Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations

During most of human history, historical change has not been visible to the people who were involved in it, or even to those enacting it. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, endured for some four hundred generations with but slight changes in their basic structure ... But now the tempo of change is so rapid, and the means of observation so accessible, that the interplay of event and decision seems often to be quite historically visible, if we will only look carefully and from an adequate vantage point. (Charles Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 20-1)

This book is about rights, not 'human' rights. Throughout this book 'human' in human rights is used in inverted commas, so as not to reduce rights, a broader concept, to 'human' rights, and also to remind the reader not to lapse into reading rights as 'human' rights from sheer force of habit. The book is about what is entailed in reducing rights to 'human' rights.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND RIGHTS

At least since the 1990s the motto of most contemporary social movements appears to be 'every wrong must have a corresponding "human" right'. Even a cursory survey of contemporary social movements is enough to see that the clamour for more 'human' rights continues to expand. The expansion of rights continues notwithstanding the contradictory, even antithetical, right claims. The 'human' right to water comes hand in hand with new proprietary rights to water, the 'human' right to food with property rights to land titles, rights of homosexuals to marry with rights to religious beliefs opposed to it, the right to wear a hijab and the right to set up nudist colonies, rights of indigenous peoples and to private property, right to self-determination and security, rights to privacy and transparency, right to statehood and integrity of existing state boundaries, cultural and political rights, rights of migrants and 'sons of the soil', rights to health, the internet, even the 'human' right to happiness. After the United Nations (UN) was established at the end of the world wars in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enumerated twenty-eight rights. Today, it is estimated that international law recognises more than three hundred rights. Typically, an excellent diagnosis of a problem is followed with a proclamation of a new right and mobilisation for struggles that demand legalisation of that right. Eventually, notwithstanding the scepticism of many about the efficacy of rights, right claims seek out law courts. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries right claims inspired millions of disempowered men and women in Europe to rebel against the oppressive European feudal order under which they lived at that time. Today the demands for evermore rights and the reasons why diverse actors advance them are less straightforward.

Consider the recent demand by New Social Movements (NSM), by which I mean social movements that emerged in the Euro-American countries in the mid 1960s and in the Third World two and half decades later in the early 1990s, on one of the most important questions for people around the world today: land. The International Land Coalition (ILC) formed in 1995 is a global alliance of just about every type of organisation: G7 and Third World states, International Economic Organisations (IEO) and International Organisations (IO), bilateral and multilateral aid and development organisations, International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGO), national Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO), grass root social movements, and global, regional and international land alliances like the Via Campesina. The ILC argues, correctly, that the roots of rural poverty in the Third World lie in land alienations and displacement. The solution to the problem is the demand for 'human' rights to land titles, fair compensation for land acquisitions and resettlement and rehabilitation of displaced people. The ILC fuses diverse voices, interests and standpoints and brings about a convergence in the positions of actors as varied as the World Bank and Via Campesina, Group of 7 (G7) and Group of 77 (G77) states, and INGOs and anti-imperialist social movements. The glue that holds the convergence together is their common commitment to the language of rights. Rights are no longer adversarial as they were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far from challenging existing orders or authorities and inspiring historical transformations in the dominant architecture of global power, the world's most powerful economic, political and military alliances – the IEOs, the IOs, the G7 states, the corporations, influential 'think tanks' and INGOs, even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – champion rights alongside the disempowered, the working people, the unemployed and the discriminated. From coalitions such as the ILC at least it would seem as though we live in a world where lions and lambs have at long last recognised their common claims to water, forests and land and tigers have become vegetarians. What kind of micro and macro processes produced this convergence? Answers to these questions must await the chapters in Part II of this book. What is important here is to grasp what is entailed in the claims for 'human' rights to land and the reality of our relationships to land.

Land is, quintessentially, a relationship. Land is not a 'thing'. It is a bond that ties people to nature and to each other. Land is the glue that holds people and nature together to form places. Historically, rights transformed places into property. It transformed a relationship into a thing, a commodity. The transformation characterises capitalism as a distinct type of social system. The European Enlightenment transformed land as the ordering mechanism in feudal Europe to commodity production as the ordering mechanism in modern Europe. The breakup of feudal land relations and the transformation of land into a commodity exchangeable in the market place was an essential condition for capitalism to advance in systemic ways. The modern concept of rights owes it birth to that moment when land was transformed into a commodity and hundreds of thousands of people were evicted from the places they called their 'homeland'. New theoretical concepts and legal mechanisms were needed to reconstitute society where both nature and labour could become saleable commodities. The concept of individual rights was pivotal to reconstituting society ordered on land relations to...