> 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.
>
>
> If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it
> through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl
> .
>
> 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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