Interview with the author of "The Politics of Human Rights Protection" Jan Knippers Black

November 8, 3:34 PMSF Foreign Policy ExaminerMaria Lewytzkyj

My opportune discussion with the author provides readers with a comprehensive valuable addition to a very thorough book that fears little in its frank and bold exploration of the obstacles that human rights protectors face in being heard at the policy decision level and in forming a world where the motivation to protect human rights supercedes the motivation to walk away with a profit.

Envisioning a world that considers the idea of triage a good guiding practice when a conflict is being sorted out toward an improved situation, Jan Black offers great advice to human rights protectors on how to advocate that human rights become a top priority among other policy factors (trump cards as she calls them): economics, religion and security. These trump cards have become the assumed priorities in assessing situations that lead to policy implementation around the globe, but they often overlook the the consequences of policy choices. In her in-depth look at individual and collective rights, her candid inquiry questions what is found acceptable when it comes to living conditions and conflict conditions and makes a brilliant argument for pulling the whole business of preventing human rights abuses to the top of any action plan. She challenges people to reengage actively in bringing to the foreground their observations and impact assessments of how policies and decisions affect the people before they ever become the established practice.

The book is a must-read and in the following interview, the author provides a sneak peek as well as applies her deep understanding to many current conflicts that are plaguing the globe. Few people have the type of determination Jan Black exerts, and few have taken the time to help us better understand the current situation we are all in. From the get-go, she challenges people to have the courage to understand and act to make the world a better place by no longer accepting failure or looking backwards to pick up the pieces, but by aiming to approach conflict resolution by taking the responsibility of becoming mindful well-informed concerned citizens who preserve the sanctity of human rights.

The interview is posted in two-parts for your benefit.

PART 1

Tell me three top ways to move intervention upstream with impact assessment.

The three summed up would be: first is dream freely, second is think holistically, and the third is to act strategically. The first one I would say is about keeping your eyes on the prize, which is to say, don’t get bogged down in the details of trying to move incrementally beyond the most immediate crisis or problem. Remember that there is something much bigger than just getting past this little obstacle that you have in mind. Then also, to know where you are going, you have to know where you are coming from, so that means that you have to start by understanding: where you are, where you’ve been, and why. Otherwise action without understanding is dangerous. So that understanding, I would say, comes from thinking holistically, which involves looking at the issue from a bottom-up perspective, which is very different from the way we look at most things. The framing for most issues comes down from those who command the floor, the people who have the power and the access to start with.

If you are promoting change, you’ve got to look at the perspective not of those who have the most to lose, but of those who have the most to fear. You also have to consider all the rights of all of the people. If you try to break them up and just choose one set of people and one set of the rights of theirs that are violated, you’re not going to understand what the big picture is about and then you can’t get very far.

The third is act strategically. I think that the most important aspect of acting strategically is to try to strip the cover of denial from people all the way up and down the system, not only the plausible deniability that presidents and other people at the top demand, but also the garden-variety denial that people use to protect themselves all the time. The main idea of mine is to lift the shield of denial from people at so many different levels in this process. I would say that is the ultimate objective. How you do that is something else. Coming up with the right kind of strategies of education and information and political advocacy.

I’ll back up a little to say that one of the reasons I think along these lines, like so many people who have been active in human rights for a long time, I just get tired of the idea of counting bodies after the disaster has happened. Especially when it is so clear to us that it is going to happen. That to anyone who has been paying attention to the nature of the conflict in the region or to the consequences of this kind of policy, you can see for sure this disaster is going to happen. The problem is that the more important the decision, the less well-informed will be the decision-maker. If you look at the way that decisions about war and peace are made, the people who make those decisions for the most part really don’t know the region, the history that would need to be taken into consideration, even the history of the past wars of the country deciding to go to war. Such decisions are made by non-experts often for political reasons on intelligence that is pre-misinterpreted.

