3
In a research funding application to the British Academy, International Human Rights
Monitoring at the Reformed United Nations Human Rights Council: An Ethnographic and
Historical Study (December 2009), subsequently awarded.
44 ritual, ritualism and the upr

agenda, and what cannot be said or cannot be heard in the context of its
discourses, modalities and processes.
An anthropological perspective on the UPR

Most enquiries into the UPR so far, in both the scholarly and the grey
literature, start from a position ‘inside’ what Boaventura de Sousa Santos
calls ‘the governance matrix’.4 As participants or analysts (or both), the
authors are ‘inside’ the technocratic, instrumentalist logic of the interna-
tional law system, embracing its pragmatist, problem-solving orienta-
tions. Their question is ‘how well does the UPR work in improving
human rights on the ground?’ and ‘how could it work better?’. The
question is posed from within a discursive terrain established by a vast
‘compliance’ literature that measures state commitment to, and compli-
ance with, international human rights standards. The literature also tries
to determine reasons for non-compliance (e.g., insincerity, lack of polit-
ical will, lack of capacity, etc.) and explores which methods, and in what
combination, are the most promising for eliciting compliance. Thus,
these scholars examine the efficacy of approaches ranging from coercion,
threats of sanctions, and offers of reward, persuasion, socialisation or
exclusion.5 A central trend in the small but growing body of research on
the UPR asks whether the move ‘from naming and shaming to
cooperation’,6 or ‘from a blame culture to a learning culture’,7 will
improve compliance with the international human rights regime. What
4
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Beyond Neoliberal Governance: The World Social Forum
as Subaltern Cosmopolitan Politics and Legality’ in Boaventura de Sousa Santos and
César A Rodríguez-Garavito (eds.), Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a
Cosmopolitan Legality (Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 29–62 at 37.
5
Some significant texts within a wide literature include Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp and
Kathryn Sikkink (eds.), The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic
Change (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Oona A. Hathaway, ‘Do Human Rights
Treaties Make a Difference?’ (2002) 111(8) Yale Law Journal 1935; Heather Smith-
Cannoy, Insincere Commitments: Human Rights Treaties, Abusive States and Citizen
Activism (Washington, DC: University of Georgetown Press, 2012); Emilie M. Hafner-
Burton, Making Human Rights a Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2013).
6
Elvira Dominguez-Redondo, ‘The Universal Periodic Review: Is there Life Beyond
Naming and Shaming in Human Rights Implementation?’ (2012) New Zealand Law
Review 673.
7
This phrase is taken from John Braithwaite, Regulatory Capitalism (London: Edward
Elgar, 2008) p.150 and is cited in Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking, ‘Introduction’.

drives this research is the desire to find out how the existing system
works in order to make it work better.
By contrast, as an anthropologist I am stepping outside this gover-
nance matrix, to ask a different question. I am not asking: ‘does the UPR
work?’ or ‘how well does it work?’ (that is, in terms of its explicitly stated
aims and objectives). Rather, I take up the question: ‘how does the UPR
function as a regulatory mechanism?’. This falls within the context of a
more open question: ‘how does the UPR work?’ and even, taking a few
steps backward: ‘what is the UPR?’. These questions prompt a number of
subsidiary questions: what does the UPR ‘process’ – that untidy and
unruly ‘assemblage’8 of people, objects, texts and utterances that extends
across time and across space – consist of? How do people and things
together produce the UPR? Who speaks and how? Through what dis-
courses and what practices, using what technologies, in reference to what
relationships, in what spaces? What gets put into the UPR process? What
shapes and forms does it have to squeeze into in order to be put in? And
what gets left out? I am investigating not only how different human
actors are trying to intervene in the UPR and what they want to achieve,
but also asking how clocks, queues, bicycles, badges, cell phones, internet
portals, simultaneous translation, NGO fact sheets, speakers’ lists and
the upr-info.org database, among other things, ‘act’ to invite, shape,
channel or block those human efforts. Although I see the UPR mecha-
nism as contested and evolving, I am interested in what it ‘does’, and
especially what it enables and constrains.
I approach the UPR as a ‘public audit ritual’, but in investigating this, I
have attempted to grasp the UPR process holistically, trying not to
prejudge what might be important. My colleague, Julie Billaud, and I
used the diverse toolkit of ethnographic methods: participant-
observation, interviews, reading and analysing documents and following
how they were produced. We sat in Salle XX at the Palais des Nations
watching dozens of reviews, attended side events, special events and
occasional celebrations, we spoke with and interviewed visiting civil
society activists, Geneva-based and visiting NGO staffers, ambassadors
and other members of diplomatic delegations, academics and members
8
Coined by Giles Deleuze, the term has been used in the work of Bruno Latour to refer to
an emergent and dynamic composite of human and non-human elements whose multiple
associations between elements must be discovered through social research, rather than
assumed. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network
Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005).

