hollmanlozano

A few things to be noted in Bolivar’s text is a certain confusion that seems to be between the power of the representatives of the people and the power of the people, if they are to have any power. For instance, at the beginning of the Angostura Address, Simon Bolivar talks about the representatives of national sovereignty having a will, which is absolute? So one of the first questions that pop to my mind was what does it mean to say that they have a will, which is absolute? Would not the people have absolute an absolute will within the Rousseauian tradition of political philosophy? In that regard the ‘representatives’ of the people don’t really have absolute power, but only derivative power. The suspicions mentioned above where to a certain extent confirmed when he argues for a hereditary senate, particularly for the liberator of Venezuela, he seems to be sure that the only way for Venezuela to honour the sacrifice of those who fought the Spanish is to honour them with a hereditary senate and if Venezuela fails to do so, it simply does not deserve to be free. The later more than an argumentation in favour of a hereditary Senate, seems to be a statement of force in favour of it.

After reading Bolivar’s text and looking at the history of a few Latin American countries, one cannot but agree with Margaret E. Crahan when she argues that one of the consequences of the political wars of independence was that new groups took the place that before was occupied by the Spaniards or the Portuguese, because the criollos where not so much interested in liberty and equality for everyone, but rather annoyed for being servile to the occupier, but once the occupier has left, the political structures and the ways of conducting the business of the State remain more or less the same. So rather than being revolutionary, the wars of independence were more about transfer of power than establishment of political novel associations which maintained the promise of individual rights that were made by creoles like Antonio Nariño.

Another point where Crahan hits the nail is when she argues that one of the reasons why the countries that had recently attained independence where far away from having political structures that guarantee the political equality that the revolutionaries predicated was because the structure of State that they had inherited, had not integrated the discourse and practice of individual rights that had already swept England and France. In consequence, the practical structure of the State simply was not ready to grant equality to the impoverished classes and there was not a political class able and willing to demand from the emerging political class, allegiance to the promises they had made when they were trying to get people’s support. As Crahan notes, the centralized structure of the Latin American incipient states saw the Church as a conservative force that sided with the reactionary forces in an effort to maintain a status quo which was beneficial to that sector of the population; however, those who were more prone to openness and equality saw precisely in the Church an anchor that did not help the political and economical advancement of the countries. The difficulty of agreeing on the idea of a nation and the procedure of how the nation should be ruled, led to different internal conflicts that were often aided by the different neighbors who were trying to take political and economical advantage of the new configurations of the political scenarios in the region.

Although she blames the emergence of authoritarian regimes in the chaos created by the needs of a dependent capitalism and the emergent demands for democratization, it seems that neither the structure of the State was developed to guarantee democratic rights, nor the people was ready to challenge the circumvention of the rules which had rendered laws, edicts and constitutions simply dead letter. The latter explains why the emergence of Marxist communities was not able to transcend the personalism and allegiance to an specific creed, rather than the pursuing of individual and communal interests under the certainty of rights and the rule of law.

One of the issues that are commonly repeated in the history of the refugees is the need to prove that they are persecuted. Often, testimonies are not enough, for the “reasonable fear” that they are supposed to demonstrate needs to be validated through documents, or what the lawyer in the article calls “third party evidence.” So, not only does one has to endure the circumstances that compelled one to leave, one has to leave in such a way that enough evidence is gather for one’s refugee status to be granted. The later has a few implications. First, people without a strong enough knowledge of the legal and political system will not qualify for the status, because they would have not had the fore thought of collecting the third party evidence that is required. So rather than any person being persecuted, the structure of and the way in which the refugee system works, caters to a certain population that is instructed enough to know what the system requires from them, but also certain premeditation to know what is it that they are going to do with their lives, unless of course, they are a famous case.

Precisely for those points mentioned about I have decided to post on the story of the Colombian women who are being deported.

There seems to be something going in the two texts that we were asked to read, namely Las Casas and Galeano that could be connected to a portion of “Society must be defended” a lecture that Michel Foucault gave in the College of France around 1975 at the College of France. There, he talks about the emergence and the role of the counter-history, or the history that is not written for and by the powerful.

