Human Rights and the Politics of Terrorism

Human Rights and the Politics of Terrorism

(Concerned Philosophers for Peace, 4/18/07 Chicago, APA)

1. Introduction

Today our society confronts a crisis of its political

institutions. The Iraq War policy and the “war against

terrorism” with which it is associated represent a failure

in the face of political dilemmas across the globe. In fact,

these are not problems caused by recent policies alone, but

have their basis in wider historical processes that for

which we lack generally shared understanding, despite the

familiar language of globalization, imperialism, structural

inequality, environmental crisis, new wars, crisis of the

state, technological revolution, competition over resources,

and so on. Framing an approach to a specific problem like

the Iraq War is difficult, because this conflict occupies an

important place in a larger pattern which in practical

settings is usually ignored or treated with platitudes.

Thus, debates over war policy are seriously hampered by a

long-term erosion of political discourse, tied to a

narrowing of conventional discourse on the one hand, and a

polarization and corruption of public language on the other.

Nonetheless, an opposition to the war has arisen and

even begins to take form within Congress. Yet the quality of

the criticism of policy, and the debate over alternatives,

leaves much to be desired. One may think that American

intellectuals in general, and philosophers in particular,

have special responsibilities in this setting. We should use

the skills we have acquired to make sense of this complex of

problems and to stimulate the public debate over them.

Having asserted these generalities, one can still ask what

philosophical thinking can contribute to the present

political debate. I will try to develop one answer to this

question by considering what an adequate criticism of

existing policy should include. In general, I will argue

that a nationalist, even militarist discourse of “strategic

alternatives” should be supplanted by a transnationally

minded ethical discourse that at once demonstrates respect

for others and discerns the ways in which present

institutions have been structured upon violent practices and

presuppositions.

2. Limitations of existing political criticism

The most influential public criticisms of Bush

Administration policies regarding Iraq and terrorism remain

for the most part within the strategic language of some

variant of foreign policy realism. Critics plausibly argue

that current policies fail when measured by their own

strategic aims, whether to establish viable political

institutions on foreign soil, to stabilize a Middle East

that is conceived as the site of needed oil resources, or to

reduce the spread of Islamist terrorism. Not only have

current policies failed to achieve these goals, they have

often made matters worse, and they have taken a great toll

in the lives of American troops, while creating an enormous

public debt. This appears to be an effective line of

criticism insofar as it establishes the incompetence of one

Administration's violent policies. By questioning on their

own terms the official rationales for existing policies,

such criticism can bring into question the qualities of

coherence, reasonableness, and truthfulness that these

rationales betray in practice, showing that the

Administration has failed by its own standards.

Critics who stay within the strategic perspective may

also minimize their vulnerability to counter-challenges

regarding their own concern for national security or

national economic well-being. By challenging the

Administration’s competence and veracity, they do not risk

questioning the stated or implicit goals of policy and thus

avoid a complicated debate with the political risks it may

entail. Yet by remaining within a strategic framework,

critics not only avoid substantive issues about what the

aims of policy should be, they also ignore questions about

the actual functions and effects of present policy goals as

such. Thus they typically ignore the extent of suffering and

destruction experienced by the Iraqi people and others, just

as they often ignore many of the respects in which current

policies continue to create historical inequities and

antagonisms. Finally, they leave largely unstated the

respects in which current policies serve particular

corporate interests in the name of national policy.

With these latter observations, I begin to note the

moral limitations of strategic criticism that bemoans the

loss of American lives without taking into equal account the

sufferings of Iraqis and others. Meanwhile, as we shall see

below, the nationalistic language of strategic criticism

serves to further the neglect of justice within the US. In

its approach to policies foreign and domestic, the language

of strategic criticism is in no position to sketch

significant alternatives. The fact that Bush policy has

failed to establish a stable regime or to secure the oil

supply doesn’t mean that there is a desirable or effective

alternative that might achieve these goals. Even if there

were more effective means to stabilize political and

economic structures, that doesn’t mean they would be any

less murderous. Without the ability to introduce significant

considerations such as shrinking oil supplies in the face of

accelerating global demand or the prospects of stable

political regimes that fail to offer social justice,

strategic criticisms of existing policy are worse than stop-

gap devices. In fact, they are deeply irresponsible.