of the Secretariat. Julie also spent three months as an intern in the
Secretariat helping to produce UN documents for the UPR. We watched,
listened, asked questions and also paid attention to our own senses and
experiences, including, for instance, of excitement, anxiety, sleepiness
and boredom. We wanted to find out at a very practical level how
documents, such as the UN stakeholders’ report or the carefully con-
structed country statements, got produced, as well as to follow argu-
ments about ‘procedure’. Because we sought to get at least a glimpse of
UPR as a national process, Julie travelled to Belgium and I to Greece to
talk to individuals in government ministries, NHRIs and NGOs involved
in discussing and preparing those countries’ first reviews. We then
closely followed these reviews, and others, in Geneva in May 2011.
Although we adopted a methodologically open stance toward the
UPR, our approach and key questions were nonetheless shaped by
my, and other anthropologists’, work since the mid-1990s on human
rights as a global social practice. With the post-Cold War expansion of
international and transnational human rights regimes, many of the
communities that anthropologists had traditionally lived among and
studied – landless peasants, indigenous groups, ethnic minorities and
others – were increasingly articulating claims using a language of rights.9
In an earlier time, anthropological efforts had been focused on explain-
ing and often defending cultural particularity in the face of a perceived
hegemonic universalism of human rights, and had thus became trapped
within the terms of the cultural relativism versus universalism debate.
This new situation, however, compelled anthropologists to consider this
globalised discourse of human rights as an object of ethnographic study,
and to explore how universal concepts such as human rights were being
taken up in local struggles: how they were being mobilised, vernacular-
ised, resisted, reinterpreted and transformed.10 Moreover, anthropolo-
gists began to look at the diverse locations, between the local and the
global, among which ideas, activists, funding and claims themselves
circulated.11 Although anthropologists remain interested in the
9
See, e.g., Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Richard A. Wilson (eds.),
Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
10
Jane K. Cowan, ‘Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights’ (2006) 108(1) American
Anthropologist 9.
11
Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (eds.), The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking
Law Between the Global and the Local (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Richard
A. Wilson and Jon P. Mitchell (eds.), Human Rights in Global Perspective:
Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements (London: Routledge, 2003).

disjunctions between global norms and local understandings, they are
also complicating the ‘local’ by showing it to be less consensual than
previously assumed. They are paying more attention to processes of
‘translation’.12 And they are calling for greater attention to the ways
that rights are both enabling and constraining: that is, to the ways that
rights processes require claims to be framed and articulated in order to
be heard.13
These questions are relevant not only to human rights processes ‘on
the ground’ but also to those occurring in international and regional
institutions. These institutions are, in fact, hubs of transnational pro-
cesses. The present study thus extends a small but growing area of work
by anthropologists on the everyday practice of human rights in Geneva,
Strasbourg and New York City.14 It arises, too, from my historical work
examining the inter-war minority treaty supervision at the League of
Nations. In this area I have been exploring how irresolvable disagree-
ments over the ‘nationality’, and thus minority status of the Macedonian
region’s Slavic-speakers, impeded implementation of internationally
agreed minority rights and protections.15 Following the mundane
bureaucratic, institutional and administrative activities, as well as
diverse social interactions, which collectively contribute to making
human rights real in the world, anthropologists have been keen to
show the extent to which international institutions are profoundly
contested spaces even though they routinely deploy a language of
12
See, especially, Sally Engle Merry, ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism:
Mapping the Middle’ (2006) 108(1) American Anthropologist 38.
13
‘Introduction’ to Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Richard A. Wilson,
Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
pp. 1–26 at 11 and passim; see also Cowan, ‘Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights’,
n. 10 above.
14
See, e.g., Annelise Riles, The Network Inside Out (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2001); Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence:
Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2006); Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, Who Believes in Human Rights? Reflections on
the European Convention (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tobias Kelly, This Side of
Silence: Human Rights, Torture and the Recognition of Cruelty (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
15
See, e.g., Jane K. Cowan, ‘Who’s Afraid of Violent Language? Honour, Sovereignty and
Claims-making at the League of Nations’ (2003) 3(3) Anthropological Theory 271; Jane
K. Cowan, ‘The Supervised State’ (2007) 14(5) Identities: Global Studies in Culture and
Power 545; Jane K. Cowan, ‘The Success of Failure? Minority Supervision at the League
of Nations’ in Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Tobias Kelly (eds.), Paths to International
Justice: Social and Legal Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2007) pp. 29–56;
Cowan, ‘Before Audit Culture’, n 2 above.

harmony.16 Any such institution brings together a wide range of actors,
each differently positioned within it and with varying degrees of power
and agency, who understand its purposes differently, invest it with
diverse hopes and dreams, and attempt to use it for individualised
purposes and projects. Yet each institution has a structure and is the
site for a set of practices and languages which have a momentum of their
own.
The concern with practice and contestation in anthropological work
on rights has recently been echoed by the political philosopher, Charles
Beitz. He has argued that it is wrong to think about human rights ‘as if
they had an existence in the moral order that can be grasped independ-
ently of their embodiment in international doctrine and practice’.17
Seeing the human rights system as a ‘precautionary apparatus’18 set up
within a society of states, in which ‘human rights are standards for
domestic institutions whose satisfaction is a matter of international
concern’,19 Beitz has characterised human rights as an ‘emergent’ prac-
tice. By this he means that ‘there is disagreement about all its main
elements – for example, about the content of its norms, the eligible
means for their application and enforcement, the distribution of respon-
sibilities to support them, and the weight to be accorded to consider-
ations about human rights when they come into conflict with other
values’.20 My study of the UPR builds on this interdisciplinary conver-
gence of attention upon human rights as an emergent and, indeed,
essentially contested global social practice.
The UPR as a public audit ritual

