> Kate Nash.  The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US
> and UK.  Cambridge  Cambridge University Press, 2009.  xiii + 209 pp.
> $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-85352-1; $33.99 (paper), ISBN
> 978-0-521-61867-0.
>
> Reviewed by David Kieran (Washington University in St. Louis)
> Published on H-Human-Rights (October, 2009)
> Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root
>
> Bringing Culture to Bear on the Study of Human Rights
>
> Human rights scholarship often fails to thoroughly interrogate
> culture's role in human rights debates. Kate Nash's _The Cultural
> Politics of Human Rights_ significantly contributes toward remedying
> this gap. Her thoughtful, sophisticated, and necessary intervention
> interrogates the complex ways in which competing human rights
> discourses are produced, circulated, and contested; their
> intersections with concepts of nation and citizenship; and their
> impact on the pursuit of domestic and international human rights.
>
> Nash's intervention is evident in her assertion "that human rights
> are not simply administered through state procedures, as if they
> always already existed as clear and distinct aims.... Human rights
> are defined and redefined as policies are created and administered,
> legal claims dealt with and so on--both inside and outside state
> procedures" (pp. 8-9). She also identifies obstacles to achieving
> human rights, noting that while such rights transcend citizenship,
> citizenship remains a fundamental category and that the transnational
> imperative of human rights belies the reality that "it is only
> through states that human rights can be realised" (p. 2). Nash thus
> specifies that the "cosmopolitan state," in which policies are
> answerable internationally, "is a necessary condition of the full
> realization of human rights" (p. 11). Nash usefully complicates this
> assertion, however, arguing that cosmopolitan states are themselves
> produced by pursuing human rights. Her analysis thus relies on the
> notion of "intermestic human rights" that "are both international and
> domestic at the same time" (p. 14). Comparing the United States and
> the United Kingdom seems appropriate, for despite their many
> similarities, "the UK is unambiguously situated within the European
> system of human rights," while "US exceptionalism with regard to
> human rights is well established" (pp. 22-23). These differences
> facilitate Nash's investigation of the potential for truly
> cosmopolitan states to emerge.
>
> Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the field guides Nash's analysis. She
> outlines the contours of and intersections among "the juridical, the
> governmental, the activist, and the mediated public" subfields, and
> introduces "justifications," a theoretical approach that examines how
> stakeholders establish the validity of their approach to human
> rights, before thoroughly describing her process of constructing and
> analyzing each subfield's archive (pp. 32, 59). These chapters
> certainly provide a useful foundation. However, they constitute a
> full third of the book; Nash might have introduced this material more
> briefly and then expanded on it with her case studies.
>
> Nash first examines questions of state sovereignty and exemption from
> human rights agreements in debates over detaining suspected
> terrorists. In both countries, discourses of "national pride" shaped
> arguments for and against suspending detainees' rights (p. 75). Nash
> illustrates that in each country arguments that human rights laws
> hampered the state's potential to protect citizens ultimately
> overwhelmed arguments that human rights exemplified national values.
> Court decisions, however, demonstrate a crucial distinction between
> the nations. U.S. court decisions relied almost entirely on national
> law (because, Nash illustrates, international law means little in the
> United States) and ultimately achieved little. In contrast, British
> courts limited executive power in decisions that "referred to ...
> international human rights law" (p. 95). In making this comparison,
> Nash effectively illustrates both the problematic that nationalism
> poses and the potential that cosmopolitanism holds for contesting
> rights violations.
>
> Nash next examines debates over a state's responsibility to address
> human rights violations occurring abroad by analyzing efforts to try
> Augusto Pinochet in Europe and to use the Alien Tort Claims Act to
> try Unocal in U.S. courts for violations in Burma. Three models of
> citizenship emerged in response to this debate. Activists and media
> accounts acted "as if a community of global citizens already
> existed," presuming obligations under "cosmopolitan law" that
> "embodies universal moral principles ... applicable and enforceable
> in national and international courts" on the part of governments and
> the individual in an effort "to imagine [that community] into being"
> (p. 114). Her discussion of activist and media invocation of the
> classification "Enemy of all Mankind," typically "used rhetorically
> to support legal arguments for universal jurisdiction" to encourage
> action in each case, is a thoughtful and effective explication of
> such claims (p. 111).
