Violence, Suffering and Human Rights

Abstract

This article develops a trenchant critique of the rise of human rights as the main universal standard against which to judge violence and suffering. It begins with a case study of an act of mass atrocity in Surinam that was brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and which demonstrates the ways in which rights-based conceptions of justice distort our understandings of suffering and pare down social and moral narratives. Legal language instrumentalizes, cutting out the symbolic and expressive dimensions of violence. Anthropology is opposed to this methodological individualist and positivist approach to representation as it seeks to understand people's life worlds experientially. In contrast, the article asserts that violence is always a social fact, which can be apprehended through inter-subjectivity and dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense. Conversation, understood in this manner, can provide an alternative to the `epistemological dictatorship' of a censorious rights-based regime of truth, and also of an anthropological discourse based in `culture'.

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