Panel I: Translating Human Rights

Panel topic: What might we learn from studying how human rights discourse is used in various contexts? What does translating human rights mean, and what are the (often hidden) epistemological assumptions of translation attempts? Need human rights necessarily be embedded in Western-style (neo-)liberalism, or, as they travel, might they take on new meaning and power? How would/do such meanings affect traditional conceptions of human rights? What constitutes "progress" for human rights, and what final vision or utopia is implied in human rights discourse? What would it mean to think of human rights discourse as a means rather than an end? How would such thinking affect human rights activism? "Translating Human Rights," the first panel of the Rapoport Center symposium Representing Culture, Translating Human Rights, sought to consider how human rights discourse is understood and used by different social actors in distinct cultural contexts. The panel was structured around an essay presented by Dr. Florian Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Law and Deputy Director of the Human Rights Center of the Department of Law at PUC-Rio, Brazil.1 Two discussants, Balakrishnan Rajagopal of MIT and Derek Jinks of The University of Texas School of Law, addressed Professor Huffman's ideas as expressed in the essay and admirably broadened the discussion outward from the paper to a variety of themes relevant to the conference. Fortunately for the readers of the Texas International Law Journal, both Huffman's essay and the commentary of Professors Jinks and Rajagopal are being reproduced in this issue, which will provide a good sense of the lively and engaging debate that was had. HOffman's essay was an ideal vehicle for generating this discussion and debate. Notably, it was perfectly suited to the "post" nature of the conference. In her preface to this volume, symposium organizer and Rapoport Center director Karen Engle notes that the organizers purposefully situated the symposium "after" debates between relativism and universalisai, about essentialism, and about cultural imperialism. These often circular debates are perceived by many to have held human rights studies back from being able to fully explore the ways that human rights are working in today's world. But as Engle also notes, "being after is not the same as being beyond."2 Hofftnan's paper offers an approach that seeks not so much to leave these debates behind, but to accept the critiques as valid and live with them on the "shaky ground" of human rights activism. These are topics close to my own heart: coming from a discipline highly concerned with both relativism and antiessentialism (anthropology), I have grappled in my own work with questions similar to those posed by Hofftnan's paper: if we can neither refute nor ignore relativist, antiessentialist and anti-imperialist critiques, what can we, as human rights activists, do! If on a theoretical level we can, and in fact must, accept that there is no stable and unified foundation for human rights, how then can we reasonably make and evaluate claims based upon human rights? Can we take seriously the challenges implied by the question of relativism without becoming utterly demobilized? And can we engage universalist discourses without committing epistemic violence against others? It is a hard road forward, as Huffman's essay makes clear. Various proposed solutions for living with the complexities and contradictions, from Rorty's "liberal ironist"3 to Koskenniemi's "liberal cynic,"4 may still leave us with nasty issues of complacency, ethnic chauvinism, cultural essentialism, and even persistent formalism. Hoffman's own proposed activist, the "shooter in the dark," is akin to these, yet goes further in its antifoundationalism and anti-formalism. Hoffman's shooter "takes the absence of foundations as a cue for activism," recognizes fully that her own unilateral act in deploying human rights is a product of her particular culture and personal experience, embraces the fluidity of the discourse of human rights and the contingency of both its mobilization and the outcomes of that mobilization. …