What I would like so much to be able to do, to inspire other people to do, is to try to get in ahead of those decisions and make sure that the people making the decisions from the top of the system understand that they will not be able to get away with plausible deniability anymore. They will not be able to say, 'but who could have predicted?' We’re not going to let them say that. We did predict it - it’s on the record. But not just 'we the activists' or the experts could have predicted it. We want them to know that the public is going to know what we know about it. We are getting the word out, so forget your cover story. It’s not going to work. That’s the idea. One of the reasons that our leaders have been able to get away with plausible deniability for such a long time is that the public wants it too. That’s the most painful part and the most painful part to deal with too.

How do you break thru that protective shield that allows people to avoid understanding what’s painful to understand? And it’s painful to understand, because you need to be able to believe in the reliability of your leaders or a power system, a social system. If you are able to understand what happens without your intervention there, then it imposes some kind of an obligation on members of the public at large. Understanding too much imposes obligations on anyone who does understand too much. Understanding is actually an act of courage in itself. It’s a step that is hard to get people to take.

It’s so easy to understand this when people have such huge obligations on their time. It’s a problem that keeps getting worse. If they don’t have three jobs just to get by, then they are doing a lot of volunteer work, or handling obligations for their own families that they didn’t have to handle before. That’s the evolution of the last several decades of our economic system; it has put a lot more pressure on every individual. So it’s easy to see how they feel like they can and must subconsciously avoid knowing these things. So it’s not enough that the information that it would take to know how to avoid disaster is not there, it’s just that you have to be able to force people to see it and understand it.

You have to make it hard for them not to know.

How you get there: there are a lot of different ways to get there. I became aware of this a long time ago when I worked on my dissertation, I wanted to look at how it happened that the U.S. became involved in the overthrow of a democratic government in Brazil in 1964, because I could see that a similar thing was about to happen in Uruguay and Chile. I wrote about it in the proposal to my dissertation. The evidence was that they were headed in the direction of a counter-revolutionary episode that Brazil had suffered and partly because of the way the U.S. was pushing it. I was amazed when I got to working on the dissertation that no one else had worked on this. At least in the U.S., you could not find even a suggestion that the U.S. had been involved in this kind of thing. In the first place, it was shocking to find out that something that was so obvious to me wasn’t out there. And I never believed for a minute that nobody else had an inkling of it, I just believed that nobody else was naïve enough to get into the kind of trouble it takes to tell the truth. The other thing that I learned in the process, in getting the information out there, is that the book that came out of it got some good publicity, but that was not enough. If people don’t want to learn what you have to tell them, then you need an organizational effort to get people informed.

It seems that one of the messages of your book is that human rights as an afterthought has become habitual in many cultures. It seems that the pain and suffering goes unnoticed and it isn’t until the system is fixed that wrongs are then righted. If there were a preventive approach to human rights in every sector, which ones would you suggest first? Also, there are already human rights commissioners in many governments with human rights abuses, why are they not meeting with success?

When you are starting from where we are now, from a fully developed kind of world empire - where there are a series of influences and hegemonies around and there are competitions for global hegemony - at least from our perspective in the U.S., we are in the belly of the beast of the empire that now assumes a right to control the ways of the world, and that’s to prevent so much of the kind of abuse that has become routine, you have to be willing to give up the idea of controlling the world. You can try influencing the world, you can try to lead by example, there are all kinds of ways we could try to have a positive influence on the world, but dropping bombs on them is not going to be one of those ways. And if we still think that whatever good we want to do for the world has to be done with the final idea that we have to control it, we’ve lost from the start.

We could approach human rights impact assessment in the same way that an environmental assessment has been approached, which is to try to get in ahead of the kinds of policies that affect the most people. Certainly you start with war, and there are basic approaches to foreign assistance, humanitarian assistance that if you study them carefully, and saw what had been done in the past and saw what has gone right and what has gone wrong, then you would have a much better idea than just starting with what is best practices from the perspective of how it works for the institution undertaking the practices. We don’t really look back after we’ve finished projects to try and figure out how the projects really worked for the people on the ground. It turns out to be how it worked for the World Bank, for the IMF, for the creditor institutions, for the aide agency.

