REINVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS Stanford Studies in Human Rights Reinventing Human Rights Mark Goodale Stanford University Press Stanford, California Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free, archival- quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Goodale, Mark, author. Title: Reinventing human rights / Mark Goodale. Other titles: Stanford studies in human rights. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Series: Stanford studies in human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021029537 (print) | LCCN 2021029538 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503613300 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631007 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503631014 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Human rights. Classification: LCC JC571 .G639 2022 (print) | LCC JC571 (ebook) | DDC 323—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029537 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029538 Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in Minion Pro Cover design: Notch Design Cover engraving: Glascow, ca. 1880. Roth. Adobe Stock. In memory of Sally Engle Merry (1944– 2020)— mentor, colleague, friend. ~ Festina lente ~ For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12 It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fredric Jameson Contents Preface ix 1 Human Rights against the Maelstroms 1 2 Human Rights, Capitalism, and the Ends of Economic Life 18 3 Remaking Sovereignty in the Image of Human Rights 40 4 Human Rights beyond the Rule of Law 62 5 Decolonizing Human Rights 79 6 Human Rights Otherwise 99 7 The Subjects of Human Rights 120 8 Human Rights in a G20 World 141 Acknowledgments 165 Notes 169 Index 203 Preface In her improbable and yet pioneering ethnographic study of human rights ac- tivism among Myanmar’s LGBT community, The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life (2019), the Singaporean sociolegal scholar Lynette Chua introduces us to two activists whose intertwined lives and experiences constitute the central thread of her work. Tun Tun is a former English literature student at Rangoon University, the son of a prominent family with deep connections to the country’s authoritarian regime. During the prodemocracy movement, which began in 1988, Tun Tun joined the mobiliza- tions against the ruling junta along with thousands of other protestors. When the Orwellian State Law and Order Restoration Council— known as the dreaded SLORC—d ecided to “pacify” the prodemocracy movement, which was led by the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the regime turned to mass roundups and the widespread use of torture against activists. Tun Tun fled Yangon for the dense jungles along the Myanmar-Th ailand border, where he took up arms as a rebel fighter within a wider guerrilla struggle against the military government. Tun Tun spent years engaging in dangerous and ultimately fruitless attacks on government installations, strikes in which many comrades were killed or captured. By the mid- 1990s, the military regime in Myanmar had destroyed most of the rebel camps and suppressed the prodemocracy movement. Tun Tun formed a close relationship with another man in the camps, and the intimate attachment had to be kept secret, even if other rebel soldiers in his unit sensed the nature of the relationship. ix x Preface For almost twenty more years, Tun Tun lived in exile in Thailand, where he eventually became a leading human rights activist and one of the first openly gay Burmese. Although he had begun his human rights work as a prodemoc- racy activist, he eventually made the decision to create the first Burmese LGBT movement. Stirred by human rights as a new language of empowerment, Tun Tun worked with others to build a fragile transnational LGBT network against a background of homophobia and political violence. Fifteen years younger than Tun Tun, Tin Hla grew up at the very center of Burmese military life. Raised in a strict military family, his grandfather was an army major whose unit played a central role in maintaining law and order in the one-p arty state. As a boy and then as a teenager, Tin Hla grew up in constant fear of his grandfather and other children in the military compound, who subjected him to years of physical and emotional abuse. Although he tried to hide his true sexual identity from others, he was still bullied and ridiculed by others on the military base, who called him achauk, a derogatory Burmese word for gay men. Ten years after the brutal military crackdown of 1988, deep in the midst of internal political and cultural repression, Tin Hla’s grandfather retired from the military, something that released Tin Hla, in a very real sense, from twenty years of bondage spent in isolation from his true self. He passed much of his twenties wandering the country, doing odd jobs, and exploring his sexuality through a number of furtive same-s ex relationships. By his early thirties, Tin Hla had returned to Yangon, where he eked out a living working in a mattress shop. Yet with each passing year, Tin Hla had become more confident in his queer identity, despite the pervasive social discrimination. Volunteer work with an international NGO implementing HIV/AIDS programs in Yangon brought him, for the first time, into contact with gay Burmese activists, some of whom main- tained connections with the exiled Burmese LGBT community in Thailand, led by Tun Tun. Finally, in 2013, the lives of Tun Tun and Tin Hla were brought together when the exiled LGBT activists came home. Tin Hla soon joined the transnational organization and went on to become one of the founding members of Myanmar’s LGBT activist network. The stories of Tun Tun and Tin Hla, and those of many others far from the centers of dominant human rights theory and policy making, were an ever- present source of inspiration and guidance as the proposal to reinvent human rights coalesced over the years. This is because the interconnected narratives of Tun Tun and Tin Hla offer a glimpse into the forms a reinvented human rights might take in the future based on an account of how human rights is already being