The UPR is a product of political compromise, and thus has multiple and
contradictory elements. It is also an evolving mechanism: ‘a work in
progress’. Nonetheless, it is meant to improve the human rights situation
within countries through a structured process of international dialogue
based on consensually agreed fundamental principles. According to the
Institution Building Package attached to Human Rights Council
Resolution 5/1, the UPR is envisaged as a ‘cooperative process’ in
which each state’s human rights situation should be reviewed in an
16
Birgit Müller (ed.), The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy-Making in Multilateral
Organisations (London: Pluto Press, 2013).
17
Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 7.
18
Ibid. p. 131. 19 Ibid. p. 128. 20 Ibid. pp. 9–10.

‘objective, transparent, non-selective, constructive, non-confrontational
and non-politicised manner’ that guarantees ‘universal coverage and
equal treatment of all states’.21 Constructed in explicit opposition to
the ‘naming and shaming’ approach of its predecessor, the UPR has
been described as ‘a soft governance accountability mechanism . . . [that]
uses peer pressure to influence members to adjust their national practi-
ces to conform with shared ideas as to how best to manage human rights
in today’s society’.22 Although the UPR is variously understood as a ‘peer
review’, a ‘periodic review’ and, more informally, as an ‘exam’, I believe
that it is useful to view the three public moments of the UPR as elements
of a ‘public audit ritual’. What does this mean and what is illuminated
when one adopts this lens?
Why audit culture?

The analytical literature that so far exists on the UPR overwhelmingly
remains within the ‘governance matrix’. That is, its central concern is to
assess the degree to which the UPR ‘works’ as an accountability mech-
anism in addressing and overcoming the flaws of the previous system.
My intention, by contrast, is to examine the UPR through the lenses of
critical anthropologies of human rights and of recent interdisciplinary
work on ‘audit culture’. This arena of discussion falls within a wider
literature inspired by Foucault’s work on governmentality, which aims to
understand the new ways that power operates within contemporary
practices of ‘good governance’.23 The lens provided by the work on
audit culture enables me to critically interrogate the UPR’s own self-
description and reframe it theoretically. Whereas the peer review model
21
Human Rights Council, Institution-building of the United Nations Human Rights
Council, HRC Res. 5/1, 5th sess., UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/5/1 (18 June 2007) Annex,
para. 3(c)–(g).
22
Constance de la Vega and Tamara M. Lewis, ‘Peer Review in the Mix: How the UPR
Transforms Human Rights Discourse’ in M. Cherif Bassiouni and William A. Schabas
(eds.), New Challenges for the Human Rights Machinery: What Future for the UN Treaty
Body System and the Human Rights Council Procedures? (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2011)
pp. 353–86 at 363.
23
See, e.g., Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Cris Shore and Susan Wright, ‘Audit Culture and
Anthropology: Neo-Liberalism in British Higher Education’ (1999) 5(4) Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 557; Marilyn Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures:
Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London:
Routledge, 2000); Marilyn Strathern, ‘The Tyranny of Transparency’ (2000) 26(3)
British Educational Research Journal 309.

privileges the structural equality among ‘peers’, ignoring or downplaying
the asymmetries existing ‘outside’ of the review, I ask: what are the
implications of those asymmetries among ‘peers’? Whereas the peer
review model assumes that it is axiomatic that peers ‘share’ values and
commitments, I ask: to what extent are these actually shared? I also ask:
what is kept off the agenda – and by extension, what cannot be said –
through the very form and modalities of the peer review? I contextualise
the UPR within the wider practices of neoliberal governance: as a type of
peer review which emphasises its own visibility, the UPR exemplifies the
trend of increased auditing of public institutions, up to and including the
state. The UPR should be thought about in relation to other mechanisms
of so-called ‘soft power’ at the international level.
I use the language of ‘audit’ to highlight the power relations which are
obscured in the UPR’s disconcertingly friendly phrases. Whereas the
term ‘review’ conveys the idea of repeated surveillance (literally, re-
viewing, looking again) the term ‘audit’ can be defined as ‘an account
of compliance with a set of expectations or standards’.24 This better
captures the nature of the UPR as a form of ‘soft power’, involving a
combination of coercion and voluntary engagement, and of external
(collective peer) oversight plus self-revelation and anticipatory self-
regulation. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, the UPR is about
the state ‘giving an account of itself’:25 it requires a performative dem-
onstration of its fulfilment of aims and objectives. Like many audits, the
UPR describes itself as a means to uphold certain values, including
human rights, objectivity, transparency, cooperation and sharing of
best practice. Within this context, it is virtually impossible to argue
with these values – the result being that those audited cannot object to
the audit directly without being seen as having something to hide. The
friendly language is thus double-edged: as a potential weapon against
hard criticisms, it is also subtly coercive in drawing actors into the
project of self-management.
Why ritual?
In using the phrase, ‘public audit ritual’, my starting focus has been with
the audit and the way that this audit is enacted through a ritual. The UPR
24
Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, n. 17 above, p. 34.
25
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005).