By failing to confront the strategic aims of current

policies, and by refusing to expand the deliberation of

necessary contexts, strategic critics pursue a logic that

will neither formulate nor discuss real alternatives of

policy ends or means. By remaining within the language of

existing frameworks, the alleged realism of strategic

criticism falters, because it cannot confront problems

created by the conditions under which these frameworks have

been devised and deployed. Here my suggestion is that policy

criticism must have an ethical dimension, and with the term

“ethical” I mean to distinguish this from the kind of

“moral” criticism I cited a moment ago in referring to the

important acknowledgment of Iraqi deaths and suffering. With

the notion of ethics, I want to follow Hegel’s idea of a

normative perspective that can go beyond moral condemnation

and effectively inform actual practices and institutions.

Ethical criticism assumes a greater burden than moral

criticism, since it must couch its challenges in terms that

point to viable alternatives.

An important obstacle facing efforts to mount ethical

criticism is the weakened if not exhausted status of ethical

language in contemporary public discourse. Ethical language

is, after all, regularly, manipulated by those who frame

existing politics. When they function in the language of

power, ethical appeals to the promotion of freedom and

democracy become ritualized expressions that are

ideologically useful while encouraging public cynicism about

their actual force. Other historical factors have weakened

the role of ethical language in public discourse too (for

example, the erosion of concerns with the public good in

favor of the pursuit of private satisfactions). The

cumulative effect is the difficulty of using ethical

language in a way that will, or should, be taken seriously.

3. From strategic to ethical criticism

From an ethical perspective, one raises substantive

questions regarding policy ends and transcends conventional

standards of efficiency regarding means. Neither feature

makes ethical thinking less “realistic” than strategic

thinking. Indeed, one can think that under certain

circumstances, including those of profound structural

change, strategic thinking can prove to be remarkably

unrealistic. In the first instance, ethical thinking

requires that we consider not jut the value, but also the

standpoint and agency of others. While strategic thinking

may incorporate the other’s standpoint as competitor or

opponent, its ability to respect the autonomy of the other

is hampered by the institutional presuppositions associated

with markets and nation states.

In a context of globalization, the ethical standing of

those living in other nations becomes a crucial

consideration. Geo-political strategies of foreign policy

realism have historically excluded ethical standing for

members of other societies. But the institutionally

dependent viability of this exclusion comes into question as

nation states become less capable of acting on their own,

where this means acting in a strategic relation to other

nations. Failures of US policy regarding Iraq and terrorism

seem to be attributable in part to the inability of US

policy makers to adapt to transnational historical

conditions.

In some important respects we are at the end of the

period of the nation state. Even if nations and states are

not about to disappear or become unimportant, economic and

cultural changes require new kinds of political institutions

capable of confronting transnational power and dealing with

transnational problems. Globalization has eroded the

conditions for and resilience of the national ethical

community, while it has introduced some of the conditions

of, and certainly the need for, ethical communities that

transcend national boundaries. In these circumstances, a

realistic approach to international conflicts will prove to

be one that takes seriously the need for ethical

recognitions that transcend the nation state and the purview

of strategically minded policy realism. Philosophers have

perhaps made this point most forcefully in recent years by

way of the problem of global inequality and issues of the

claims that those beyond the borders of wealthy societies

can legitimately make.

I take this kind of argument to bear on possible

processes of social learning that may be compared to the

learning that made establishing national ethical communities

a possibility some centuries ago. In speaking of such

communities I do not mean to imply that the social relations

within a society like the US should be uncritically

described as those of a community or as having reached a

consistently ethical character. Nonetheless, such national

societies have achieved a certain progress against direct

violence and coercion in social relations. To develop this

point more completely one would have to consider the role of

various institutions, including those of the law, in this

process of learning. My point is that within the US and

other liberal societies, a framework of expectation and

practice was established that made many conflicts within

states into ethical issues. An example of this is the way

certain features of racial oppression could be articulated

in legal-ethical terms and be reformed in significant, if

limited, ways. Something similar is required on the

transnational level. The fact that such ethically informed

social learning could take place within emerging national

societies is some reason to think that it is possible in

post-national terms. However, such a political process

cannot be grasped or guided by political thinking framed in

strategic terms.

4. The challenge to strategic thinking is also anti-

militarist

So far, I have argued that criticism of contemporary

war-making policies should be couched in an ethical language

that takes into account the structural changes which make

much strategic argumentation anachronistic. By emphasizing

the recognition not only of the material needs but also of

the agency of those beyond national boundaries, I am

anticipating an argument that the legitimate ethical claims

of others introduce issues of power and sovereignty.

Therefore, this kind of argument can move us in the

direction of a democratic reading of transnational ethical

claims. As such it resembles Habermasian cautions about the

clash between instrumental thinking and action on the one

side and the communicative action required of democratic

politics on the other.

