IPRH Symposium: "Resentment's Conflicts"; Colleen Murphy: "Resentment and Political Reconciliation"
Guest Writer: Luján Stasevicius

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

posted under , , , , by Unit for Criticism


"Ruin", section from "Too much world" ("Demasiado mundo") by Marina Núñez.
[On October 19, 2012 the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese co-organized “Resentment’s Conflicts: A Symposium.” “Resentment and Political Reconciliation” was a talk given by Colleen Murphy (Philosophy). Her talk is reviewed below by guest writer Luján Stasevicius, a graduate student affiliate in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.]

Luján Stasevicius (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese)

Colleen Murphy´s paper dealt with the topic of understanding the relations between resentment and political reconciliation in countries that have experienced dictatorships or civil conflicts. Murphy spoke about the large number of communities around the world that have attempted to transition from dictatorships to democracy, calling them “transitional communities." South Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Argentina and Spain were among the countries she described as “transitional communities.”

Her focus was on how to achieve justice in transitional communities in which basic human rights had been denied for so long. For Murphy, the success of democracy is related to a discourse of forgiveness. She characterized this question as part of a moral debate, since the transitional communities must justify their responses to the past to present communities. Justice, she said, involves punishment and the infliction of pain on those who did wrong. However, in many of these societies, reconciliation involves the avoidance of punishment “for the sake of democracy, so it does not fail.” This appeal to reconciliation is also used to justify amnesty for criminals. Murphy equated such reconciliation to political forgiveness.

Reconciliation refers etymologically to the process of repairing damage, making this approach to justice not only a failure at reparation, but also one that urges victims to overcome their negative emotions about suffering. Repair is thus related to the achievement of forgiveneswhich is presented as critical for relationships in the long term.

Murphy raised three main issues arising from this model. First, there is an evident disconnect between the actual relationships under discussion and the model used to address them. During dictatorship, the model assumes, wrongdoing is the exception so that individuals can -- and should -- overcome their resentment. According to Murphy, this expectation is not only naive, but also complicit in perpetuating injustice. By expecting victims to change, this method shifts responsibility for reconciliation away from political forces and toward victimized individuals. The result is to overlook systematic violence and abuse of human rights on the part of the state

Colleen Murphy (Philosophy) speaking at "Resentment's Conflicts"
Requiring the victim to change -- to forgive and forget -- not only fails to address the violence the victim has been through, but also prevents a step forward at the level of the state toward ending violence. Finally, reconciliation entails using Catholic moral values such as forgiveness to measure success—a gauge all too subject to the continued oppression. In concluding her talk, Murphy argued that political reconciliation often fails to achieve forgiveness. In transitional communities, relationships are still damaged because the key values of reciprocity and mutuality are undermined, and these values require conditions that must be based on trust and respect for all participants.. The pursuit of a trust-based model of reconciliation which focuses on these necessary conditions will be more effective in truly addressing resentment.

After the talk, there were many questions related to specific cases in which political reconciliation had been sought without focus on forgiveness. A question was asked in relation to the usefulness of the category of "victim" in the discussion about social justice. Murphy’s answer addressed the need to think about relationships in general and not in terms of categories, so we can ask other questions such as “what does it mean for a perpetrator to do wrong?” Another comment connected conditions for reconciliation and the economic, asking if reconciliation was compatible with imperialism.Examples of Honduras and Paraguay ) were cited. Murphy answered that any successful reconciliation has to take into account the third parties involved, in order to make sure that reconciliation is not compatible with imperialism.

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Author’s Roundtable: Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Guest Writer: Zachary Poppel

Thursday, October 18, 2012

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On October 15, 2012 the Unit for Criticism held the Fall 2012 Author’s Roundtable . The Unit hosted Samuel Moyn to discuss his book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Below is one of three responses that were delivered on Monday, by Zachary Poppel, a graduate student affiliate in History.]

Response 1
Zachary Poppel (History)

My brief comments focus on the middle and end of Moyn's book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and I hope to suggest some connections and questions.


The middle chapter of The Last Utopia is about decolonization, collective liberation, and to quote the title of chapter 3, "Why Anticolonialism Wasn't a Human Rights Movement." For now I'll just say my question for Moyn is rather simple: does he think history can repeat itself? As the title suggests the key claims of this chapter are that decolonization was a period that saw the "globalizing" of claims to nationalist liberation, not a globalizing of individual liberation (86). In this story human rights come after anti-colonial struggles —in Moyn's words, "human rights experienced [their] triumph as a widespread moral vernacular after decolonization not during it" (117). Furthermore, the chapter turns on the idea that in the wake of decolonization and national liberation, the idiom of human rights displaced rather than fulfilled anti-colonial promises (116). Collective liberation went into crisis around the globe, and in doing so set the stage for human rights (87). It's also suggested that decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism were periods, rigidly bounded in time, rather than processes that could very likely, or could already, be happening again. If we push back a bit against this periodization, as I think we should, and against the book's suggestion that empire and some forms of racialized oppression ended in the 1970s, we might see the current uneven horizon of humanity against empire that today is both retro and original (118; 217). Briefly, I will discuss the middle of The Last Utopia, and do so in light of what Moyn offers us at the end of the book regarding the approaching choice between two different futures for human rights.


Dates of Decolonization World Map
My reading of this middle chapter, and of the book overall, boils down to a set of questions about what the futures of anti-colonialism, of collectivity, and of decolonization might look like from Moyn's perspective. I suspect he may have some ideas about how another round of decolonization, or another attempt to rattle popular conceptions of state sovereignty, might do to reveal a lean and mean, bureaucratic-proof, properly historicized relationship with human rights. Indeed it's the choice that Moyn describes at the conclusion of The Last Utopia making urgent the query about the future of anti-colonialism and anti-neocolonialism. The coming choice described at the end of the book is between a future where human rights is either a method for a more successful restraint of potentially violent global affairs, or a future where human rights is expanded artificially to displace or neutralize necessary political struggles. This is defined as a choice between on the one hand a "minimalist" human rights--conscious of its contingency, resistant to liberalization--and on the other hand a "maximalist" human rights--addicted to its teleology, run by a professional class that prescribe, rather than just edit, blueprints for political life and political solutions (219).

Though he offers many qualifications, Moyn thinks a minimalist human rights is more fair. He writes that the minimalist choice can more "honestly confront its lack of answers and acknowledge that it must make room for the contest of genuinely political visions for the future" (226). For Moyn then, human rights emerged because the idea was not "genuinely political"; it was, as he says, "born in anti-politics" and it "survived [through] neutrality" (213). And those conditions do not justify the maximizing, the scaling up of human rights to the level of the "genuinely political," a level reserved for unrealized or heretofore uncharted modes of liberation.

I conclude with my larger question, how would this minimalist version of human rights engage another round of decolonization and collective liberation? How does another round of fighting for concessions and fair jurisdiction change the core language of human rights? Since the 1970s is a crucial part of this core, my last silly question is whether or not Moyn is expecting a reenacting of the 1970s any time soon?
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