is, indeed, a ritual of audit. But it is also a ritual that expresses other core
propositions or values: among other things, it is a ritual of universality, a
ritual of equality and a ritual of cooperation. Importantly, it is a ritual of
international order, involving the performance of national sovereignty.
At the same time, it contains a number of smaller rituals: particularly
sociable rituals of greeting (to which may be added congratulations,
expressions of sympathy and solidarity) or confrontation, as well as
collective acts, such as the adoption of the draft report and, ultimately,
the final report.
If the study of ritual by anthropologists was long confined to religious
or mystical domains, there is now a significant corpus of work on ‘secular
ritual’ and political ritual in particular. Moore and Myerhoff identify six
elements that characterise secular rituals: (1) repetition; (2) being self-
consciously acted rather than spontaneous; (3) special behaviour, styl-
isation; (4) order; (5) evocative presentational style; and (6) a collective
dimension.26 The UPR’s public moments include a number of these
elements: they are highly ordered in time and space; they involve for-
malised modes of speech (e.g., a rigidly ordered ‘interactive dialogue’, the
reading out of timed written statements, use of diplomatic codes); they
call for particular presentations of the body, voice and demeanour; and
they are a collective exercise. Like many rituals, both sacred and secular,
UPR serves to effect a transformation in subjectivity and community.
In their introduction to this volume, Hilary Charlesworth and Emma
Larking have set out a regulatory approach to human rights which
distinguishes between a ‘ritual’ as a means to enact dominant under-
standings and power relations, whether consensual or merely hegem-
onic, and ‘ritualism’ as ‘a technique of embracing the language of human
rights precisely to deflect human rights scrutiny’. They acknowledge that
the UPR process involves both human rights rituals and human rights
ritualism. It is certainly true that actors representing a state may use
human rights language with varying degrees of commitment. And
although I am sceptical of attributing a ‘motivational posture’ to a state
as a whole – since such an attribution treats the state as a super-
individual rather than an institutional entity composed of people with
diverse and contesting views – I agree that one can identify practices of
ritualism carried out by a state. For my purposes, however, the concept of
ritualism invites an overly narrow focus on an individual state’s practices
26
Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (eds.), Secular Ritual (Assen: Van Gorcum,
1977) pp. 7–8.

and attitudes, and does not consider the wider effects, including for that
state, of participating in a universal and public ritual, both as auditor and
auditee. Staying inside a problematic of compliance, it under-theorises
the effects of ‘just’ going through the motions, and especially, of the
cumulative effects of 193 UN member states, one after the other, going
through the same motions within a ritual that is highly orchestrated and
relatively unvarying. In her development of the notion of
‘performativity’, Judith Butler has emphasised the productive effects of
the repetitive enactment of gendered norms of posture, gesture and
movement in creating the reality of gender difference.27 Following
Butler, I see the repetitiveness of the UPR as key to its power and
persuasiveness. As I shall explain in more detail later, repeated partic-
ipation in the ritual of the UPR serves to make habitual, customary and
normal a specific discourse regarding the nature of sovereignty in rela-
tion to human rights. The focus on issues of sincere versus insincere
commitment can be a distraction when ‘going through the motions’ itself
has such powerful effects.
Leaving more open the question of what the UPR ‘is’ – rather than
framing it as solely or primarily a ritual about human rights – has helped
me to observe that the UPR is also an occasion for invoking and
celebrating values such as universality, equality, cooperation, national
sovereignty and international order. That recognition opens up the
investigation of how the UPR works as a ritual, inviting an exploration
of the consequences of ‘bundling’ the audit of human rights with the
performance of these other core ideas and values. It helps to make sense
of the thinking of those diplomats that we spoke to who, although critical
of the UPR’s flaws and hypocrisies, appreciated it as a space to speak on
equal terms, and to cooperate with or confront other states.
How public?
The UPR is, finally, self-consciously public. Not all audits are public, but
here, the holistic, single-nation focus of the UPR has led the UN to
emphasise its public character: documents are available online from
websites, and anyone with the right computer equipment can watch
the proceedings of the UPR Working Group live and through archived
webcast. Actors are aware (especially the state under review and states
27
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990).