Prior to the emergence of this sort of counter-history, what existed was a sovereign history understood as the history of the celebration and glorification of conquest and might, so history was not so much a way of telling, or relating historical facts, but a way of enhancing the power –understood in the traditional sense of the term- of kings, kingdoms and lineages.

Although Foucault is more specific about the functions of this sort of sovereign history, for he talks about the genealogical and memorial sites of the sovereign history, the reason why these two texts seem to connect is because they are telling the other side of the story.  According to Michel Foucault it is with Boulanvilliers “that we go from a history of the established right by telling the story of wars, to a history that continues the war by deciphering the war and the struggle that are going on within all the institutions of right and peace”[1] So in that sense, the two mentioned texts seem to relate to a counter-history that tells the history of the people of Latin America, not necessarily from the point of view of those who directed the conquest, but from a point of view closer to those who endure it.

The focus in the historical account and the relevance of the texts is not meant to serve as an excuse to deviate to the absolute horror of the Conquest, which seems to be the implicit aim of the readings, but to point out how there is an strength in telling those stories, for memory makes people conscious of the wrongs that have and continue being committed in the name of a civilization or an idea.

Although Las Casas text is more direct and specific, for it is a testimony of the injustices that he saw, Galeano’s text is more complex because it seems to connect the history of Latin America to a sort of chronological account that relates what is happening around the world as if telling that not only what happened historically in Latin America is important, but also what happened in the world that directly and indirectly affected Latin America was also important.

Reading the three articles one after the other makes it really hard to make the case in favor of human rights. Not only because the arguments put forward are extremely compelling, but also because they point to specific failures of the both the discourse and enactment of rights. However, it seems that the simple abandonment, or displacement of political categories will not solve the issue of human rights, but recast them on a new light.

For instance, it is undeniable that as Agamben quotes Arendt in saying: when people were seen in the mere humanity in which human rights were to reside, the paradigm of the self-evidence and universality of human rights crumbled. Perhaps because the grandiose declarations have tended to lack mechanism of enforcement that could legally guarantee what was promised in paper, perhaps because the declarations of rights of the people did not really meant the people as a whole, but people as Agamben agrees as “always a minority”, a certain type of social class that is involved economically and politically. The latter could be argued by the distance in the title that seems to be in the French declaration between the rights of the man and the citizen, or the ‘ignorance’ of women and minorities as subjects of rights as the declaration of the rights of women clearly points out.

Regarding Deleuze and his insistence that human rights are fictions I think that together with Hannah Arendt I will agree that human rights are legal fictions created in order to sustain equality at a political level. Therefore, human rights are based not so much on natural rights assumptions, but on artificial politics, which are meant to grant equality not on a pre-political feature that is shared by all humanity, but on an attribute of democratic political associations.

On Agamben’s position there seems to be a little bit of the free choice injunction, which Zizek refers to when he talks about the “freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the ‘psychological’ subject”. For, if “the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the very insecurities caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms” one has difficulties to see that to a certain extent that is similar to what Agamben is proposing with the refugee as the central political figure of our political history. It is true that there is a gap between what was promised and what has been attained, but rather than continuing the opening of spaces that guarantee exercises of liberty and equality a la Balibar, he invites as to enthrone the refugee as the new political figure that will resolve the contradictions that are inherent in nationhood and citizenship. Regarding the refugees that he mentions, those who preferred to be refugees rather than returning to their countries, they did so, not because they willy-nilly preferred to be refugees, but because there were not possibilities of a safe return to their homeland and they had not been accepted by either France or Germany. It is true that they were not stateless, for they still were part to the State from which they were escaping, but fear of persecution did not allow them to return.

The purpose is not to argue that all the ignominies that have been committed in the name of human rights are simply the accidents of their enactment, but that eventually the promise of those grandiose declarations will prove itself to be true. If anything has been proven on the ground is that universal rights are a promised to be attained and not necessarily a conquered reality. Perhaps the key to solve the issue lies with Ranciere’s dissensus understood as “the putting of two worlds into one and the same world” for the distance that exists between man and citizen is not so much a sign of contradiction but the space of the struggle, “the opening of an interval for political subjectivation.”