It would be nice if you could have human rights impact assessment built into the system in the way that environmental impact assessment has been. I understand very well why that hasn’t really taken place and why it’s less likely to, because it’s a lot safer politically to hug a tree than a poor person.

People who think they have something to lose feel very threatened by the fact that there are a lot of people out there who have needs, and so security systems are really built to keep the have-nots from going after what the haves have. In fact, most of the systemic grand theft that happens is the rich stealing from the poor, not the other way around, because it is very easy for the rich to steal from the poor. It’s not easy for the poor to steal from the rich. But, there is so much that is systemic like that that you need to break through in some way. One of the reasons is that everyone wants to say that they are in favor of human rights. No one wants to be seen as being opposed to human rights. It’s gotten to be not only an accepted part of the discourse, but an obligatory part in a way. The way they get around actually being for human rights, is that they have trump cards that in the system are allowed to override it. One of them being security, of course. Once you play the security card, it overrides everything, including common sense. It means that decisions can be made very hurriedly without looking at any of the possible consequences. People are inclined to stop thinking themselves when somebody else plays that card, it’s a conversation stopper. It means that the argument stops here. To a lesser extent but also to devastating results, the economic card is played that way. You would think that in times of economic crisis, reasonable people would say, well, triage means you handle the greatest need first.

One of the worst things that happens with the myth of expertise about economics, the economists say that of course you have some starving people down there, but we can’t think about that right now, because the banking system is about to collapse. Wait a minute! The bankers are in trouble, so we are supposed to turn away from the starving people? I don’t think so.

If there are people who are in danger of starvation, if they are without shelter, if they are without the most basic health care needs, if they are disabled, if they need help for whatever reason, if they are old or young, in times of economic crisis, you direct whatever you have first of all to the greatest need. But actually, the opposite is the case. It’s never been seen more clearly than in the U.S. since September ‘08. What we have done is throw incredible amounts of money we don’t have to the financial institutions that got us into this mess in the first place. All over the country, budgets from local to state to federal budgets that were designed to help the people in the greatest need are the ones that are stripped. It’s not just us, that’s just not here and now, that’s the way the world has worked. That’s how the economy trump card is played. If the economy is in trouble that means that there has to be belt tightening. But guess whose belt gets tightened: the belts that are around the narrowest waists. That’s the way that works.

Also, when I talk about triage in the book, I counter-posed it against the broader issues. A lot of people will challenge pursuit of rights that are not well understood and abuses that are not necessarily understood as abuses, because, wait a minute, if you’re talking about human rights, you have to be dealing with genocides and execution and torture, and I say absolutely yes, we must maintain an idea of what has to be dealt with expeditiously and urgently, and of course we have to keep an eye on it! That doesn’t mean we can ignore the borderlines where the issues are not well understood or not agreed upon, because that is where most of conflict actually will be. Right there on the fuzzy border.

The rights of immigrants, legal or otherwise, right now that’s a huge issues. The U.S. has been imprisoning and abusing in all kinds of ways people rounded up of all ages. Immigrants, legal or otherwise - it takes them a long time to get things sorted out. In the meantime, they just abuse people right and left. It’s not just the U.S., we hear more about that all the time, but Europe is getting worse and worse on this all the time. It’s these borderline issues that call for policy and that cause conflict. We can’t ignore them, because there are even worst things going on.

If we are not expanding the boundaries of the rights that are understood as rights and must be protected, then we are losing ground. The more we lose, the more we stand to lose. This is a dynamic that is moving in one direction or another all the time. You can always say, well yes, there is an increasing number of homeless people on the streets, but we don’t have time to think about that, because we have bigger problem to deal with.