who participate in the interactive dialogue) that they are or may be
watched, and they consciously perform to their domestic audiences as
well as to their colleagues in Salle XX.
At the same time, ‘public’ has very specific meanings in the United
Nations context, and there is much contestation around the degree of
‘public-ness’ that is appropriate or desirable for UPR. As you enter Door
40 of Salle XX, a large board announces the day’s meetings, indicating
each as ‘public’ or ‘private’. UPR is marked as ‘public’, yet it is impossible
for a member of the public to enter unless she or he has institutional
knowledge, connections and has made arrangements in advance. She or
he will have had to apply by email, in advance, to request a badge to enter
the ‘public gallery’, a glassed-in unit three floors above the meeting room
floor (or the spectator can take their chances and request a badge on the
day, at the registration desk at Pregny Gate). In order to be able to enter
Salle XX itself, the observer must make contact with an ECOSOC-
recognised NGO and convince them to sponsor herself or himself for a
badge under their auspices. Although physical access is extremely diffi-
cult, some argue that there is at least good virtual access. Yet even here,
many states have resisted allowing such access. In the early days of the
UPR, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned
Movement produced a ‘non-paper’ arguing against the video-
broadcasting of proceedings. Although they were not successful, and
the existence of the webcast is now presented as evidence of the UPR’s
‘transparency’, the webcast offers inevitably limited camera angles and
thus a very partial perspective as to what happens on the floor and what
participants in the room can see, hear, touch, smell, taste and feel.
Moreover, with the recent redesign of the UN website, it is more difficult
to find the archived webcasts of previous UPRs (only viewers ‘in the
know’ will realise that all documents relating to previous UPRs, includ-
ing webcasts, are now available from the upr-info.org website). In these
various ways, therefore, ‘public’ access to the UPR space is highly con-
trolled and ‘public’ information both reveals and conceals.
How does it work/what does it do?

In my research on the League of Nations’ minorities regime, I argued
that the League’s minority supervision was an early attempt at oversight
in international affairs, and that at its heart was the problem of sover-
eignty. How could an international organisation peer into the internal
affairs of a sovereign state and affect, through supervision, its behaviour?

I also argued that the international oversight of what I called ‘supervised
states’ – states that had accepted minority obligations – carried out
through the supervisory practices of the highly innovative minority
petition procedure, opened a space for members of the wider public to
make claims about a state’s treatment of its citizens, and thus created
a new political field.28 I drew here on Pierre Bourdieu’s idea, which he
continued to develop with his colleague Loic Wacquant, of the political
field as ‘a configuration of forces and a site of struggle to maintain
and transform those forces’.29 The new political field created by this
still-to-be-tested international supervisory mechanism was a site of
encounters – whether conducted through embodied persons or through
paper documents such as petitions – which involved not only statesmen
and minorities, but also bureaucrats, activists, minorities at home and
abroad, minority spokesmen, concerned world citizens, the press and
new publics. Whilst it was Geneva-centred, it nonetheless involved
transnational networks and geographically dispersed activities.
The UPR is another attempt to resolve the same dilemma of how to
provide international oversight while respecting national sovereignty.
Both attempts have led to ambiguous practices, which often look as if
they are failing even while they may be succeeding.30 In this section,
I make and explore three claims concerning what the UPR is doing:
(a) that it has created a new political field; (b) that this political field has
widened the space where things can be said and done, and has enrolled
existing categories of actors to speak and act in new ways; and (c) that it
is intensifying an already existing role of ‘self-auditing sovereignty’ while
creating a new role of ‘other-auditing sovereignty’.
Although just the latest of many such mechanisms of oversight at the
United Nations pertaining to human rights, the UPR has several features
which have helped to generate an unusually large and heterogeneous
political field. First, its universality – the expectation that all states will be
reviewed – has considerably expanded the number of people actively
engaged in human rights practice. In part, this expansion has been a
consequence of the way that the UPR casts nearly all states, in one way or
another, into unfamiliar new roles. In the early years of the first cycle,
28
See especially Cowan, ‘The Supervised State’, n. 15 above; Cowan, ‘The Success of
Failure?’, n. 15 above.
29
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic JD Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992) p. 101.
30
Cowan, ‘The Success of Failure?’, n. 15 above.

those states accustomed to being accused of human rights violations
found themselves invited to assess the human rights situation of each
and every other fellow UN member state. On the other hand, those states
who were more used to pointing the finger at other states now realised
that their own situations would be reviewed, sooner or later. In other
words, all states have been ‘enrolled’ (in Bruno Latour’s terms) into the
collective task of auditing the human rights situation of all other states,
as well as being responsible for auditing – assessing and self-critically
presenting – their own country situations. Of course, states participate as
‘participating governments’ in the interactive dialogue to different
degrees, depending on their policy decisions, state capacity and resour-
ces. Some have aimed to participate in all reviews (Algeria and the
United States being two extremely active cases), while others have
focused their energies on states within their region, and a few, like
some small island developing states with no diplomatic presence in
Geneva, have found the burden prohibitive, and managed to participate
only as a state under review. Nonetheless, the fact that all UN member
states are responsible to undertake the review of every individual state is
not only accepted but highly popular. This is true, even though the UPR
has expanded and intensified the workload of every diplomatic mission.
Secondly, the UPR’s holistic, one-country-at-a-time structure has
allowed the review to be embraced as a national process. It has appealed
to civil society organisations, who have seen the possibilities of attracting
locally based constituencies in the national review. This is particularly
given UPR’s ‘public’ character (the third relevant feature) whereby real-
time webcast broadcasts and online documents make visible the partic-
ipation of all stakeholders. Paradoxically, then, although they are for-
mally excluded from speaking during the review, civil society
organisations have flocked to the UPR.
The UPR has generated a political field which provides new spaces
where things can be said and done, and enrols existing categories of
actors to speak and act in new ways. It has mobilised a wide range of
actors, in different spaces, to respond to its requirements; it has gener-
ated new networks, invited the creation of new connections or the
intensification of existing ones between networks, and prompted new
kinds of collaborations. These actors have been enlisted into myriad
practices either of audit itself, or of making audit possible. For instance,
for the prospective state under review, the production of the national
report (the country’s self-audit in respect of human rights) is a consid-
erable labour. In countries with limited capacity, the burden of pulling

