Is There a Human Right to Resistance?

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Is There a Human Right to Resistance? Gwilym David Blunt* ABSTRACT This article is premised on the idea that global poverty is the foreseeable and avoidable by-product of the international system. This position is held by many cosmopolitans, but rarely do they deal with the consequences of this claim. This paper will examine the idea of a right to resistance in the face of global poverty. It will argue that a right to resistance is a necessary component of the political conception of human rights. It will also be argued that it is latent in some major documents and declarations to the point that it can be considered an emerging practice. I. INTRODUCTION In the debate on global distributive justice, cosmopolitans have often claimed that the global poor are suffering a severe human rights violation. The foremost amongst them has been Thomas Pogge, who has made the powerful argument that global poverty is the foreseeable and avoidable product of the international system.1 It is understandable that the focus of Pogge and other cosmopolitans has been to offer institutional reforms to ensure secure access to human rights and provide compensation to those who have suffered from human rights violations.2 Yet, very little has changed in the decades in * Gwilym David Blunt is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is also a fellow of Corpus Christi College. Research funding for this article was provided by the Leverhulme Trust through an Early Career Fellowship [ECF-2014-661]. I would also like to thank Human Rights Quarterly’s editors and anonymous reviewers for their assistance. 1. Thomas Pogge, Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation, in FREEDOM FROM POVERTY AS A HUMAN RIGHT: WHO OWES WHAT TO THE VERY POOR 11, 30 (Thomas Pogge ed., 2007). 2. THOMAS POGGE, WORLD POVERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS: COSMOPOLITAN RESPONSIBILITIES AND REFORMS (Thomas Pogge ed., 2008). Pogge’s work is not without critics. Cf. Michael Freeman, World Poverty: Rights, Obligations, Institutions, Motivations, 37 HUM. RTS Q. 439 (2015). Human Rights Quarterly 39 (2017) 860–881 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press 2017 Is There a Human Right to Resistance? 861 which cosmopolitans have been leveling this criticism and proposing alternatives. There are still hundreds of millions of severely poor people. Amongst the affluent there is little political will to move beyond schemes like the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which may improve the lot of some people, but does not provide secure access to the contents of their human rights. The SDGs place more focus on the importance of stakeholder consultation, but stakeholders are not the same as rights holders. It remains the prerogative of member states to determine the way in which stakeholders participate.3 It is surprising that cosmopolitans have not been more willing to engage with the problem of intransigent ongoing human rights violations. Whether the global poor have a right to resist the institutions responsible for their immiseration is a question that has rarely been discussed.4 This article will argue that the political conception of human rights, which underpins several prominent theories of global distributive justice, requires a right to resistance in order to be a strong theory of rights rather than a discourse on important interests. Moreover, the way in which the right to resistance has been conceptualized often overlooks the types of resistance available to extremely oppressed agents. This silence on resistance is symptomatic of a deeper problem with the global justice literature. It does not treat the global poor as genuine moral agents. Cosmopolitans identify the global poor as hypothetical moral agents and rights-holders, but when they appear in the work of political philosophers they tend to be subjects awaiting justice to be delivered rather than agents acting to claim what they are owed. This is somewhat understandable. The literature on global poverty may be about the global poor, but it is not for the global poor. It is a discussion between academics that occasionally reaches out to the affluent citizens of developed states. This is a problem because it molds theory to the interests of the academic, who, as Charles Mills points out, tends to be an affluent white male.5 It is not surprising that, although cosmopolitans are concerned about the global poor, they tend not to focus on resistance as it may severely disrupt the social institutions in which academics prosper. Yet, it is unfair to treat this as ideological blindness to the agency of the global poor. Pogge has written that he has no standing to speak for the global poor.6 This can be called the Spivakian reticence in cosmopolitanism. 3. 4. 5. 6. G.A. Res. 70/1, ¶79, U.N. Doc A/RES/70/1 (21 Oct. 2015). There are exceptions to this. Cf. Roberto Gargarella, The Right of Resistance in Situations of Severe Deprivation, in FREEDOM FROM POVERTY, supra note 1, at 359, 365–74; Gwilym David Blunt, Transnational Socio-economic Justice and the Right to Resistance, 31 POLITICS (2011); Simon Caney, Responding to Global Injustice: On the Right of Resistance, 32 SOC. PHIL. & POL’Y 51 (2015). Charles Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 20 HYPATIA, 165, 172–73 (2005). Thomas Pogge, Responses to the Critics, in THOMAS POGGE AND HIS CRITICS 175, 209 (Alison M. Jaggar ed., 2010). 862 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 39 Gayatiri Spivak’s assertion that the “subaltern cannot speak” seems to be a hidden premise within much of cosmopolitanism.7 Any attempt to capture the agency of the global poor is doomed to make them the mouthpiece for the interests of the affluent academic philosopher. They become fetishes rather than actual persons. Cosmopolitans seem to be caught in a pincer by their critics; either they treat the global poor as subjects, or they treat them as objects. This article attempts to avoid treating the global poor as passive subjects or as a fetish for our moral commitments. Edward Said’s critique of Michael Ignatieff springs to mind: we must “imagine the person whom you are discussing—in this case the person on whom the bombs will fall—reading in your presence.”8 In the case of global poverty, we are not imagining people upon whom bombs are falling. Instead, they are victims of a slower, but no less devastating violation of their rights. This is why resistance must be on the cosmopolitan agenda. It is difficult to imagine that an extremely poor person would be content with phantasmagorical reforms of the international system found in the cosmopolitan literature. The intention here is not to speak for the global poor, but to disclose a space of resistance that the global poor can shape and is also intelligible to cosmopolitans and human rights theorists. The article begins by examining the political conception of human rights that underpins several prominent theories of global distributive justice. It will then argue that a right of resistance is a necessary part of this theory, if it can be considered a theory of rights that produces obligations. It will then examine the structure of the right by examining transatlantic slavery. This clarifies the structure and content of the right to resistance by rooting it in practice. II. THE POLITICAL CONCEPTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS There are many competing theories of human rights and providing a comprehensive analysis is simply beyond the reach of this article. However, the choice of the political conception of human rights is not random. The political conception of human rights, best articulated by Charles Beitz, has a strong connection with cosmopolitan arguments about global distributive justice. The political conception of human rights is compelling because it attempts to sidestep the perennial debate about the foundations of human rights by examining the function of human rights in the international system. This conception has been identified with John Rawls’ use of human rights in 7. 8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in MARXISM AND OF CULTURE 301, 08 (Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg eds., 1988). EDWARD W. SAID, HUMANISM AND DEMOCRATIC CRITICISM 142–43 (2004). THE INTERPRETATION