Human Rights and Empire: The PoliticalPhilosophy of CosmopolitanismBy Costas Douzinas (New York:Routledge-Cavendish, 2007)

Margaret Denike

Dans son ivre intitul Human Rights and Empire, Costas Douzinas traite desconsquenees possibles de l'utilisation des droits de la personne pour justifier desguerres humanitaires et pour rationaliser l'idologie du nouvel imprialisme.Il traee la gnalogie des droits de la personne et des philosophies cosmopolites,fait la lumire sur leurs paradoxes inhrents (en aspirant l'universel tout ense fondant sur l'exclusion) et indique comment les idologies normativessous-tendent une anatomie politique de l'imprialisme. Il cherche comprendrele type de communaut internationale et de droit international reflt dans cesdveloppements et dans les appels normatifs aux droits de la personne pourjustifler la violence.

In Human Rights and Empire, Costas Douzinas addresses the implications ofutilizing human rights as a justification for humanitarian wars and as anideological gloss for a new imperialism. He provides a genealogy of human rightsand cosmopolitan philosophies, elucidates their inherent paradoxes (in aspiringto universalism yet building on exclusion), and provides a political anatomyof the imperialism in which he situates them as its composite normativeideologies. Its interest is to understand the type of "international community"and international law that is reflected in these developments and in the normativeappeals to human rights as a justification for violence. Elucidating the mainthemes of this work, this review maps the paradoxes of rights and sketches theforms of bio-political power that they express and serve.

What business do human rights have in the "new moral order" of liberalcosmopolitanism, economic imperialism, and their "humanitarian" wars?What do they say about post-modern technologies of power and how theyoperate through "suffering humanity," within and despite law, and at whathuman cost? What might an analysis of the relation between rights ideologyand state violence conducted in their name tell us about the future of rights?The critical inquiries that drive Costas Douzinas's latest book. Human Rightsand Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, offer an analysis of

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the political philosophies of human rights and cosmopolitanism and sketch atopography of contemporary imperialism in which these philosophies can beseen to operate as tools and strategies of empire.' It spells a political crisis thatshould concern anyone who is invested in the meaning of human rights andhow they areor might beutilized to produce social inequalities or to resistthem.

This work is a sequel to his book The End of Human Rights^ which, whilehaving seen the invasion of Kosovoan international interventionwidely described as the first war conducted "for purely human rightspurposes"^had not yet witnessed the terror-mongering freedom-fightinghumanitarianism that proliferated in the wake of 9/11, however much thisbook had predicted its escalating violence. Just as Htttnan Rights and Empiredevelops the Utopian philosophies of cosmopolitanism. The Ettd of HumanRights offers a remarkably detailed genealogy of the Western ideologies ofhuman rights, tracing the development of rights doctrine from classical Greekstoicism through Christian theology, the philosophies of natural law andnatural rights, the French and American revolutionary declarations of therights of man and proclamations of freedom, and, finally, to the internationalhumanitarian law and human rights conventions. Having in mind that thishistory ends where humanitarian wars begin and where human rights become ajustification for armed force, Douzinas provides a rather grim account of thefate of the idealism of human rights, all the while pondering whether there issomething about the way in which these principles were forged that necessarilyreturns them again to the scenes of violence and sovereign law making.

Hitman Rights attd Etnpire picks up on this question from out of the fog ofthe US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraqwars launched in the name of"freedom" and "democracy" and justified in part as a fight for the humanrights of the oppressed other (and, notably, of Muslim women and otherinnocents suffering under the strictures of the Taliban or "rogue" regimes ofterror-harbouring tyrants). As Douzinas puts it, human rights have becomethe post-modern justa causa of such humanitarian wars,'' making them

1. Costas Douzinas defines cosmopolitanism as a form of "globalization with a human face."Cosmopolitans, as he sees them, promote global social processes, institutions, and worldcitizenship and are critical of patriotism and nationalism as well as hegemonic and imperialdesigns. Costas Douzinas, Human Righls and Empire (New York: Routlege-Cavendish, 2007)at 125

2. Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford; Hart Publishing, 2000).3. David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kahut and Beyond: Human Rights and International

Intervention (London: Pluto Press, 2006) at 9. For an exhaustive study of recent internationalhumanitarian inventions and their justifications, see also Simon Chesterman, Just War orJust Peace: Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001).