It’s easier to see the nature of ‘cause and effect’ if you look at things in the farming sector. We know that where you have farm labor involved and you are spraying pesticides, there is going to be tremendous damage to the people working there, but we keep doing it. When you are mining - mining gold and other such metals - there is going to be mercury released that will get into the water and it will be damaging to the health of children in the area. But we don’t do anything to prevent that sequence. We may check later, and find lots of kids in the Amazon who are suffering from mercury in the system. How could we have known? Of course we knew. There are many sectors like this. We know the downside. We don’t know how to stop the perpetrators from doing it.

The best example of them all is war, and the very idea that you send the bull in to set up the shelves in the china shop, never mind to clean up the mess that the bull made in the china shop. We talk as if we were so seriously concerned about the underprivileged, the disadvantaged, the discriminated against people in all these other parts of the world that we know so little about and, so what we are going to do about it is make war on them to straighten it out. How on earth can thinking people come to a conclusion like that? But imperial societies have always come to that conclusion. We have gotten to be an imperial society and we don’t face that.

That would be dealing with the problem of denial, if we could just get people to face the idea that our whole mindset is drawn from the business of having become an empire and that if we don’t deal with that, it’s not just that we’ll keep getting into wars, it’s that we are in a state of war. The system will require conflict all the time to keep itself going. That’s why you have to get out in front of it and recognize that this is empire, and if we don’t want the wars and we don’t want the cost of it, we have to start turning that around instead of going ahead down that path.

The more we build the military industry complex, the more there will be war. It’s a systemic thing. Once you have an empire, to keep the economy of the empire going, you also have to keep the wars going. The nature of demand is that you have to scare the people in order to keep the budgets coming out. We are building other aspects of this empire in the same way, like the prison industrial complex system. Our prisons are privatized and they are in it for profits. In order to continue to get the profits, you have to keep filling the prisons and having more demand for places to put the prisoners. So instead of thinking about whether it is really necessary to imprison people who have used a little bit of marijuana. Even if you’re sure you don’t want marijuana, there is surely a better way to deal with users of a substance than put them in jail. There is much about our prison system that is also quite insane. Not just immoral, but insane.

About human rights commissioners:

It’s one of those tools that is up for grabs always, it can be used to squelch criticism and curiosity about human rights if controlled by a government that doesn’t want to invite anybody into the discussion, but it can also be used to bring pressure on the government from the inside and the outside - like so many institutions and agencies it can be used for good or ill. The name of our game if we are promoting human rights, is that it works for the benefit of human rights instead of against it.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, I was working on some cases with Amnesty International, one of them being that of Annette Lew and other people who were fighting for organizing and trying to build a political base for respect for human rights and women’s rights and indigenous rights (or at least people’s rights). The Taiwanese felt like they were occupied more or less by mainland China and so they wanted their own government. And so I went over to see if I could get into the prison and be able to do a report for Amnesty on what was going on there. But also I knew that would not be easy, but perhaps making enough of a fuss, people would bring focus on the issue in the U.S. and around the world and bring pressure on what was then the government of the Republic of China. I was turned away from the prison of course by the human rights office of the government there.

Of course, if you anticipate that there are people who are going to come over looking into your human rights situation, then you set up a barricade, and the intelligent way to do that is to set up a human rights office to push these people back. That’s one thing. Human rights as a discourse, and the existence of human rights offices can be a tool and a tool can be used by anyone who picks it up. It can be used for good or ill. The language we use, is the same way.

When Jimmy Carter was in office in the U.S., we set up, for the first time, a human rights office in the State Department, to actually look into abuses in other parts of the world, including some that the U.S. had a great deal to do with (Latin America, but also along the fringes of what was then the Soviet sphere). And then when Carter was gone, and Reagan took over, the office came to be used for the opposite. I had an article that went to the New Republic on the situation of human rights in Chile - this would have been in the early 1980s. After they had published my article, the magazine got a really heated nasty message from Elliott Abrams, who was then head of the human rights office for the State Department. They were using that office the same way that the government of the Republic of China had been using it in Taiwan: to redefine human rights as they choose to and to push back those who were serious about it. That’s something we should understand about any kind of office, any kind of use of language, that it becomes a political football that can be used either way.