together the disparate ministerial inputs into a final report may fall upon
a tiny handful of senior civil servants, as happened for crisis-afflicted
Greece, or even an external consultant, as happened with Tonga. In
contrast, in other cases such as Belgium, the process involves a small
army of civil servants across a range of ministries, who, across a period of
one to two years, gather information, analyse it, draft documents, sit in
meetings presenting, defending and arguing about it, and then go back
and redraft again and again. At one or more points, representatives of the
government may, as they are strongly encouraged to, ‘consult’ with
individuals representing that country’s civil society organisations.
Those individuals may have drafted a submission on behalf of their
organisation, or they may have decided to join with other organisations
to work in coalition to draft a joint submission to the UN Secretariat for
the Stakeholders Report. However, even if they have opted for the latter
method, each organisation will want to ensure that the national report
addresses at least one or two of ‘their’ priority issues.
At every point – within the government, among the civil society
organisations and during the consultations – there are disagreements
and conflicts, and negotiations and compromises over what to include
and exclude, and what to prioritise. For the national report, the prospec-
tive state under review has the final word in deciding what should be the
balance between critical self-exposure and, as a Belgian government
employee quipped, ‘not giving them a stick to beat us with’. Back in
Geneva, in a process that Julie Billaud describes in her chapter of this
volume, members of the Secretariat are drafting the compilation and
stakeholders reports. These are similarly collective, occasionally conflic-
tual, efforts. In the two to three months before the review, those states
who intend to contribute as participating governments will also be
preparing their statements, frequently reading and drawing on the
three key reports. Preparing the statement may require another coordi-
nation across boundaries. In the case of statements by the UK delegation,
for instance, whilst the UK government’s London-based human rights
team has primary drafting responsibility, they draw on input from
British embassy staff in the country to be reviewed, who give their view
‘from the ground’, and from the Geneva team who meet with civil society
representatives and receive their suggestions for recommendations.
The public audit ritual is thus the tip of the iceberg of a set of practices
that the UPR has set in train and that stretches across time and space. We
can see these practices, all of which are geared toward identifying human
rights problems and formulating solutions, as contributing to the

intensification of an already existing (but rarely so-described) state
subject: the ‘self-auditing sovereignty’.31 What we see here is not a
bureaucracy responding to a petition (as in the League procedures),
nor experts assessing and checking up (as in the treaty bodies). Rather,
in the UPR the state itself is asked to marshall and coordinate people,
objects and resources into multiple tasks of scrutiny, assessment and
action plans for self-improvement. Through the ritual, the state (through
its delegated representatives) explains its human rights situation and
what it is doing to address it. Importantly, it announces the always
additional steps – creating a new commission, adopting a new law,
signing a new treaty, further expanding an existing reform process –
which will both ‘improve’ human rights and facilitate an ongoing, con-
tinuous and more efficient process of self-auditing.
It is important to emphasise that these practices concern not only the
state under review, but also have effects for other actors who are
exhorted to take on the role of tireless and insistent auditors: to for-
mulate recommendations, and then to encourage, remind, check for
progress and otherwise maintain pressure on the state to implement
the recommendations it has accepted. The first category of actor this
affects is civil society organisations. In many ways, the expectation that
they will act as auditors is an extension of an established role vis-à-vis the
state under review. In the context of international human rights mon-
itoring, NGOs already act as ‘watchdogs’: assessing the state’s perform-
ance (in the form of publicity, reports, including shadow reports to treaty
bodies), making demands, extracting promises and encouraging the state
to fulfil them. The modalities of the UPR have led to some new strategies:
in many cases, NGOs have formed coalitions to collaborate in writing
joint submissions, which they predict will be more powerful and which
keeps the prioritisation of objectives in their hands. As Collister argues in
this volume, it has actually helped NGOs to mobilise effectively.
For the second category of actors, however, that of participating
governments, the role of auditor is a new one. Whereas state X may be
happy to criticise states Y and Z in the Human Rights Council, and states
Y and Z might happily return the favour to state X, many states remain
on the sidelines, rarely or never making interventions, or doing so
primarily as a member of a regional bloc (‘Spain allies itself with the
EU position . . . ’). The UPR, by contrast, is universal not only in
31
For instance, in the context of UN human rights treaty body reporting processes where a
state submits a report assessing its own progress.