But there is another issue about strategic approaches

that bears on our general concern with the criticism of war

policies. This has to do with whether such thought and

practice implicates itself in relations of violence. In

particular, do strategic approaches presuppose practices of

violence that go well beyond explicit threats of military

action? Here I want to raise the possibility that strategic

thinking is not only a matter of adopting a military model,

but also that it presupposes a politics of social violence

in complicated though often implicit or veiled ways.

Strategic vocabulary, after all, is derived from ancient

Greek roots in which the term strategos denoted an army leader

or general.

The military background of strategic vocabulary is

instructive regarding its readiness to resort to violent or

coercive methods in the face of resistance or disagreement.

Strategic action may employ discursive means, but it does

not calculate or condition its projected outcomes as matters

of reasoned or voluntary agreement. Even within social

institutions in which direct violence is typically excluded,

strategic models may still imply or threaten violence, even

if this is the “violence of things,” for example, by

threatening to fire an employee or bloc institutional

opportunities.

One can also make a more historically specific argument

about the violent content of strategic approaches by

connecting their recent use to a militarization of American

public life. By militarization here, I mean less the

traditional idea of a sweeping ideological promotion of the

military or the rise of a military caste to political power.

Instead, I mean that social life has been “militarized”

through application of military solutions to public

problems. As a result of this militarization, logics of

military solution have become routine and entrenched. As a

corollary to this process we witness an interlocking between

state officials and corporate elites with interests in

armaments, military contracts, and cheap oil.

Within recent American history, militarization might be

inferred not just from the reckless pursuit of a war of

intervention in Iraq or the use of military metaphors and

organizations in responding to terrorism, but also in the

inability of media to critically discuss such policies with

their concomitant suspension of civil and legal rights of

citizens and non-citizens alike through policies justified

by national security. When media companies are owned by

corporations with major stakes in military production, and

popular entertainment is frequently given over to fantasies

in which violence plays a prominent role, at least some of

the elements of a new kind of militarist society may be in

place. (Addressing the complicated question of militarist

culture is something that deserves much further

consideration.)

In such a setting, the ethical challenge to strategic

thinking would have to promote democratic politics in the

face of militarist tendencies in the public sphere and

elsewhere. Development of ethical language becomes a way of

questioning the use of militarist practices in general, not

just the specific uses of violence in particular policies of

war making. In this light, the adoption by the Bush

administration of classic “friend-foe” rhetoric reflects the

inability of this strategic politics to engage others beyond

the nation as interlocutors worthy of equal respect. This

approximation of the Schmittian stance towards politics is

confirmed by the suspension of legal principles already

cited.

With such considerations in mind, we may sharpen our

sense of what an ethical alternative to strategic policy

thinking must attempt to develop. As in the case of

developing reciprocities that cross national and state

boundaries, this is a matter of political agency.

Cultivation of respect for the agency of others is

inseparable from defending and extending one’s own

democratic agency. If the language of human rights can be

used to stress recognitions that extend beyond our political

system so far as it remains a national system, this same

language can function to assert political rights within the

eroding coherence of the national polity. Strategic

language papers over the structural crisis contemporary

politics faces, and so it is incapable of grasping the

problem or the opportunity that institutional changes

present. An ethical language that reasserts the democratic

rights of others would help to resist social trends toward

strategic militarization at home and abroad. This is

because a premise of respect for others strengthens the

premise of self respect.

5. the context of structural and symbolic violence

The deficiency of strategically conceived politics,

then, is not only that it is incapable of addressing the

issues that contemporary institutional and structural

changes have posed. An additional deficiency is that such

politics is predisposed to violent methods and outcomes.

This seems true of such politics in our recent history, but

I have suggested also that it may be true of strategic

thinking as such. Developing notions of structural and

symbolic violence allows us to grasp violence as a more

complicated and pervasive reality than theorists have

usually acknowledged. Developing these notions would also

require that we rethink ideas of power and ideology so as to

see the place of violence within their routine workings.

I will try to indicate what I have in mind with only a brief

statement of the ideas of structural and symbolic violence

and an example or two to illustrate my claim (here I draw

broadly from Galtung and Bourdieu). My main purpose here

is to establish another point of reference for the kind of

ethically minded criticism that is needed to confront

contemporary war-making.

