Ben Dorfman Aalborg University Denmark

1. “…whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts”Rights, Dialogue and Historical Memory Ben Dorfman Aalborg University Denmark

2. …”you can’t avoid human rights” (Cmiel 2004: 117) …the “age” of rights (Bobbio 1996) …a human rights “life-world” (Dorfman 2012) …human rights as the “last utopia” (Moyn 2010)

3. Rights, intervention and conflict Humanitarian intervention Civil conflict resolution

4. human rights as contingent upon historical memory and imagination vistas of the historical imagination

5. …all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights… …all members of the human family [have]…inherent dignity… …freedom, justice and peace in the world [are] the aspirations of a common people… …disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…

6. …[we] are inclined to idealize a remote past of natural human innocence from which men have fallen into the corrupt social state in which they currently find themselves. [We] in turn project this utopia onto what is effectively a non-temporal plane, viewing it as a possibility of human achievement at any time, if only men will seize control of their…essential humanity… (White 1973, 25)

7. corruption

8. …human rights draw from experiences of human “suffering”… (Baxi 2006) …we suffer on private, individual (civil and political) scales …we suffer on collective, mass (social and cultural) scales

9. Images of suffering …the political disappearance …the famine …gender abuse

10. private suffering universal humanity collective, mass suffering

11. Collective, mass suffering Mazower (2002) Inordinate levels of state violence in the twentieth century Grossest, largest scale human rights violations perpetrated by states Global diversity of large-scale slaughter Holocaust retains pride of place in the global imagination

12. “genocide consciousness” and the global “cultural economy” (Moyn 2010; Appadurai 1996)

13. Bosnian genocide Cambodian genocide Holocaust

14. The radical expansion of genocide consciousness in the 1980s and ‘90s was linked to the radical expansion of grass roots human rights activism and increased breadth of human rights organizations in those years. It also concerned surprise at continuation of the practice in the wake of the immediate promise of the end of the Cold War.

15. Mediascapes and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990, 298-9) …the distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information which are now available to a growing number of private and public images throughout the world…and…images of the world created by these media… …concatenations of images…often directly political and frequently hav[ing] to do with the ideologies of states and…counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented towards capturing state power or a piece of it…[these include] ideas, terms and images including “freedom,” “welfare,” “rights,” “sovereignty,” “[political] representation” and…”democracy.”

16. creating “master-narratives” Eurocentric during the Rwandan genocide, there were a maximum of 15 members of the international press present in the country (Melvern 2007, 204)

17. Conclusion Events of the mid-1990s in conjunction with the expanded global discursive deployment of human rights vocabularies lead to a continued heightening of “genocide consciousness” in the latter part of that decade and the start of the twenty-first century. Though Eurocentrically-driven and dominated by the Westernized perspectives undergirding and structuring the global cultural economy, this global receptiveness to both political and popular culture driven interests in- and representations of deleterious mass violence. These – senses of deletorious mass violence – form the outer limit, or ultimate justification of, human rights ideas. This reflects the essence of human rights consciousness, structured, as it is, around senses and images, or imaginations, of humanity’s descent into “barbarous acts.” Barbarity, or mass scale negations of human life are present qua artifacts of the historical imagination in all discursive and policy-oriented invocations of human rights. This includes those surrounding humanitarian intervention and post-conflict dialogue. This serves to make explicit the precise terms and imageries to which the (or a) de facto global community refers in the deployment of human rights ideas. This again includes policy and law.

18. References Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7: 295-310. Baxi, Upendra. 2006. The Future of Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bobbio, Norberto. 1996. The Age of Rights. Translated by Allan Cameron. London: Polity. Cmiel, Kenneth. 2004. “The Recent History of Human Rights.” The American Historical Review 109 (1): 117-35. Dorfman, Ben. 2012. “The Human Rights Lifeworld: Politics, Society and Representation at the Start of the Twenty-First Century.” Academic Quarter 5: 1-20. Mazower, Mark. 2002. “Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century.” The American Historical Review 107 (4): 1158-78. Melvern, Linda. 2007. “Missing the Story: The Media and the Rwandan Genocide.” In Media and the Rwandan Genocide, edited by Alan Thompson,198-20. London: Zed. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Bellknap. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.