4. Douzinas, supra note 1 at 178. See also Costas Douzinas, "Postmodern Just Wars: Kosovo,Afghanistan and the New World Order," in John Strawson, ed.. Law after Ground Zero(Portland: Glasshouse Press, 2002) 21 at 21.

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reminiscent of the pre-modern righteous crusades against the evil of theuncivilized infidel.^ As he argues in Chapter 3, "The Many Faces ofHumanitarianism," the justness of the cause is supported by images ofsuffering innocents in God-forsaken lands. The dissemination of these faces,together with those ofthe tyrants and terrorists behind them, which is a "corestrategy" of contemporary humanitarian campaigns, provides a moral glossfor military violence, while also working to cast all resistance, including self-defence, as acts of terror, evil, or the savagery of the uncivilized. Tapping thepromises that human rights offer, and the urgency of their appeal for"suffering humanity," these faces call upon armed saviours to save them fromtheir evil, all the while preventing the exodus of refugees or their admission tothe "homeland."^ They also implicate human rights and humanitarian non-governmental organizations, who also become bit players in the war effort, asDouzinas puts it, donning khakis, riding bombers, and applying the World'sConstitution.^ In light of these developments, the question remains how canhuman rightsand the campaigns behind thembe an effective tool againststate oppression?

The answer suggested by Human Rights and Empire is quite simply that theycannot, or at least they will not, for as long as they remain in the service ofhumanitarian war and act as "an ideological gloss of an emerging empire," co-opting the voices, strategies, and human resources of well-intentioned humanrights advocates and advocacy campaigns.** The severity of his critique seemsto overwhelm the prospect of hope and to conceal the functional and effectivestrategies of human rights claims to ameliorate specific inequalities, whichhave also been a part of their history.

The spirit of this book lingers in the gap between dreams of "justice" or"just causes" and the bloody lawlessness ofthe recent US-led "humanitarian"wars and between the cosmopolitan aspirations or abstract ideals of universalhumanity and the material reality of the human suffering produced by theinterventions that promise to take us there. This book hears the refrain of

Beyond state policies, such as the US National Security Strategy and President Bush'saddresses that speak of their crusade against "evil" in literal terms, Douzinas also considersthe moral interventionism of the human rights campaigns of non-governmental organiza-tions (NGOs) and their role in producing empire's "enemy" and justifying the use of forceagainst them. For this point, he draws on the arguments of Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri that NGOs are fully immersed in the bio-politics of the new imperialism's moralinterventionism. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000) at 36; and see Douzinas, supra note I at 62.For a brilliant discussion on the processes and effects by which interventionist violence islegitimatized, while the local other is criminalized and demonized, see Anne Orford, ReadingHumanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Foree in nternationat Law(New York; Cambridge University Press, 2003). The insight of Orford's work resonatesthroughout Douzinas's text, supra note 1.Douzinas, supra note I at 228.Ibid, at 8.

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promises of a peaceful future free of degradation and enslavement, yet seeshow the human rights "victories" are heing drowned in the disaster of the localpeople. Reckoning with what David Kennedy calls the "dark sides of virtue,"*the hook is caught up in its own war of sorts: calling on "good people" to"defend rights against attacks by fearful and fear-exploiting governments,"including liberals such as Michael Ignatieff, who have pushed for a "benignimperialism" or "empire tite" as "the only way of protecting human rights andhumanitarian values in a brutal world."' The deep skepticism of the book'saccount gives little, if any, reason to think that such a battle is worth fighting,much less being possible to win, as long as the compassion, idealism, andprotectionism of human rights advocacy resonates so readily with the interestsand tactics of empire.

Chapter 1 begins with "The End of Human Rights?" and a hard look athow human rights have "triumphed" as the "only ideology in town." It noteshow human rights have been adoptedor so Douzinas claimsby both Leftand Right, North and South, and rebels and state officials alike" and haveheen used hoth to advance the claims of the most powerless and deployed as astrategy of power and a normative force of international relations. To accountfor these processes, Douzinas begins Chapter 2 by examining the subjectiveelements of rights, including the needs they express and the demands theymake for recognition and social inclusion. His point is that human rights donot betong to humans but, rather, that they construct humans: depending onhow successfully one can mobilize rights in relation to others, they serve todetermine just how "human" one is.'^ Political power simply codifies andinstitutionalizes this insight.

