Human Rights as War by Other Means
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Following the 1998 peace agreement in Northern Ireland, political violence has dramatically declined and the region has been promoted as a model for peacemaking. Human rights discourse has played an ongoing role in the process but not simply as the means to promote peace. The language can also become a weapon as it is appropriated and adapted by different interest groups to pursue social, economic, and political objectives. Indeed, as violence still periodically breaks out and some ethnocommunal and class-based divisions have deepened, it is clear that the progression from human rights violations to human rights protections is neither inevitable nor smooth. Human Rights as War by Other Means traces the use of rights discourse in Northern Ireland's politics from the local civil rights campaigns of the 1960s to present-day activism for truth recovery and LGBT equality. Combining firsthand ethnographic reportage with historical research, Jennifer Curtis analyzes how rights discourse came to permeate grassroots politics and activism, how it transformed those politics, and how rights discourse was in turn transformed. This ethnographic history foregrounds the stories of ordinary people in Northern Ireland who embraced different rights politics and laws to conduct, conclude, and, in some ways, continue the conflict—a complex portrait that challenges the dominant postconflict narrative of political and social abuses vanquished by a collective commitment to human rights. As Curtis demonstrates, failure to critique the appropriation of rights discourse in the peace process perpetuates perilous conditions for a fragile peace and generates flawed prescriptions for other conflicts.
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Human Rights as War by Other Means
Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor
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Nevertheless, since World War II there has been widespread recognition that violent conflict produces violations and denials of human rights. Commonsensically, the resolution of conflict entails recognition of human rights to prevent the recurrence of conflict and to create legitimacy for postconflict institutions. Yet the truism that these practices are interdependent is challenging in practice. Many scholars locate the difficulty of reconciling conflict resolution practice and human rights principles in a clash between the pragmatic (conflict resolution) and idealist (human rights) impulses of the fields (e.g., Helsing and Mertus 2006). Nevertheless, argues Bell (2000), their continuing linkage in theory and actual peace agreements reflects a broader association of justice—regarding representation, state institutions, and past violence—with peace, despite contradictions between conflict resolution’s realpolitik and human rights ideals. Much of the work linking conflict resolution and human rights emphasizes a mutually reinforcing reciprocity or “synergy” between the two areas of practice (e.g., Galant and Parlevliet 2005). Said and Lerche (2006) go farther, arguing that peace itself should be recognized as a universal human right.
The practical challenges of protecting such a right are immense, however, as Donnelly (2006) argues. Other scholars share his reserved perspective on human rights principles and conflict resolution. In fact, human rights advocacy has been shown to be counterproductive for reconciliation in some postconflict societies. For example, in South Africa, human rights discourse has been linked to the substitution of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) for retributive justice (see Wilson 2001). In another case, demands for human rights and disagreements about how to define and secure them have caused returns to violence in Sri Lanka (see Keenan 2006, 2007).
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