E3W Literature | University of Texas

Human Rights Discourse and Advocacy: An Interview with Karen Engle

On January 21, 2009, Charlotte Nunes conducted the following interview with Karen Engle, Cecil D. Redford Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at The University of Texas at Austin. The interview centers on Professor Engle’s work pertaining to human rights law and discourse. Professor Engle’s book, Indigenous Roads to Development: Social Movements and International Law, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Charlotte Nunes: You have worked on behalf of a num­ber of marginalized groups, including indigenous and Afro-descended Colombians, survivors of war-time rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and citizen and non-citi­zen immigrants suffering discrimination in what you re­fer to as the US’s “internal war on terrorism.” What do you see as the relationship between language and rights?

Karen Engle: I’d like to begin by clarifying that I don’t see myself as working on behalf of those you describe. Rather, when engaged in legal and political advocacy, I aim to do so as much as possible in discussion with the individuals and groups who are the subjects of that advocacy. In terms of the relationship between language and rights, I would say that most of my scholarly work is about international human rights discourse. I focus, in particular, on how hu­man rights advocates for particular causes (such as wom­en’s rights or indigenous rights) conceptualize and deploy human rights law and discourse. I often focus on human rights in the context of marginalized groups and individu­als because they both provide a critique of what they see as traditional human rights law and aim to expand it. And they have often been successful so that human rights law has largely expanded over the years in response to its own criti­cism. The case of women’s human rights offers a good ex­ample. Twenty years ago, many human rights advocates did not see women as having distinct rights under the human rights corpus, but today few would question their inclusion in it. That inclusion is both represented in and has been pre­cipitated by a significant number of legal instruments and institutions that specifically incorporate, even mainstream, women’s rights. Of course, with inclusion have come new challenges and new critiques. So the battle is far from over. I am also interested in the way that the discourse of hu­man rights is deployed by those whom we do not normally consider marginal—political conservatives in the United Sates, for example. I have argued that those on the Right have made good use of human rights language, so that the Right as well as the Left and center have contributed to the growth of human rights. Even the administration of George W. Bush framed many issues in terms of human rights. So the question is not whether one is for or against human rights. Rather, the struggle is over the meaning of the term.

CN: Do you distinguish between academic and advocacy work?

KE: Honestly, some days I do and some days I do not. Per­haps for that reason, I am very much interested in the rela­tionship between academic endeavors and advocacy, and the extent to which we often believe that we must see them as separate so as not to compromise one for the other. One of the goals of the Rapoport Center is to bring together con­versations between academics and advocates, while at the same time not fully acknowledging the distinction between the two. There is a growing trend toward activist research, which offers one way of approaching critically the academ­ic/activist divide. While I am sympathetic to many of its premises, I also take issue with some articulations of the way in which it attempts to bridge that divide. In particular, I find discomfort with the position posited by some that ac­tivist researchers should essentially suppress their critical in­stincts for the purposes of strategy. The book that I’ve been working on, on indigenous rights advocacy, critiques what is often referred to as “strategic essentialism,” which is ba­sically a plea by critically-minded academics to perpetuate essentialist ideas about culture in their legal and political strategies. Those who promote strategic essentialism might maintain, for example, that the law only offers protection to indigenous peoples who meet certain criteria of cultur­al distinctiveness, and that therefore lawyers and anthro­pologists need to present the group’s narrative in this way.

I take issue with the ways that strategic essentialists accept not only a monolithic understanding of culture for strategic purposes, but of law as well. Indeed, I argue that they play a role in the production of the very legal rules they critique because, the more we insist that the law requires such a nar­rative, the more the law is going to require it. Here is an example. A lot of the advocacy with regard to indigenous land rights deploys dominant and romanticized understand­ings of indigenous peoples—as connected to the land, envi­ronmentally sensitive, looking for only ethno-development opportunities, returning to their traditional practices, even engaging in them. In this context, essentialism doesn’t take into account the historical factors that have made even that romanticized idea impossible. In Spanish, the term “cosmo­visión” is often used to refer to an indigenous world view much like what I have just described. But when land rights are based on such a cosmovisión, they are often paradigm-shifting. They are collective, for example, and nonalienable. But, in the market economy in which indigenous peoples often live, this means that their options are limited. Their land basically has no market value to them. Now, this is a complicated issue and I don’t mean to suggest that the land should be alienable—most indigenous peoples do not want that—but it does highlight the extent to which indigenous peoples are often caught in a bind between their day-to-day economic and political situation and their desires (and others’ desires for them) to “return” to a simple, sustainable lifestyle.

I would like to consider the possibility that the law doesn’t necessarily require essentialism. I would argue, in fact, that the law is much more fluid than it is often given credit for by advocates. I think lawyers are more likely to see the gaps, conflicts, and ambiguities in law than advocates from other disciplines. Nevertheless, I am aware that gaps, conflicts and ambiguities cannot always be exploited, which is why power remains an important component of analysis. We need to attend to structural biases and the limits that I would con­tend are inherent more in ideology and politics than they are in law itself. If ideology is the problem, essentialism does not and cannot attack it, however strategically deployed. So why not risk deconstructing culture in our advocacy? It might reveal some biases that we have otherwise missed.

CN: You recently spearheaded a project to make a portion of the George Lister archive available online. Could you say a few words about the significance of this project and how you’ve made use of other archival resources at The University of Texas?