By “structural violence” I mean avoidable and contested

harms that follow from the regular functioning of

institutions. Such harms are not properly regarded as

accidents, though that is often the way they appear and are

treated. Routine industrial injuries, environmentally

inflicted diseases, sickness associated with malnutrition,

even many injuries from use of automobiles illustrate

structural violence. Perhaps the most far reaching is the

implicit violence at work in poverty and chronic

joblessness. In all these cases, individuals suffer physical

and psychological harms that are avoidable insofar as

institutional reform could eliminate the patterns that give

rise to them. Violence is an appropriate term in such

contexts insofar as these institutions and practices persist

in the face of challenges that are defeated through the

workings of social power. It is this combination of

avoidability on the one hand and resistance to attempts at

change on the other that justifies use of the ethically

loaded idea of violence. Analyzing violence in this way has

the advantage of bringing into view respects in which the

routine workings of power intersect with violence. The

suffering caused by such violence may be a consequence

elites are willing to accept, but it may also function to

discipline and demoralize those who otherwise might be

prepared to challenge the institutional status quo.

My thesis regarding militarism is that it frequently draws

upon and reinforces various kinds of structural violence.

The specter of poverty and unemployment can encourage a

community to press for military spending that will create

jobs and economic demand. On the other hand, those in

poverty may find the military as a path towards a better

life. A society haunted by criminality associated by poverty

may promote fantasies of violence that in turn feed into

militarist thinking. Structural violence may be a

particularly modern phenomenon insofar as the harms it

inflicts are frequently part of complexly organized

processes mediated by sophisticated technologies. These are

contexts with a good deal of purposive social structuring

and are subject to the scrutiny of officials and

intellectuals. Such violence is not innocent or invisible,

but the ethical issues associated with it typically are not

registered within strategic discourse.

The fact that structural violence does not receive the

social attention it warrants is in part a function of the

organization of the language and sensibilities in which it

operates. Viewed in symbolic terms, this failure of

attention counts as another kind of violence, namely

symbolic violence. While this term can cover justifications

of violence as well as harms inflicted directly through

language (e.g., “hate speech”), it is more broadly a matter

of the symbolic organization of our capacity to live with

violence without identifying or challenging it. Symbolic

violence in this general sense can be illustrated by the

readiness to treat harms as accidents or as outcomes for

which the individual is responsible. The structural violence

in a factory or due to neglect of public health issues can

appear as an accident or the bad luck of the victim. The

inability to find a well paying job or abuse from a spouse

can appear as the victim’s own fault.

To speak of symbolic violence, then, is to see the mix of

violence and power relations that I have associated with

structural violence as frequently functioning in conjunction

with a systematic distortion of understanding and even of

affect and response. Violence is an apt term here, both

because of the harms that result and because this language

is part of an ongoing debate in which the possibilities of

social solutions are curbed or derailed.

To claim that strategically organized violence and

militarism operate in a wider context of structural and

symbolic violence is to develop my argument for an ethical

alternative to strategically framed criticism. But this

further assertion can also be couched in the historical

language of social learning. Criticism of militarism needs

to figure within a wider challenge to institutionalized

violence that puts the problem of institutional alternatives

on the political agenda. Symbolic violence curbs the social

imagination regarding ways of doing things that not only

avoid harms that can be avoided, but that also honors and

cultivates the agency of society’s members.

The kind of ethic that is involved is one that sets its

sights on ethical understandings as emerging in discursive

processes, not as a matter of applying pregiven standards.

Retrieving ethics in the face of militarism, does not only

mean breaking with the rhetoric of friend and foe and

national security in favor of some positive evaluative

commitment. It also means breaking with the authoritarian

character of such a polity in which such rhetoric has gained

the upper hand. It means more public debate, more sense of

the need for open political process. And this is not simply

because of needs for legitimacy or claims that debate will

lead to better understandings, but also because the

articulation of the normative commitments that supplant

friend/foe politics is itself a matter of forming common

understandings, not simply assuming them. An ethical

understanding of this sort can arise only if there is

appropriate political activity, but that is not to say that

such an understanding can be achieved by political action

alone, since there are many other background preconditions.

6. Reciprocity in context: the problem of democratic

responsibility

So now I have added another component of what I take to be

the appropriate and needed ethically minded criticism aimed

at challenging and replacing the policies of contemporary

American militarism. The task of promoting post-national

reciprocities now includes confronting the multiple ways

violence is present within the practices and institutions

that provide the anachronistic infrastructure of

contemporary strategic thinking. If we want to challenge a

strategic policy linked to oil, we need to question the

goals of economic expansion and consumerism that go with

them, but we also need to explore the violence inherent in

the oil economy as it presently functions. Without

confronting the effective structural and symbolic violence

that operates within this economy, attempts to challenge the

violence informing strategies to sustain it become all the

more problematic. Making this structural and symbolic

violence explicit can contribute to a process of rethinking

the ways of life and institutional organization that they

help structure.