subjecting all states to review, but also in creating an expectation that
(potentially) all states will review all other states, or at least, as many as
their resources allow. In effect, it creates a new role for the participating
government: that of ‘other-auditing sovereignty’. The novelty of this role
is striking, and has gone virtually unnoticed in analyses of the UPR to
date.
Yet one of the first things I heard when I began to research the UPR
was the fact that diplomats were themselves perplexed with this new role.
While members of certain delegations were accustomed to denouncing
or being denounced in the table-thumping style of the Human Rights
Council Item 4 debates, the UPR demanded something different: partic-
ipating governments are called upon to act as a ‘peer’ rather than an ally
or adversary. Rather than simply choosing between denunciation and
support, they are asked to adopt a strange new amalgam: constructive
criticism. Moreover, they are called upon to offer this constructive
criticism universally, to all states under review. The manner in which
this has taken form is a fascinating story in itself and worth a serious and
detailed analysis, but in broad strokes, the Western European and Others
Group (WEOG) – sometimes dubbed ‘the club of criticising countries’
by those outside the West – have taken up the challenge with enthusi-
asm. Thus, in its first cycle WEOG offered the most recommendations
overall: they made just over 40 per cent of total recommendations, while
the other four regional groups made between 11–16 per cent each. If one
looks at each Region under Review, the same pattern emerges: for Africa,
WEOG made around 43 per cent of recommendations, while African
countries made around 18 per cent; and for Asia, WEOG made around
42 per cent of recommendations, and Asian countries about 21 per
cent.32 Diplomats that we interviewed from some WEOG countries
(including the United Kingdom, the United States and Belgium) stressed
that their delegations were attempting, through their diligent recom-
mendations, good attendance, fair play and collegial manners, to ‘set an
example’.
In contrast to the ‘confident countries’, diplomats of developing
countries and even middle-income countries have often been more
diffident. They have frequently expressed their sense of being con-
strained by a lack of resources and state ‘capacity’, and by obligations
to donors and to international institutions such as the IMF. For these
states, formal equality within the UN system – something that they
32
McMahon, ‘The Universal Periodic Review’, n. 1 above, pp. 16–17.

absolutely insist upon – is nonetheless belied by actual relations of
political and economic inequality between states, with its resulting
hierarchies and dependencies. This affects how they have engaged as
participating governments: the nature of their presence (on the speakers’
list, in ‘the room’), the kinds of statements and recommendations they
make and the regional spheres in relation to which they make them.
Many diplomats from developing states have used the UPR space to
express solidarity with similarly positioned countries, especially from
their own region: these are ‘peers’ who share similar predicaments, one
of which is an experience of diminished sovereignty. Thus, one South
Asian diplomat explicitly observed that since other least developed
countries were already obliged, as a conditionality of aid, to submit to
the priorities of donors and the IMF, she considered it a gesture of
solidarity to offer recommendations that confirmed what the state
under review had itself defined as its own priorities. In the reviews of
more powerful countries who, in other contexts, act as ‘donors’, diplo-
mats of many developing countries find it more difficult to provide the
‘constructive criticism’ of an egalitarian ‘peer’ relationship. ‘If you are a
developing country receiving aid from a donor country’, a North African
diplomat said during a discussion on the UPR in autumn 2012, ‘are you
going to criticise it? Let’s be frank. You will not do something that will
affect bilateral relations. We have to be realistic’.
Although the structural inequalities of the world outside Salle XX have
produced an over-arching divide between ‘confident’ and ‘diffident’
participating governments,33 all countries are enjoined to ‘participate’.
Increasingly, participation is expected to include making recommenda-
tions to help the state improve its human rights situation. A key effect of
the UPR is therefore the construction of a new norm – indeed, a duty – to
make recommendations. Through the repetitions of the UPR interactive
dialogue (statement after statement, review after review, over a two-week
session, three times per year) the act of pronouncing the constructively
critical statement becomes more normalised, less awkward. The aim
seems to be that an ever-increasing number of participating govern-
ments get used to being criticising countries. Indeed, a central thrust of
analyses of the UPR’s first cycle was the identification of weaknesses in
33
It must nonetheless be stressed that ‘confidence’ is also relational and thus contextual.
African and Asian countries as participating governments were confident (i.e. active)
recommenders to countries within their own region, but less active in relation to WEOG
(see McMahon, ‘The Universal Periodic Review’, n. 1 above, pp. 16–17).

the ways recommendations were made and to suggest ways in which
states could make them more effective.
The UPR is a space, albeit one of many spaces in the UN context,
where state sovereignty is performed as each state gives an account of
itself in relation to ‘its’ human rights situation. Importantly, the UPR
reinforces through repetition not only the normality of being a sovereign
state, but also the idea that it is the state, and its policies, which are
responsible for both violations and realisations of human rights. The
UPR can be seen as a ritual of state responsibilisation in relation to
human rights.
What is left out? What does the UPR disable or disallow?