KE: The Rapoport Center has been collaborating with UT Libraries to identify and expand archival resources related to human rights at UT. From the Rapoport Center side, much of this interest was sparked by the receipt of the papers of George Lister. Lister was a mid-level bureaucrat in the State Department for over sixty years, from 1941-2003. Ironical­ly, the fact that he never really rose above that level, coupled with the sheer length of his service, provides a unique lens into US foreign policy. Lister was often outspoken within the department and got himself into some precarious situ­ations. In the 1950s in Italy, for example, he argued that the United States should work with the democratic left, in particular with “autonomists” within the socialist party. This position for him was a Cold War tactic—the goal being to break the socialist-communist alliance. He suggested a similar approach in Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. While in the long-term his strategy was successful in Italy, he almost lost his job over it. He was disciplined for his insistence on meeting with members of the socialist party despite pres­sure from the US embassy to stop doing so. Only later did the policy change, in part through Lister’s work with Ar­thur Schlesinger. Arthur Schlesinger later called Lister “Mr. Human Rights.” That was one of the principal things we knew about Lister when we received the papers. It was very intriguing. Nobody else, to my knowledge, had been called “Mr. Human Rights.” What did Schlesinger mean by that?

It turned out that Lister had been one of the people in the State Department who had pushed for the inclusion of hu­man rights concerns in foreign policy decisions. One of the great assets of the papers is the synchronic perspective on human rights discourse. You can see in the papers when the shift to human rights discourse happened. In the 1950s in Italy, Lister did not use the term “human rights.” The Uni­versal Declaration of Human Rights had been passed by the United Nations and “human rights” was a term in circulation in much of the world, but it wasn’t really in circulation in the United States State Department or in US foreign policy. In the 1970s, when human rights considerations started to make their way into the State Department in an overt way, Lister was there, spearheading the idea of it in his own way as a mid-level bureaucrat. He became the first human rights officer, for example, within the bureau on Latin American affairs. My particular focus and interest in these papers is on the insight they offer as to when the switch toward hu­man rights occurred within US foreign policy, and what the term “human rights” has come to signify over the years.

I am often puzzled when I read some of what George List­er wrote, because sometimes, particularly as human rights became more mainstreamed in the department, he seemed more attached to the idea of human rights than to any par­ticular substantive commitment. So, if his support for the democratic left was defined by Cold War politics, his post-Cold War commitment to certain substantive issues or out­comes were largely defined by and described with human rights rhetoric. He might have been “Mr. Human Rights,” but—particularly as we moved into the 1980s—what it meant to be “for” human rights became less clear. The Rea­gan administration, for example, partly due to Lister I be­lieve, began to use human rights discourse in the context of Russia and its treatment of its Jewish population. It did so after initial resistance to incorporating human rights in for­eign policy and after pushing human rights aside in our rela­tions with many parts of the world, notably Latin America.

As a result of work we did with the Lister archives, UT Libraries recently acquired the papers of Joyce Horman, whose husband, Charlie Horman, was killed during the Chilean coup. The movie Missing [Costa-Gavras, dir. 1982] was made about him. The papers include materials from a long, protracted lawsuit that Joyce Horman and her fa­ther-in-law, Ed Horman, brought against the United States government and Henry Kissinger. There are some docu­ments in the archives that you won’t find anywhere else, but—and this is true with the Lister archive as well—a lot of the documents are available elsewhere. Our goal is to put them in one place, however, so that you can see any particular document in a larger context. Another goal is to identify human rights archives that already exist on cam­pus, and try to make better use of them and consider their ongoing relevance. The Law Library, for example, contains the bench notes from a series of cases called the Alstoetter cases, which were part of the Nuremburg Trials. These were the cases against the lawyers and judges who were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The contem­porary importance of these materials was recently high­lighted by the visit of Philippe Sands, author of The Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values [2008]. His book centers on the role of lawyers in the Bush administration in condoning, even authorizing, torture in Guantánamo. In considering their liability as lawyers, Philippe made a connection in the book to Alstoetter, and it turned out we have those papers at the UT Law Library.

CN: You are the founding Director of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. Could you comment on the genesis of the Center, its mission, and what you envision as its role in the Law School and in the University as a whole?

KE: The Center has always been a multi-disciplinary center, which distinguishes us from human rights centers at many other universities. We are multi-disciplinary in terms of fac­ulty, but also with regard to students. It has been exciting for me to see students from undergraduate, graduate and other professional schools get involved—through internships, hu­man rights delegations, archiving projects, and conferences and lecture series. Our new human rights legal clinic is also open to non-law students because we recognize the need for multiple perspectives and skills in the practice of law.

The Center’s mission is “to build a multidisciplinary commu­nity engaged in the study and practice of human rights that promotes the economic and political enfranchisement of mar­ginalized individuals and groups both locally and globally.” Our mission statement tries to expand on the typical under­standing of human rights by including a focus on economic and social as well as civil and political rights. It uses the term “marginalized” as a way to attend to structural bias. It applies to groups as well as individuals. “Both locally and globally” is meant to encourage attention to the relationship between the local and global. The project around the Lister papers, for example, was a project on human rights and US foreign policy, but it also highlighted the role that the United States plays in human rights issues that might seem to be far away.

I think it’s fair to say that we encourage more of a focus on economic and social rights than is the norm, and I, at least, always aim to keep the economic issues in mind even as we consider civil and political rights. In terms of economic and social rights, a number of our faculty work specifically on those issues. And we now have a faculty-driven working group on health and human rights. One of the largest proj­ects in which we have been engaged is one on Afro-descen­dant land rights in Latin America. It is a multi-year project with delegations to five different countries, and then a final year to bring together activists, black community leaders, academics, and government officials from the different coun­tries to consider legal and political strategies for addressing the gross economic disparities reflected in and perpetuat­ed by lack of meaningful access to land and development. Bringing together activists, academics, and policy-makers is an ongoing goal and method of the Center. The conversa­tions that result are sometimes hard, but they are crucial.