Doing so would be another part of the social learning I

early suggested is at issue in the present historical

setting. This would be a matter of learning about violence

as well as about the objectives and strategies of

nonviolence. Stressing the significance of violence in this

setting may be another reason to think that human rights

provide us with the ethical content appropriate criticism

requires.

Human rights may be the most promising ethical perspective,

both because of their ability to both supplant and

complement more specific historical traditions and because

of their distinctive relation to issues of violence. Part of

the ethical authority of human rights is associated with

their compelling appeal in the face of violence, though

extending this appeal to contexts of structural and symbolic

violence would be itself a political undertaking. Another

advantage of human rights is that they can encourage the

kind of trans-national reciprocities needed today, and can

inform a politics that presses for greater democratization

of social powers.

What is less clear about human rights as an ethic is their

serviceability either as a general perspective on justice or

its ability to inform a democratic politics. Its compelling

force in the face of violence may be won at the cost of

retaining a fairly narrow range of application. On the other

hand, its potential within a process of social learning, in

which its possibilities are explored practically, should not

be prejudged on purely theoretical grounds.

Whatever the promise of human rights, it would be an

exaggeration to say that their understanding or

implementation today warrants treating them as providing an

ethical perspective in the neo-Hegelian sense of the term.

Their abstract universality is both part of their attraction

and a source of resistance to them. Some critics see it has

offering an ideological device for imposing cultural

perspective and power objectives proper to one specific

historical society or world. Often this is equated with the

West. Even if we reject that dismissal of human rights as

such, there is no doubt that they have sometimes been used

in ideological ways. It is important to note one of the

conditions that makes this possible, because it haunts the

proposal to sustain a consistent and democratically minded

appeal to human rights as well.

Despite the assertion of a universality that implies a

commitment to genuine reciprocity, today’s language of human

rights remains part of a globe divided by dramatic

inequality and disparities of power. Those in the wealthy

societies retain an advantage which under the best of

circumstances can function as a kind of paternalism. It is

unrealistic to think that under present circumstances a

single ethic can function in the same way everywhere,

because the conditions and forms of agency are so diverse.

Ethical demands on those in a high consumption, militarized

society are very different than the demands on those in

impoverished societies with crumbling infrastructures and

placed a the mercy of the world market.

In this context, a critical ethic of the sort I have been

advocating must be informed by a complex sense of the

context of agency in which it is advocated and developed. It

should be formulated with an eye to actual recourses and

capacities to make important changes in the name of new

historical possibilities. For wealthy societies like the US,

this requires what I will call an ethic of democratic

responsibility. And this is not just a matter of

responsibilities that come with greater resources and

technical capacities. It is also a matter of

responsibilities that grow out of the history in which

contemporary inequalities came about. One need not assume

that inequalities are all the result of oppression, nor that

global oppression is exclusively the work of those in the

wealthy societies, to argue that policies today should be

tempered by a sense of historical injustices and the long

term damage they have caused. This is not so much a matter

of applying contemporary standards to the past (though the

idea that such standards have no retrospective role is

false, I think), as it is a matter of arguing that the

standards we need to promote today require a historical

sense of the present as importantly a result of a history

whose legacies we bear today.

7. Implications?

In this paper I have pursued a historically minded

philosophical reflection on some requirements for an

adequately critical political challenge to contemporary war

policies. If this very general argument is on the right

track, then critics of current Administration policy should

replace strategically framed criticisms with challenges that

cite standards of justice and social possibilities that

clash profoundly with existing practices and institutions.

This should be a criticism within which ends and means of

policy are open to ethical debate. A democratically minded

human rights ethic could press for adequate recognition of

the suffering and needs of those beyond the borders of our

anachronistic national state. It would scrutinize existing

strategically minded policy to demonstrate its ties to a

militarism that represents a more general failure to

confront the problems of social learning that contemporary

structural and institutional change has made so urgent. It

would try to advance this learning both by profiling the

many mechanisms and forms of false consciousness associated

with social violence. In doing so, it would press for the

kind of institutional and cultural learning that we need to

probe the democratic possibilities inherent in our technical

and social powers.

With the language of human rights, such a political

criticism could draw on the legacy of learning achievements

regarding nonviolent forms of social life just as it would

explore the meaning of democratic power. Within the wealthy

societies, this implies the acknowledgment of historical

asymmetries that impose a sense of responsibilities for past

wrongs as well as responsibilities inherent in present

powers.