#HumanRights: The Technologies and Politics of Justice Claims in Practice

by Ronald Niezen

Overview

Social justice and human rights movements are entering a new phase. Social media, artificial intelligence, and digital forensics are reshaping advocacy and compliance. Technicians, lawmakers, and advocates, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector, have increasingly gravitated toward the possibilities and dangers inherent in the nonhuman. #HumanRights examines how new technologies interact with older models of rights claiming and communication, influencing and reshaping the modern-day pursuit of justice.

Ronald Niezen argues that the impacts of information technologies on human rights are not found through an exclusive focus on sophisticated, expert-driven forms of data management but in considering how these technologies are interacting with other, "traditional" forms of media to produce new avenues of expression, public sympathy, redress of grievances, and sources of the self. Niezen considers various ways that the pursuit of justice is happening via new technologies, including crowdsourcing, social media–facilitated mobilizations (and enclosures), WhatsApp activist networks, and the selective attention of Google's search engine algorithm. He uncovers how emerging technologies of data management and social media influence the ways that human rights claimants and their allies pursue justice, and the "new victimology" that prioritizes and represents strategic lives and types of violence over others. #HumanRights paints a striking and important panoramic picture of the contest between authoritarianism and the new tools by which people attempt to leverage human rights and bring the powerful to account.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503612631
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Series:	Stanford Studies in Human Rights
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Ronald Niezen is the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the Faculty of Law and in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University.

Editorial Reviews

"#HumanRights shines much-needed light on the use of digital information to illuminate human rights violations around the world. Ronald Niezen spotlights how human rights advocates' embrace of innovative methodologies is shifting the field of practice—to corroborate survivors' stories, verify contested facts, and ultimately contribute to the realization of justice."

UC Berkeley School of Law - Alexa Koenig

"No longer confined to the courts and clinical reports, the discourse of human rights is now claimed by activists marching in the streets, spray-painted on urban walls, and invoked to enroll participants and engage allies through social media. Ronald Niezen's groundbreaking and insightful book tracks the emergence of these new mediascapes and compellingly explains why they matter."

author of Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text - Stuart Kirsch

"What is the connection between emerging information technologies and the rise of global human rights? Ronald Niezen addresses this question with imagination and acuity, exploring the extent to which their interplay portends a future of greater political domination, emancipatory potential, or a complex mix of both. A critical issue, and book, worthy of very close attention."

Harvard University - John and Jean Comaroff

2022-11-02
A nonfiction book offers a reconsideration of the impact of communication technologies on the advocacy for human rights.

Niezen observes that the technological transformation of the world hasn’t neglected to leave its mark on the pursuit of human rights. In fact, he distinguishes between a first, “analog” push for global human rights, largely driven by the efforts of mainstream journalism following World War II, and a subsequent digital phase, fueled by the amateur participation of the “netizen.” The author raises timely and provocative questions about the uses and abuses of these technological inventions and the ways in which they can be directed to the suppression as well as the protection of rights. Niezen refers to this brand of reflection as “Dialectics of Despair,” the recognition that communication innovation employed to reach a greater audience can be retooled to spread disinformation, surveil the powerless, and hunt down dissidents. In fact, a “multidimensional digital arms race” between human rights claimants and those who wish to suppress them has been born, the latter sometimes aided by an unholy alliance of big tech and Big Brother. The author provides an impressively thoughtful tour, both incisive and panoramic, of the terrain in question, a sparkling example of “digital ethnography” or “netography.” Niezen convincingly concludes that the online world needs to be balanced by an offline one, both as a source of “ ‘factual’ material evidence” and guiding values: “What good does it do to draw attention to the crimes of the state in its handling of refugees when these ‘aliens’ are storied as less-than-human perpetrators-in-waiting? The compliance powers of human rights extend only as far as popular conceptions of humanity will allow.” This is an important and original work, one cognizant of but not in thrall to the “blind attraction to innovation.”

An insightful human rights analysis, intellectually rigorous and culturally nimble.

Kirkus Reviews