Human Rights and Empire reiterates throughout its chapters a maxim that islong familiar to feminist equality advocacy and women's engagements withconstitutional lawthe fact that "rights have only paradoxes to offer."'^ Suchis the catch phrase famously formulated by Olympe de Gouges, the eighteenth-century French feminist activist who wrote the Dectaration of the Rights ofWoman and Citizen during the French Revolution and who knew well that"man's" revolution had little to do with women and that women's access topolitical rightsand to the citizenship that remains the underlying conditionof such accessentailed a denial of the very (sexual) difference that she arguedon behalf of. She also knew, as many critical commentators have sinceobserved, that rights declarations could perhaps provide a remedy for such

9, Douzinas critically engages with the recent work of David Kennedy, The Dark Sides ofVirtue: Reassessing Inlernalioiuil Humaniiarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2004).

10, Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite (London: Vintage, 2003); and Douzinas, si4pru note 1 at 138,11, Douzinas, supra note I at 33,12, tbid. at 50,13, bid. at 8, 33, 50, 100, 113, 122, 129, 231, and 235,

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exclusion, even though the "inherent dignity" of the "man" that wastrumpeted by the revolutionaries turned on the fact that this subject excludedthe many individuals (women and slaves, for instance) who lacked it. Thisproblem is similarly expressed by Hannah Arendt, to whose Origins ofTotalitarianism Douzinas frequently turns, when in the wake of the SecondWorld War and the newly minted UN Declaration on Human Rights, shedescribed certain "perplexities of the rights of man" for the countless refugeeswho were denied them but who may have needed them most. Although theserights are "supposedly inalienable," they have "proved to be unenforceableeven in countries whose constitutions were based upon themwheneverpeople appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state."'''A consideration of the paradoxes of rights^and the processes of exclusionthat they perform and reproduceremains a focal point in feminist and anti-racist engagements with the law and in our ongoing efforts to grapple with thefact that rights are something that we "cannot not want,"'^ especially for thosewho do not yet have them.

Human Rights and Empire draws on such critical insights and contributessubstantially to this ongoing historical conversation about the inherentquandary of rights. The text frames the problem as follows: built on "endlessexclusions" yet proffering a universal application, the very (paradoxical)design of international human rights renders them a perfect tactic for the "bio-politics" or bio-power'^ of states and empires, which codify them ininternational law as their normative principles and utilize them to facilitate

14. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1994 [1948]) at 290-1.15. Gayatri Spivak, Outside the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993) at 45-6,

describing the paradox of liberalism and citing the way of describing liberalism, in WendyBrown, "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights," in Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, eds.. LeftLegatismILeft Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 420 at 420. For generaldiscussions of the "paradox" of rights in varying historical and geopolitical settings, see, forEurope, Arendt, supra note 14; for France, Joan Scott, Only Parado.xes to Offer: FrenchFeminists and the Rights of Man (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997); for the UnitedStates, Wendy Brown, "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights," in Brown and Halley, eds., supranote 15; for Canada, Mary Jane Mossman, "The Paradox of Feminist Engagement with theLaw," in Nancy Mandell, ed.. Feminist Issues: Race. Class and Sexuality, 2nd edition(Scarborough: Prentice Hall, 1998) 180; and, internationally, Orford, supra note 6, andRatna Kapur, "Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Take a Walk on the Dark Side"(2006) 28 Sydney Law Review 665.

16. This refers specifically to Michel Foucault's increasingly utilized notion of the "biopower,"which describes forms of power that produce and control subjects through the managementof human life and the "protection of society." He distinguishes this from "sovereign" or"disciplinary" forms and technologies of power. See Michel Foucault, "Society Must beDefended": Lectures al the College de France 1975-1976, edited by Mauro Bertani andAllesandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003). See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1998). Through the figure in classical figure o homo sacer or "bare life,"the form of life that can be sacrificed with impunity, Agamben demonstrates that, contrary towhat Foucault suggests, bio-politics may well be a tactic of sovereign power and is notnecessarily distinct from it.

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the production, tnanagement, and regulation of human lives and populations.Tracking the operation and exploitation of these paradoxes of rights in acontemporary geopolitical framework, Douzinas profiles various moral-legalfeatures of the "new world order"'^ and, through their explication, broaches aradical theory of modern imperialism, which exposes it as being similar to theUtopian cosmopolitanism of the "international" community that graces itshistory. Modern imperialism is also characterized by the erosion of nationalsovereignty (or at least of the so-called "rogue" or "failed" states or"repressive regimes") and its re-consolidation and condensation of such lostsovereign power into a new hegemonic centre, namely a paternalist, protective,and productive (US) empire that promises peace while launching war. Despitethe weakening of sovereignty, which the discourses of international humanrights and their demands for accountability have always promised was coming,an "international community" of global governance is not on the horizon.