If the UPR ‘does’ by enabling and channelling, it also ‘does’ by disabling
and disallowing. I want to demonstrate this by looking briefly at just two
elements – time and space – and considering a few of the ways that these
elements are conceptualised and managed within the UPR.
The UPR has been designed as a monitoring mechanism which is
universal, treats all states equally and requires no increase in the UN
budget. The principles of universality and equality inform the UPR’s
institutional architecture in a strikingly abstract and mathematical way,
through meticulous attention to ordering and quantification. The
demand for ‘efficiency’, conversely, defines a fixed quantity of time,
space and resources which, once set, is more likely to be further sub-
divided than extended. Graphically expressed by the digital clock on the
video-screen at the front of Salle XX, relentlessly counting down as
speakers present, the correct apportionment of fixed quantities of time
is a primary means through which equality is guaranteed within this
universal review. Thus, in the first cycle, all reviews lasted three hours,
with a total speaking time of one hour for the state under review and two
hours divided among participating governments, who received three
minutes (for Human Rights Council members) and two minutes (for
observer states). However, if the number of speakers was high, the time
was reduced to two minutes for all states. Similarly, the principle of
equality required strict maximum page limits for formal documents: five
pages for a single stakeholder submission, ten pages for a joint stake-
holder submission, ten pages for a compilation, and so forth.
Although the time limits for speaking, and space limits for written
texts, compel a disciplined approach which some have welcomed, in a
context where treaty body reports often run into hundreds of pages,

these textual limits have many complex consequences. Interviewing the
Belgian section of an international prison rights NGO, for instance, we
learned that they felt forced to be ‘selective and strategic’ in identifying a
few key issues – prison overcrowding, the effects of strikes by prison staff
on prisoners, inadequacies of health provision – while ignoring many
others they considered crucial (their five-page report listed the ‘most
pressing issues’ and directed readers to a 189-page report available
online). The director of a Belgian organisation devoted to refugee serv-
ices, who was invited to a government consultation, lamented having to
choose just one issue pertaining to immigrants (he chose imprisonment)
and then complained of the difficulties of synthesising its complex legal,
social, cultural and economic dimensions within the word limit allowed.
Whereas NGOs protested about selectivity and superficiality, states saw
other problems in the enforced brevity. One South Asian diplomat
complained that the limited clock time of the UPR ritual left the state
under review with ‘not enough time to explain’ the rights issue at hand,
and that some states under review resorted to ‘cultural arguments’ as an
unavoidable shorthand for issues with complicated historical, political,
social and economic, as well as cultural, dimensions.
A second approach to time and space in the UPR has also been
consequential: as part and parcel of its pragmatic, problem-solving
governance approach, the UPR focuses on the ‘here and now’ of a state
under review viewed in isolation, not located in space, time or history.
This focus is sometimes contested. For example, Lebanon’s national
report for its first review in November 2010 was unusual in contextual-
ising its human rights situation within the Middle East conflict, whereas
during the interactive dialogue, it argued that it was impossible to
consider its refugee problem without referring to its complex relations
with its neighbours. The complexities included the state of Israel, and the
historical facts of war, invasion and occupation. These assertions pro-
voked Israeli ‘points of order’ insisting that Lebanon, and not Israel, was
under review. Similarly, in many instances when a developing country
was being reviewed, other developing states have made a point of refer-
ring, in their statements, to historical legacies such as colonialism,
asserting that they are relevant to the state under review’s human rights
challenges. Such interventions were viewed by less sympathetic state and
NGO participants as irritating examples of ‘special pleading’ or as
‘excuses’. A European director of an international NGO remarked that
the four year-cycle was quite enough time-depth for measuring human
rights improvements.

In fact, the disdain for history characterises human rights discourse
more generally. As Naomi Klein and Susan Marks have argued, this
contributes to a tendency among the actors involved to treat human
rights violations as ‘free floating facts’, amenable to technical solutions
rather than phenomena linked to the historically rooted production and
reproduction of global inequalities.34 The UPR does not recognise
human rights violations as, in so many cases, manifestations of the
‘planned misery’ of unregulated neoliberal global capitalism,35 and a
consequence of transnational extractions, appropriations and redistrib-
utions of resources and wealth from poor to rich. Instead, the UPR
obscures the salience of global systems in both time and space and
reinforces a focus on the state as the primary agent at fault, as well as
the primary agent of change.
Thus, it is also in what it disables – what cannot be asked or what cannot
be formulated as a recommendation – that the UPR ritually reinforces a
frame of reference in which the realisation of rights is a national responsi-
bility. The UPR is structured in such a way that solutions are national, and
international action, including offers of capacity building or financial
assistance, are read as remedying a national deficiency, rather than express-
ing a global responsibility.
34
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2007);
Susan Marks, ‘Human Rights and Root Causes’ (2011) 74(1) Modern Law Review 57.
35
The Argentinian investigative journalist, Rodolfo Walsh, used the phrase to describe
the economic policy of the Argentinian military junta, as cited and discussed in Klein,
The Shock Doctrine, n. 34 above, pp. 95–6.
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The Universal Periodic Review as a public

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a mechanism established to provide

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An anthropological perspective on the UPR

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The UPR as a public audit ritual

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Why audit culture?

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How does it work/what does it do?

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What is left out? What does the UPR disable or disallow?

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