I first met Lara Montesinos-Coleman at a workshop in 2016. I recall a discussion on Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment with respect to everyday resistance and it being necessarily cruddy and mundane. We soon got to talking about our personal lives, and I remember feeling heard and hopeful around her. I say this here because the same ‘ethical grammar’, thoughtfulness and care permeates Lara’s book – which is essentially about, from my reading, radical hope as a practices of struggle, being human and worlding.

Struggles for the Human is a collection of reflections on struggles represented as peasant, worker, Black and indigenous movements in Colombia that boldly seek alternatives to capitalism (p134). It combines ethnographic engagement (e.g. peasant resistance to BP’s oilfields; the Colombian Food Workers’ Union and its international campaign against Coca Cola) with political philosophy, to consider how possibilities for human rights might be expanded by attention to social movement struggles outside the ‘West’, in most of the world (Madhok, 2024). The book respects a decolonial ethos and is rich with philosophical literature and historical detail, making it almost a Samuel Moyn-style storytelling of human rights. But what makes Struggles for the Human original and especially compelling is what the author terms ‘accompaniment’ – being alongside in struggle. It is a beautifully written, personal and political book for our age of imperialist capitalism.

I will highlight some questions Lara asks that stood out for me. At the very start of the book she asks (p2), can we do without human rights? Then, how do we think of our ethical obligations towards others (p6)? And, what does it mean for a language of resistance to be useful?  These are important questions because they move from centering ‘the human’ to centering social relations. Moreover, they call out the place of law in social relations as representing not merely the “Master’s tools” but as being the very fabric of the “Master’s house”, a fabric that is neocolonial, capitalist and exclusionary, and so must be dismantled. For myself, and for many of us working within what Ratna Kapur calls the ‘neoliberal fishbowl’ that is global human rights talk, these questions highlight a problematique that is often missing from rights critiques: the place of (relational) ethics (p15 & 17).

Talking about her work with Le Red, Lara emphasizes the importance of horizontal relations among peoples (18). The importance, to go back to Povinelli, of the everyday – what is exchanged over a glass of wine or a long car journey up the mountains, or an awkward zoom call. And this is what builds the radical hope that she talks about in Chapter 5. This radical hope poses the challenging question of human rights as a political and ethical vocabulary. ‘Radical hope’, Lara says, ‘is antithetical to the pernicious optimism (a twist on Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, p139) of much cosmopolitan ethics… and is embodied in an ethical and spiritual disposition towards others and the natural world that implies transformation of the human’ (p25)… it is a ‘sense of good that remains yet to be defined’ (p25). What I find most compelling, optimistic and hopeful about this observation is that it emphasizes what is already happening as struggle. It emphasizes processes, or hope as an everyday practice(s).

In Chapter 5, Lara talks about plan de vida processes. These are, she says or the CNA booklet says, not a document but a way of life in themselves that respect the ethos of buen viver, or living well together – an expression of the cosmological visions of the indigenous peoples of the Andes. They are word and action – organizational processes and horizons of desire (p146). The projection of another mode of being, knowing and acting in the world. It is, crucially, only within this everyday practice of building a plan de vida that we can understand the appeal to human rights… for demands for rights are central to the planes de vida. 

Questions always arise. Why the redemption for law and legal rights? Yes, this is the kind of clever and strategic use of liberal rights that Ben Golder prescribes for a politics of rights, and actively refutes his criticism of redemptive critiques (p5). Yes, it is a wonderfully messy meshing of the legal with the ethical and spiritual, akin to Alexandre Lefebvre’s recent work, who draws on Foucault’s notion of care of the self to argue for human rights as a way of life and a way to care for ourselves. And yes, to reduce the debate as being ‘for’ or ‘against’ human rights bypasses the politics of struggles. Could the response to ‘can we do without rights’ have been more deliberately placed within a register after rights? Plug for the ‘After Rights? Politics, Ethics Aesthetics’ special issue which interrogates: Can we, and should we, imagine an ‘after rights’? What comes ‘after rights’? What are the political, ethical, and aesthetic/poetic provocations of the ‘after’? What responses and responsibilities do they demand? What are the political, ethical, and aesthetic/poetic implications of thinking ‘after rights’? I know from our conversations since on my current project on radical friendship as a ‘replacement’ for rights that our responses to these questions conflate through Lara’s concept of counterlegalities; strategic appeals to human rights that evince the violence of law.

Can the plan de vida processes translate to other postcolonial spaces of abandonment – and what would this look like? So if we were to think about intensifying Islamophobia in Britain following the race riots of this summer (2024), or the rights of Palestinians experiencing colonial erasure , how would this action realize itself to produce radical hope and make rights claims? What does counterlegality in these other settings, and the loving attention to the world you refer to, look like? The spaces of radical hope we have shared at the Sussex Liberation Encampment and the Brighton Reading Room give me a response. As does of course being oriented towards the broader ethico-political direction of insurgent humanism, which is the lasting message of the book. Insurgent humanism has much to teach us about our ethical obligations towards others. The human is not a noun but a praxis (p154) – 

When those involved in the planes de vida insist on thinking the human otherwise, or when social movement lawyers advance counterlegalities that decenter the rational individual, they are not simply engaging in epistemic struggles. They are also, simultaneously, confronting contradictions of capitalist development and legality as they are lived and felt in material conditions.

The hope for human rights is to see them as an ethical discourse and as vocabulary of solidarity with others.