While the first part of the book explores the paradoxical ways in which theideal, transcendent position of human rights has been reversed into toolsof public power and individual desire, the second part assesses the place ofrightsand their legal-moral characteristicsin the constitutive formation ofthe new world order, its configurations of political, economic, and militarypower, and its harnessing of international law in the interest of imperialhegemony. As recounted throughout Hutnan Rights and Empire, the paradoxesare structural and systemicthe contemporary rights agenda has been set bythe great powers, which are the very figures and institutions against whichindividual rights are defended.'** An appeal to human rights takes the form ofarescue operation of the symbolic, tragic faces of cultural oppression and ethnicconflict and reduces them to what Wendy Brown calls an "anti-politics,"which lacks any consideration of the operations of power that produce thesefaces or any interest in the collective action that would change their causes.'^Moreover, rights are exported to the Third World as a form of ethicalconsumerism and justification for economic policies by the very stategovernments that actively seek to curtail and quash them domestically. Asaddressed in Chapter 4, "The Politics of Human Rights," althoughdeclarations of rights once expressed the opposition of revolutionaries to thevery design of the law, these rights have since become the normative tools forproducing sovereign exceptions to the law, giving shape to the "boundlesspower of the nation state and its law."^ ** This power is now writ large as

17. Douzinas, supra note 1 at 148.:8. Ihid. at 180.19. Ihid. at 84. Wendy Brown. "Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism" (2004) 103(2/3)

South Atlantic Quarterly 453. See also Wendy Brown, "Moralism as Anti-Politics," in RussCastronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds.. Materializing Democracy: Toward a RevitalizedCultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 368.

:!0. Douzinas, supra note I at 98.

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empire's now-normalized exceptionalism, as is manifest in its repeatedjustifications for making exceptions to the UN Charter's ban on use of forceagainst sovereign states; the suspension of domestic rights through policieswarranting the indefinite detention and use of torture against "terrorist"suspects; and the draconian reforms to criminal procedures and immigrationlaws through security certificate schemes, deportations, and extraordinaryrenditions, for example.

For the purpose of this study, the most revealing paradox returns Douzinasto Arendt's insight that human rightsnamely the "universal" guarantees andentitlements that are granted to "all" by virtue of their humanity, as describedby liberal philosophysimply "do not exist."^' Whatever they are, they havenever been available to humans generally but only to the fortunate citizenswho are tolerated by power and included among dignified "humanity."Furthermore, they are built on the "endless exclusions" that, by political, legal,and military means, keep them out of the reach and sight of the mostpowerless, the "one-use humans"^^economic migrants, refugees, prisonersin detention camps, and torture victims. And it is these individuals who mostneed them and who are often forced into such situations by economicand military interventions: "They are just no part; they are the indispensibleprecondition of human rights but at the same time the living, dying rather,proof of their impossibility. The law not only cannot understand the surplussubject, its very operation prevents the emergence of such subjects."^^

As this summary makes apparent, Douzinas's critical analysis of theparadoxes of rights elaborates a theoretical framework for understanding theinterrelationif not inseparabilityof various forms of power, which areexpressed negatively through exclusion, domination, exploitation, and appro-priation and constitutively through the salvation and protection of vulnerablelife. To account for how these paradoxes are operative in and through the newimperialism and its lawlessnes, Douzinas takes as a starting point theFoucauldian hypothesis that modalities of modern power are not reducibleto "negative" or sovereign/monarchical forms that have dominated thepolitical,theory ofthe past and that speak of power as repressive, restrictive,and prohibitive. Rather, they are also productive and constitutive of theirsubjects, including "humans," through institutional practices of surveillance,discipline, regulation, and control and, further, as in this instance, throughthe protection of life against its internal and external threats. GiorgioAgamben's analysis of the figure of homo sacer or "bare life" reinforces thisidea. Appearing in the metaphysics of classical Rome, it is a figure thatfalls outside of the polis or political life and beyond the purview of the citizen.

21. Ibid. M 99.22. Bernard Ogilvie, cited in Douzinas, supra note 1 at 100.23. Douzinas, supra note 1 at 108, citing Jacques Rancire, "Who Is the Subject of the Rights of

Man?" (2004) 103(2/3) South Atlantic Quarterly 297.