>
> However, opponents argued that this vision threatened national
> autonomy, and Nash charts the emergence of a discourse of "(inter)
> national citizenship" that establishes national interest as a
> precondition for pursuing rights abroad (p. 127). Between these
> extremes, Nash locates "Cosmopolitan National Citizenship," which
> acknowledges the nation's centrality while insisting that it support
> global human rights (p. 127). Nash notes that this discourse risks
> promoting imperialism but contends that it can nonetheless promote
> human rights and, eventually, global citizenship if "global
> citizenship is ... seen as emerging from within [states]"; borrowing
> a term from Fuyuki Kurasawa, she calls this "'cosmopolitanism from
> below'" (pp. 134-135). Nash effectively demonstrates how the problem
> of nationalism might be addressed while still acknowledging that
> "cosmopolitan national citizenship" is an imperfect solution, but the
> decision to analyze _Unocal_, "because it was roughly contemporaneous
> with the Pinochet case," warrants more explanation, especially
> because she notes that "there was not much discussion of the _Unocal_
> case at all in the US media" and refers to the series of cases as
> "actually quite marginal events in US political life" (pp. 111, 123).
> It would be instructive to learn whether the discourse surrounding
> _Unocal_ is representative of other cases brought under Alien Tort
> Claims Act, which Nash asserts "has become hugely significant in the
> last twenty-five years" (p. 111).
>
> Nash next examines U.S. and U.K. activism surrounding world poverty
> and hunger. She argues that global human rights requires the creation
> of "'thicker' solidarity," which denotes "the sense that we belong
> together in a 'community of fate,'" and examines whether it emerged
> through this activism (p. 138). Nash notes that each campaign sought
> to create a global community by, for example, selling wristbands and
> holding simulcast concerts and speeches, but she astutely notes that
> such activities risk "degenerating into an emotionally indulgent
> admiration of one's own sensitivity, sincerity, and strength of will"
> (p. 153). Once again, Nash compellingly demonstrates that media
> coverage, activism, and political rhetoric produced "cosmopolitan
> nationalism," yet she discerns "a sense of collective responsibility
> that empowers and validates 'us'; it is up to 'us' to do something
> for 'them.'... 'We' take pride in our state and our nation because it
> is exercising moral leadership" rather than "long term reflection and
> analysis of how ... some benefit more than others" (pp. 154-155).
> This chapter is at once Nash's most nuanced and most clearly argued,
> and it effectively illuminates how "cosmopolitan nationalism's"
> continued privileging of the nation inhibits challenges to structural
> inequality and the promotion of global citizenship.
>
> Nash concludes by calling for a "cosmopolitan ethical framework" that
> "limit[s] the contestation of human rights to those meanings which
> abolish the ... distinctions between citizens and non-citizens," but
> she ultimately concedes that this vision "will be extremely difficult
> to realize in practice" (pp. 183, 189). This conclusion is grim, but
> following Nash's thorough, insightful analysis, it is also logical.
>
> Nash insightfully illuminates how competing human rights discourses
> emerge and what their political stakes are. Nonetheless, a few
> concerns deserve mention. This complex and densely written book is
> appropriate for advanced students already somewhat familiar with
> human rights scholarship. This is partly because Nash occasionally
> presumes her reader's familiarity with topics. She asserts, for
> example, that "international human rights agreements are
> comprehensive" without fully reviewing their content (p. 16).
> Likewise, readers who are not equally familiar with U.S. and U.K.
> legal systems would benefit from more background on each and on the
> cases she discusses. Though not necessarily faults, such instances do
> limit the text's accessibility. Moreover, Nash could have extended
> her analysis in some places. She writes broadly of human rights
> activism, and some discussion of the conflicting agendas and
> interests within the activist subfield would have complemented her
> argument. Nash also limits her definition of "media" to newspapers.
> Though she explains this choice and it serves her analysis, surely
> film, television, literature, and other forms of popular culture also
> inform the cultural politics of human rights, and acknowledging them
> would have augmented her argument.
>
> Despite these minor critiques, Nash's thoughtful, complex book makes
> an important intervention that illuminates complex issues and adds an
> important consideration to the study of human rights. Perhaps more
> important, it encourages further investigations of culture's role in
> shaping human rights discourse.
>
> Citation: David Kieran. Review of Nash, Kate, _The Cultural Politics
> of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK_. H-Human-Rights, H-Net
> Reviews. October, 2009.
> URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24906
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.

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