Human rights rise to geopolitical significance in the 1980s and 90s, and since then we have seen important waves of  Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist critiques. At particular moments we see fresh texts setting new agendas, creating new directions in which people can then begin to push against extant forms of knowledge. What is quite rare in this critical literature, however, is a text that seeks to reaffirm critiques of rights, but then restages them in a way, so that foreclosed modes of analysis and political commitment re-emerge as viable modes of movement. But this is precisely what Lara Montesinos Coleman’s exciting new book Struggles for the Human seeks to do.  

To begin, the book does everything you would hope for a good critical account of colonial capitalist modes of doing human rights. It grasps the ways in which a rights are coextensive with the emergence of capitalism, it shows us the ways that capital can co-opt and deploy rights-talk to drive violence and expropriation, it explores the histories of how rights were deployed internationally to destroy national liberation movement. But it also gives us a vision – a radical hope – of how movements can deploy rights to go challenge capitalist coloniality. 

The book takes a deep dive into a number of different anti-capitalist struggles in Colombia where rights were deployed strategically, combining them in new ways with vivir bien and the movement for Andean indigenous ideas of development and being together initially begun in the naughties in Bolivia and Ecuador, but which has spread more widely. These alternative cosmologies and epistemologies focus us on forms of life which seek to unwork capitalist modes of desire and accumulation at all levels. Thus, there is a challenge to the ontology of the individual; there is a rejection of ‘Man’ as it is grasped in Western humanism; there is a challenge to western ideas of community, of the state, or gender relations; and crucially to the practice of work, profit, and development. In particular, Struggles for the Human focuses on the call to ‘protect the human’ which emerges in these struggles. This is not the Amnesty slogan with its carceral politics, but a distinctive mode which provides ‘a different basis of authority to human rights from those understood in terms of the dignity of the sovereign, rational individual.’

This is not the conventional human rights politics where radical alternative modes of thought are reduced to abstract rights demands. Anyone who has ever read some of the terrible mythmaking about the origins of human rights in this or that religious belief, or in this or that tract from antiquity, will know that the goal of many of these processes of reduction is to take something other and to translate it into the familiar international human rights text. It is a sacrificial impulse of a certain liberal rights analysis to cleave out any difference and replicate current forms of rights in the particular text. Struggles for the Human refuses this sacrificial and reductive approach. Instead Montesinos Coleman approaches the encounter between human rights and vivir bien, seeking to understand the way that rights themselves are transformed. In other words, the aim is not to assimilate these various Andean social and political struggles into the language of rights, to make them familiar and the same. Her aim is to show how the struggle makes rights other than themselves. Rights cannot simply be critiqued and dismissed, because they hold an immense power on the contemporary political imagination. We need to learn to traverse rights, moving through and beyond them. In this way they can be deployed but also the trap described by Moyn in Not Enough can be escaped. On my reading, Struggles for the Human does exactly this work of traversal. Rights are never enough, but they are also not nothing. They provide footholds for a critical praxis, which they can never consume.

On my reading, Montesinos Coleman’s challenge is to pose the question of the newness of these forms of life, that struggle against capitalism while using the language of rights. Newness is important here. I mean it not in the sense that these struggles are temporally new, we know that they date back decades and centuries. But rather, I mean they are new in a ruptural sense. They break through the conventional accounts of rights, which tries to contain this novelty. When critics of rights fail to notice this stretching and tearing of the fabric of human rights, with unmanageable demands, they unwittingly do the work of containment. Montesinos Coleman insists that critics must take care: “by rejecting human rights and law as “inherently capitalist” or “inherently colonial”, rather than attending to social movement praxis, there is also a risk of being drawn into fantasy, fixing our coordinates in advance, and reading politics off a readymade theory or conceptual framework.”  

Ultimately, it seems to me that at the heart of this book is an attempt to enchant jaded critics of rights with an excitement and enthusiasm for the use rights against the extant social and international structures. Lara’s is an enchanting book. But not in a sort of mystical way. Its not trying to pull the wool over your eyes, or hide some chicanery. It is trying to do that impossible thing where you are shown something you think you know, but you are shown it in such a way that it becomes new.