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"ahandoned hy law." '^* This figure (historically incarnated in statelessrefugees, prisoners of war, or targets of colonization and genocide) can be"sacrificed with impunity," as Agamben and Douzinas characterize them.^ ^Nonetheless, this figure is one whose exclusion is the very condition on whichthe potis is established, and it is the cause and limit of law, the hare life fromwhich "man" must separate himself in order to he a citizen of the empire and abearer of rights. The point is that social orders past and present invariably"establish and perpetuate themselves hy rejecting, silencing, and banningcertain others as mad, foreign, criminal, inhuman" and unahle to representthe universal in whose name inclusion is asserted, and these figures alwayshaunt the terrain from which they are excluded, '^' Symholic to Douzinas'scritical examination of the philosophy and politics of cosmopolitanism, theyare the reminder that, while human rights might help emancipate people,they are based on exclusions and serve among the instruments of power todistinguish expendahle from protectahle life."^ A reminder that a dreamof human rights "for all' is something that can only ever he a promise that hasyet to come.

In one of the few moments that Douzinas explicitly and succinctlysummarizes the objective to this hook, he explains that in examiningthe politics and metaphysics of "our age," his leading question is "whatconception of community and of self do political developments at theinternational level reflect? Specifically, he asks, what do they indicate about therise of a global cosmopolitan community and the waning of sovereignty orabout a new imperial configuration?^** The hook's position is that there is littledifference hetween the two,^ ^ however much those who applaud the demise ofnational sovereignty and identify with the cosmopolitan dreams of universalrights, world citizenship, and global social processes might insist that they arenot in the same business as those driven hy the imperial interests of capitalistpenetration and economic expansion.

Exploring this question in the second part of the hook, Douzinas sketches agenealogy of cosmopolitan philosophies, as he does earlier in the hook withrespect to human rights. And, again, this rich historical context reveals thecontemporary configurations of power. He traces the trajectory of cosmopol-itan ideals from Cynic and Stoic teachings of universal morality and notions ofjust and virtuous conduct to its espousal by the Roman empire as the jusgentium that was to be binding on all of the empire's subjects. He provides ahistorical snapshot of how what was once a philosophy of an ideal world could

24, Douzinas, supra note 1 at 116,25, Agamben, supra note 16 at 133; and Douzinas, supra note 1 at 69,26, Douzinas, supra note I at 113,27, tbid. at 113,28, tbid. at 148,29, tbid.

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become "a strategy for world power."^^ Looking at ideas of theEnlightenment, he tracks this world utopianism through Immanuel Kant'sbelief that the cunning of reason would overcome human conflict and lead to"the perfect civil union of humankind";^' through Hans Kelsen's vision of aninternational system of federalism and citizenship; and, fmally, to JrgenHabermas's blueprint for cosmopolitan law and the endorsement for theinvasion of Kosovo. Arriving again at the war that then Prime Minister TonyBlair described as being "fought not for territory but for values,"^^ Douzinasexplains that the point of this story and its historical returns is that the ideal ofa peace-loving international community that transcends national sovereigntycan readily lend itself to an ethos of world domination, showing that thecosmopolitan impulses are hardly incongruous with imperialism.

Told in these terms and through these sites and voices of Western "man's"philosophical idealism, what this genealogy elides are the countless andfaceless voices of resistance, those who have nothing to say or do about how"the world" might ideally be or how a good fight might help get us there; thosewho do not count as making history, much less as being human; and those forwhom gaining access to human rights might mean access to food, basic shelter,or the HIV/Aids medication that is otherwise restricted by the property rightsof imperial pharmaceutical corporations. A genealogy of this silence, were itpossible to air the voices of those who have none, would surely furnish claimsother than these. This history also needs to be written, to tell the tale of how,and for whom, human rights have failed and what they might still mean forthose who do not, or have not, had them.