Particularly in media coverage, attention is only given to the most spectacular cases. Even though there are cases in which that spectacularity seems unethical, there are dramas that remain unnoticed, because they are simply not as dramatic, or perhaps because within the contest for attention, there are only so many bad news that can be attended. I have chosen this week’s article http://colombiajournal.org/colombia3.htm because it portrays how during the high of internal displacement, most of the media attention was given to the State sponsored violence in Kosovo and East Timor, whereas the almost 1.7 million displaced people that have left the ongoing conflict remained aloof from media coverage.

According to the article “The number of Colombians displaced by the war between the Colombian army and leftist guerrillas far exceeds the number of refugees in East Timor. It even exceeds the number of Kosovar Albanians forced to flee Serb repression. And yet, in spite of the fact that Colombian refugees currently constitute the third largest displaced population in the world, behind only the Sudanese and Angolans, their plight receives little attention from the mainstream media.”

The issue is not so much a contest of attention. The issue is more why some conflicts are seen with different eyes. Is it because the geo-political reality in which the conflicts occur? Is it because there are first, second and third types of human rights? Or is it because prior and above human rights, there are economic interests which take precedence over humanitarian concerns and only where there are economic profits to be gained can the  flag of human rights be properly advanced?

Having read most of the texts of this weeks reading, the one that prominently grab my attention was De Gouges Declaration of the Rights of Women. The text is valuable not only because having been written in 1790 still has prescient demands that have not been met yet, but also because it is written in the language and manner of most of the declarations of the time. One of the first impressions upon reading the texts is that it is written in the language and logic of the Enlightenment, through the questioning of the conclusions that those who promulgated the rights of the man and the citizen had used. She has taken to the logical conclusion the arguments of the Declaration of the right of the man and the citizen and question why the liberty and justice that was meant to be restored to men is denied to women.

What she does is to invite people to observe nature and see how throughout nature sex is equally distributed. So it follows, or so her argument entails that to the same extent that the two sexes are equally distributed through nature, the same should occur in the new political arrangement of France. For, if the argument that lies beneath the enactment of the Rights of the man and the citizen is that there are inalienable rights that are bestowed on people by nature, women should also have the same rights as men, for there is no rational argument that can leave one of the sexes without the same rights. In other words, if it is truth that “liberty and justice consists on restoring what belongs to others” and that process of restoration is what occurs at the enactment of the rights of rights of men and the citizen, there is no rational argument to withhold equality for women.

She also mentions the hypocrisy with which men “have raised their exceptional circumstances to a principle” because in an age of Enlightenment, science and critical evaluation of tradition, they insists on commanding a sex, which in is full intellectual capacity. Those exceptional circumstances to which she makes reference is the fact that the Enlightenment is meant to move beyond prejudices and established truths towards the emporium of logic, reason and proof, but instead of looking at the issue of equality with a critical eye, men have decided to raise their peculiar circumstances to a principle, justified in no other way, than in the tradition from which they were meant to move away.

There is also the fact that the text is so revolutionary and yet so common. Particularly in article III where she argues that the essence of the nation “is nothing but the union of a woman and a man…” Perhaps she is too much a daughter of her time, perhaps I am reading her arguments with the eyes of another time, but she does not even conceive the possibility of same sex couples being also at the foundation of the nation.

Perhaps for the actuality of the arguments and the fact that most of them remain unfulfilled, perhaps because today King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections this texts was the most relevant of them all.

There are basically three broader terms in which I see the documents connected. The first one is their dependence of the historical context from which they emanated. Although, rights are often described as abstract and legal entities, there is a sense in which those legal and abstract entities are tied to specific historical contexts. In other words, most of the declarations of rights are preceded by the wrongs that prompted their existence. The other point is that although there are constant references to the universality of rights, that universality is dependent upon the acknowledgement and responsibility of States and once one of those States refuses to comply, the supposed universality and self-evidence of the mentioned rights is questioned. The third point is that it is almost unavoidable to see the declarations of rights as rules of chess, or rules that should be followed inasmuch as one wants to play a certain game; the game of life in community one could argue.