That said, I also have to say that a lot of good has been accomplished by many of those offices in parts of the world, particularly in Africa, because when the people who are trying to fight for human rights have so little clout behind them - when it’s so dangerous to do so - if you can get United Nations involvement in trying to set up and monitor such an office, even if the UN then is having to deal also with a repressive regime that is trying to control how that office is used, at least there is some push back FOR human rights. I’m not against countries having human rights offices, in fact I’m for it, but it’s something that people need to understand, like government or social institution itself: an operation that is called a human rights office can go either way.

Can you elaborate a little on your call to indiscipline?

I was thinking of it first in the sense of my advocacy of multidisciplinary studies, but in a way, I think I should go farther and say anti-disciplinary, because usually the whole idea of discipline is used to put up walls beyond which one set of people is not supposed to tread in search of an answer to a question, or a solution to a problem. I think that almost gives away the un-seriousness of the pursuit. If you look for example in the social science disciplines, political science all by itself, the study of politics by itself is entertainment, and economics by itself is religion. But, politics that is not based on an understanding on an intent to incorporate economics is just a popularity contest. Economics without politics has nothing to do with what is actually going to happen, so it’s a game. It’s chess that is less realistic than an actual chessboard. It goes beyond that. It’s a kind of discipline that is imposed by religions and the idea that you don’t dare question what I say god says. You get that also with any category of people that claims expertise and priority. That includes security systems and the economic systems at the top. The mess of expertise is one of the worst things that we have to contend with. The kind of expertise that says don’t question me, you’re not supposed to think about this, I have all the answers.

Can you tell me about a few world leaders who you think have moved away from that self-contradictory thinking that you mention in your book and are implementing indiscipline in their policymaking?

Yes, there is an awful discrepancy between the leaders who can accomplish that sort of thing and the ones who are the decision makers. One of the biggest problems we have is that once people are in a position, elected or otherwise, to be seen as leaders, then they have something to lose, and then they are afraid to lead. Because leading means taking risks. Especially if you are trying to lead on behalf of the people, that is, as opposed to the elite. People like Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Gandhi, all kinds of people around the world have been willing to step up to do what it took to make a difference on behalf of the people as a whole. Not many people who are acknowledged people in public office or private power are willing to do that. Some are. I would say Soros has. George Soros has used his economic power to do some good. But that is kind of rare. There are international leaders. Right now for example, Lula from Brazil. He started a program “Fome Zero” (“No Hunger”) and it changed names and “Bolsa Familia” (“Family Safety Net”). It has cut back on poverty and kept a lot of students in school. Things can be done, even when it looks very difficult.

“To every solution there is a problem: any remedy devised to protect the interests of the less powerful will soon be turned by the powerful to their own advantage.” I quote from your book. I see your point. Everyone can play victim, is what I’ve heard. How do you suggest staying ahead of that game?

Anticipating it, and understanding that it will happen. Don’t be blindsided by it every time it happens, and understand that it is systemic. As soon as you implement an increase in minimum wage the folks who don’t want to pay their workers more will say that they have to downsize, because we can’t afford that. They’ll say it’s all your fault and you’re going to lose half those jobs instead. There may be some companies that are handicapped and some kinds of small companies that need some tax credits when such pay raises are implemented, but for the most part that’s just greed and hegemony. We have to expect that they will say that we know that they will downsize. We have to make it harder for them to downsize in response to an increase in minimum wage.

Same thing with laws that have come in to protect women or protect children, the first thing you know is that they are used to discriminate against women. We have to stay awake all the time and anticipate what they are going to do, and counter it and get back on track.