As he has previously argued elsewhere, a significant thesis of Human Rightsand Empire concerns the role of violenceand particularly that of warin themaking and reforming of law.^^ Put quite bluntly, war is "the father of states,violence the midwife of law."^'* Wars impose new sovereigns, states, andorders, and they suspend existing laws and constitutions and put others in theirplace. And these laws carry within them this originary violence (against those itexcludes, sacrifices, and exploits), however much it is masked by self-legitimacy. Such is Anne Orford's insight in Reading HumanitarianIntervention that "at the heart of the establishment of international law was,and is, the legitimacy of the violence exercised as sacrifice or punishment ofthose constituted as law's savage, barbaric, others."^^ Human rights or

30. Ibid, at 157.31. Ihid. at 160; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated J.C. Meredith (Oxford;

Clarendon, 1985).32. Tony Blair, "A New Generation Draws the Line," Newsweek (19 April 1999).33. See Douzinas, supra note 4 at 2434. Douzinas, supra note 1 at 251; see also Douzinas, supra note 4 at 24.35. Orford, supra note 6 at 197. For a fascinating discussion of the colonial foundations of

international law, see also Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making ofInternational Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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humanitarian concern for the plight of the savage has always been themoral gloss of their sacrifice, traces of which imbue international law. AsDouzinas argues, perhaps the greatest normative effect of the recenthumanitarian wars has been the wholesale undermining of existing laws,not least of which are the constitutions of "conquered countries," thereformation of which is part of the process of bringing them into the"international community."-'^ Harnessing cosmopolitan and human rightsidealism to legitimize and justify state violence has facilitated the substantialreorganization of international legal institutions,^^ including the abrogationof the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force, the unilateral declarationsof war on sovereign territories, and the UN's recent endorsement of thedoctrine of "responsibility to protect," which provides a moral gloss forintervention that promises to save the suffering humanity from humanitariancrises that have yet to come.

Attending to the violent foundations of a new imperial order and itsinternational law remains a critical exercise, especially for the task ofunderstanding just what kind of community "we" are after all. In this sense,as Orford describes it, this community "shares something with those nationalor 'tribal' communities against which it constitutes itself -^ the wounding andkilling of its others as an organized and necessary part of its foundation."^**When all is said and done, we know well that human rightsas imagined bythose who live their paradox, those consigned to "bare life," or those who havebeen sacrificed by the violence of empire's capitalist and colonial interests-arenot, properly speaking, the "cause" of war, much less a justification for thelawlessness and laws born of its violence. As Hilary Charlesworth has noted,the tens of thousands of faceless forms dying daily from hunger or from HIV/Aids are actually of little concern to much of international law and certainlynot enough to amount to a crisis of the order ascribed to the states thatharbour "terrorists."^^ However much they speak of a love for sufferinghumanity, the so-called "humanitarian" wars of the rising imperialism arefundamentally utilitarian, driven by a sacrificial logic of neo-liberal capital-ism'*'* and by the expansion of capital markets. Human rights simply serve asthe gloss for the violence required to impose them.

In the epilogue, the sliver of hope that Douzinas holds out for the future ofhuman rights requires, first, that the human-rights-for-export and neo-liberalcapitalism, which are part of the same sacrificial economy and imperial

36. Douzinas, supra note I at 253-4.37. Ihid. at 253-4.38. Orford, supra note 5 at 197.39. Hilary Charlesworth, "International Law: A Discipline in Crisis" 65 Modern Law Review

377; and Douzinas, supra note I at 193.40. Anne Orford, "Beyond Harmonization: Trade, Human Rights and the Economy of

Sacrifice" (2005) Leiden Journal of International Law 179; and Douzinas, supra note 1at 190.

Vol. 20 2008 83project, be severed from each other.'" He calls for an end to human rights thatact as imperialism's moral gloss and as a pursuit of well-meaning khaki-wearing saviours. For such rights can promise no emancipation, no socialjustice, and no redemption until they are returned as tools to those who areengaged in the resistance and struggle against domination and control,including against the moralism of empire.''^ Douzinas's account makes it hardto see the scenes where these tools might well be already in the hands andminds of those engaged in political resistance. Were Human Rights and Empireto divert its gaze from the horizon of Western metaphysics, it might betterafford a glance at how these revolutionary struggles, including those thatoppose the exploits of Western imperialism are all around us. Among others,activists who are engaged in collective struggles for self-determination, thosewho are fighting for the release of prison detainees, those launching rights-based challenges to archaic discriminatory laws or to the regressive reforms toimmigration and refugee policy that have been conducted in the name of"security," or those who have worked to extend existing rights to previouslyexcluded groups, such as sexual minorities, all know well that rights are alsoindispensible tools for challenging forms of state-authored domination andcontrol. We know as well that "human rights" have very different meanings indifferent contexts and different usages in different hands, and it remains ourchallenge to enable them to be the most meaningful for the most powerless.

41. Douzinas, supra note I at 293.42. /hid.