1- Most of the declarations of rights seem to be tied to specifically historical contexts, like the Magna Carta, the US Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Even when those historical contexts are made explicit as in the case of the Magna Carta or the US declaration or when they are made implicit, as in the Canadian Charter, those texts are more like road maps, a plan which dwells on the reasons for its existence, a point of departure, a wrong that they are meant to redress.

Usually when people talk about rights, one thinks of a fairly abstract figure to which one only appeals when one does not have rights; however, reading those declarations of rights one after the other brought to light the fact that none of them can escape their local specificity. If rights are so self-evident, why each of those declarations dwells so much on the conditions of their coming to light? Sometimes when one reads constitutional documents there is a point at which it is really difficult to see  the ‘nationality’ of the document. It may refer to previous laws, or constitutional amendments, but there are not historical references in the text. But in most of the declarations of rights, there are historical references done through the text that locate it historically, either through an overt exposition of the context as in the case of the Magna Carta, or through an acknowledged of a quarrel, which the text is meant to correct.

In the particular case of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms it is truth that there is not implicit reference in the body of the text about the social tensions that the text is trying to resolve. Perhaps because of that lack of reference, perhaps due to a lack of knowledge of the context in which the Charter is written, the sections on language tend to be seen as obscure and unnecessary. However, when one looks closely at the historical context, one could argue that the Charter is a piece of a broader intent within Canadian politics to try to ground the legal basis that could unite the country to something other than its dependency to the British Crown. But not only to unite into something other than the consciousness of a colony; at the same time the Charter wanted to integrate the demands of the Quebec population, which had served as the argument for their interest in independence. In other words, most of the provisions on language in the Charter, are a response to the complaints from the Quebecois about their perceived threats to the existence of their language and it is that context that the text is written. So even if the context is manifestly put forward as in the case of the Magna Carta, even within the legal abstractness in which rights are written, those rights are tied to historical contexts that determined them.

2- Declarations of rights are dependent upon the states that are supposed to enforce that universality. So they are not so much universal, they are only pretended to be universal, but that universality is only attained through the compliance of each State and as soon as one of those States decides to transgress the act of faith that rights entail, there is a conundrum and a whole ethical debate about how to resolve the violation of rights. In other words, declarations of rights are statements of good faith that are dependable on the good faith of the signatories. Perhaps that is one of the biggest difficulties of rights; they are too grandiose to be declared and too feeble to be enforced.

3- To a certain extent I cannot avoid thinking of rights as one thinks of the rules of chess. Certain rules that one is supposed to follow in order to “play” a “proper game”, but there are instances when a proper game is not precisely what is sought and there seems to be shortage of alternatives to enforce those proper rules of play, once one of the players decides not to abide by those rules. Sure it could be argued that diplomacy and moral coercion can eventually serve the purpose of persuade the non-complying states to agree with the ‘universal’ declarations of rights, but history is full of examples where neither diplomacy, not moral coercion have been enough to guarantee the universality of human rights.

http://www.yale.edu/cpworkshop/papers/Steele.pdf

As Steele argues in the article one of the common concerns of humanitarian scholarship tends to be on what produces the displacement and wether if is voluntary or involuntary, with long and imbricated debates over the pertinence of one or another term for appropriately discuss the nature of the phenomenon. However, how people are displaced is also a relevant question that needs to be asked. Not only because the patters of community building are necessarily different from rural to urban communities, but also because it is important to see how those new communities that are formed could also become enclaves or continuations of the conflict that originated the displacement, or if on the other hand, they are simply a new beginning, for the communities that resettle.

My name is Hollman Lozano, I am from Colombia and currently I am doing a double major on political science and philosophy. I am in this class because one of the things that interest me is the political and philosophical discussion about the issue of rights. What are the implications, limits and possibilities of having rights?  How does one enforce them, once one has them? Are they really dependent on the structure of the nation-state, or could they be enforced in a supra-national scenario? Although my concern is more towards the figure of the refugee and how s/he challenges the figure of human rights in particular, it seems that indigenous people also present peculiar challenges to the discourse of rights.