13 research outputs found
Myth-making and Reality: A Critical Examination of Human Rights-Compliant Counterterrorism in the Philippines and Indonesia
This thesis explores the relationship between counterterrorism
and human rights. Its primary contention is that the promotion of
the ideal of human rights-compliant counterterrorism has
undermined rather than strengthened human rights. Drawing on
fieldwork-based case studies in the Philippines and Indonesia,
the thesis demonstrates that greater recognition for the role of
human rights in achieving security has not prompted a positive
transformation of counterterrorism practices. Instead, proponents
of counterterrorist action have been able to frame their action
as a necessary, human rights-sensitive, and rational response to
unnecessary, human rights-insensitive and irrational political
violence. The challenge therefore is how to devise strategies to
resist human rights abuses in the name of counterterrorism that
do not entangle human rights in the perpetuation and legitimation
of the counterterrorism agenda.
The thesis proceeds in eight chapters besides the Introduction.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for analysis, introducing the normative
discourse of human rights-compliant counterterrorism at the
international level, and proposing a theoretical framework for
analysing this discourse that draws from the insights of Critical
Terrorism Studies and critical approaches to international law
and human rights. Utilising this theoretical framework, I examine
the extent to which counterterrorism practices undermined rather
than advanced human rights in two case studies: the Philippines
and Indonesia. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 develop the Philippine case
study. Chapter 2 presents the local counterterrorism discourse
during the government’s alignment with the United States’
“War on Terror”, showing that the government characterised
complex armed struggles as “terrorism” with devastating
consequences for human rights. Chapter 3 analyses the responses
of local human rights advocates to this counterterrorism
discourse, describing how their resistance strategies cannot be
reduced to a clamour for human rights-compliant counterterrorism.
Chapter 4 shows how official policies have incorporated human
rights-friendly rhetoric; and why despite this, they are failing
to transform the practices of security forces that lead to
extrajudicial killings and other serious abuses.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 develop the Indonesian case study. Chapter 5
reviews the local counterterrorism discourse developed during the
Suharto regime, showing that the threat of Islamic
“terrorism” was likely fostered by it, benefiting the regime
at the expense of human rights. Chapter 6 shows how, after the
Bali bombing of 2002, Indonesia’s approach to counterterrorism
has incorporated human rights, much more than in the Philippines,
and how local human rights advocates have accordingly adjusted
their perception of the Islamic “terrorist” threat and the
acceptability of counterterrorism. Chapter 7 analyses how Densus
88, the main counterterrorism actor, enjoys impunity for
extrajudicial killings, demonstrating that the legal framework
has failed to restrain serious abuses and in fact inoculated the
counterterrorism agenda from further scrutiny. Chapter 8, the
concluding chapter, brings together the main findings of the
thesis and emphasises the need for more critical human rights
scholarship and advocacy that are disentangled from the
counterterrorism agenda
Exercising rights into existence: new human rights strategies by Third World peoples
This article suggests that a critical Third World approach to human rights does not
have to be reduced to scepticism, but should rather incite a pragmatic sensibility
towards the use of rights talk in struggles of Third World peoples. Two examples
of collective struggles are considered: in the first, involving indigenous people in
Chiapas, Mexico, a human rights vocabulary is redeployed in such a way as to escape
state capture; in the second, involving undocumented migrant workers in the US
state of Tennessee and in the Netherlands, rights talk is avoided in order to maximise
the chances of obtaining rights. I argue that both cases illustrate a route to rights
based on a performative ontology or exercise-based theory of human rights that
eschews the need for state recognition or the existence of a receiver or verifier of
claims or expressions for rights to exist. The view that there is no better evidence of
the existence of human rights than their exercise or enjoyment radically adjusts rights
talk by countering the state’s claimed monopoly to legal authorship or production
and locates a realm of power and law in people’s actions and practices
Clandestine activists : human rights activism for undocumented migrants : (a case study of a campaign of domestic workers in the Netherlands)
The emergence in the Netherlands of a campaign for recognition and rights of domestic workers, mostly undocumented migrants, is a highly unlikely event. Among other things, the Netherlands is not a party to the Convention on Migrant Workers and it has an aggressive policy against irregular migration centered on the denial of most social rights to undocumented migrants. The campaign of domestic workers is a window into pro-undocumented migrants’ human rights (UMHR) activism in a harsh political environment. This paper looks at the opportunities and constraints of pro-UMHR activism in the Netherlands and the strategies that activists can and do adopt to overcome constraints and create opportunities, as demonstrated in the campaign of domestic workers. It advances the view that deprived of a ‘hegemonic’ language, pro-UMHR activists will likely engage in processes of argumentation/dialogue/persuasion in which an explicit normative language of human rights for undocumented migrants is largely avoided. A key finding is that activists in the campaign of domestic workers are constrained to conceal instead of announce their motivation which is the regularization of undocumented status. The paper challenges some established conceptions of human right activism’s relationship to human rights norms in the standard social constructivist account
Dealing with the Past or Moving Forward? Transitional Justice, the Bangsamoro Peace Agreement and Federalism in the Philippines
10.1163/15718123-bja10066International Criminal Law Review1-2