How do you suggest that the root causes of human rights violations be explored more in the public’s eye? For example, when you see a show or read an article or a study that talks about refugees in Sudan, or pirates in Somalia or other injustices in the news, what do you think that the media is doing wrong in telling the story?

One understands the nature of the news business and some of it is hard to get around. Of course, the focus will be on what is happening right now. It’s hard to get people just to give us a back-story and to give it in a way that makes what is happening now comprehensible, but they should try. I think also there is a tendency to focus primarily on the victims, without asking how did this happen and why did it happen without looking in the first place to the perpetrators and not to just the immediate abusers, but to the ones who enabled that abuse, and the ones who promoted the abuse, and the system that promotes it.

For example, sex trafficking. It’s such a big issue now. Of course, it’s horrifying. So the immediate attention is to the particular people who we can identify as having being trafficked and the particular immediate traffickers, but there are all kinds of systemic things that make that turn of events more likely. Look at the kind of economic collapse, meltdown, that means that public jobs will be lost. Well most of those jobs, that have been lost every time there is that kind of meltdown that destroys the public sector first, are women’s jobs, and they are left desperate. They have to be reaching for whatever looks like an opportunity for them. No wonder they are easily fooled in that kind of thing. Also you find more trafficking where there are swarms of workers that are immigrant workers, so we should make it less necessary for people to have to travel so far to do their work. That’s a systemic problem, that so much of the work force is on the move now and can’t settle down and make a real home for a real family.

Also, the warzones - that’s another part of the demand side of the human trafficking business. Where you have a lot of troops gathered, of course, there will be demand for sex services, so you will have people trafficked to meet that demand. There are systemic features on the supply side and the demand side that we never seem to look at or try to do anything about. That would be true with almost any kind of issue that you look at. And when you get right down to the bottom of it, rights abuse is always about inequality, because the bullies don’t go after people who are just as big as they are, the ones who can fight back.

Where you have vulnerability on the one hand and impunity on the other, of course you’re going to have rights violations.

Do you think that there have been any impact assessments on failed states that included that countries with poor governance would rely more on international organizations such as the UN and international aide? Do you think that that impacts whether or not other countries choose to improve their own governance or know that they can rely on these organizations and aide groups with their domestic politics and internal strife as a fall-back plan?

I don’t really think it’s the governments, or the would-be leaders trying to put together a government for what are borderline failed states, that are so much the problem, as the countries that destroy these states. Like the way the U.S. goes into Iraq and smashes it up like a bull in a China shop and then says, yeah sure, the UN ought to come in and clean it up. I worry a lot about the U.S. having more impunity precisely, and other hegemonic states, that can act recklessly vis-à-vis another people or another state, and then turn around and say that it’s the role of the United Nations to pick up the pieces. I think that’s a problem.

I also think that whether or not we are talking about human involvement, part of the problem is that we so readily accept failure. We don’t go back.  In the first place, if it worked for us, the ones who are supposed to be fixing it, it doesn’t seem to matter nearly enough that it might have been a failure for that bunch of folks we left behind. As long as it works for us, our budget, our careers, our media image, that’s what seems to be what matters too much. Not only do we too readily accept failure, we don’t even define it in a realistic way. But under any circumstances we seem to more readily accept failure than we accept an ongoing challenge. Or we can accept failure like the way we accept responsibility, which is without doing anything about it. That’s a big problem. Especially when it comes to what might be called nation-building, or post-conflict reconstruction or whatever has inspired the West to get involved somewhere, that it didn’t know enough about or care enough about, our model still has been the colonial system. We don’t admit that, we talk an awful lot about how important local buy-in and participation are and we don’t pay any attention to that on the ground, we just run it the way we always have, which is a colonial model.

We can’t stand to think that a project that we think is ours is getting out of control. It has to be out of control, unless we are going to stay on as colonial masters, but that’s a hard one to accept for the hegemonic.

Part 1 of 2.  Click here for Part 2 of 2.