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Dear friends of the Duke Human Rights Center @ FHI,
As a college student in the late 1990s, and then beginning my professional career in nonprofit organizations in the early 2000s, I consider myself a product of “human rights culture” at what may have been the peak of its strength and influence. Amnesty International chapters were sprouting up on high school and university campuses. Key new treaties and declarations, including the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People were all signed and ratified in this period. The United Nations named 1995-2004 the “International Decade for Human Rights Education.” Human rights courses and programs at universities were blossoming, shaping the lives of students like me.
The human rights institutions, networks, and culture of the time had flaws and blind spots, as critics in a broad range of fields and place made clear. We live in the wake of some of those failures: transitional justice programs that paid more attention to museums and trials than widespread poverty, democracy promotion agendas that ignored histories of colonization or contemporary corporate extraction of wealth and natural resources. But the debates and critiques of the time generally maintained some bedrock, shared commitment to the fundamental moral vision behind human rights: the dignity and worth of every person, and the need to create political orders and economic systems that would preserve their freedom and wellbeing. Some of the most persistent and thoughtful critics of the human rights framework, from my own field of anthropology, reaffirmed in a 1999 statement their “commitment to human rights consistent with international principles but not limited by them”—a desire to keep transforming human rights culture and institutions without tearing down what had been built.
I am finishing my first year as Faculty Director of the Duke Human Rights Center in very different times from the ones that shaped me as a human rights educator and activist. Around the world, from Argentina to the United States to Russia, authoritarian leaders are seeking not only to pull back their countries’ official commitment to human rights, but to erase the memory of human rights struggles as well. I’m sure we each have our own lists—all of them too long to bear—of the wars, extralegal executions, and attacks on basic rights that are keeping us up at night.
What does it mean to run a university human rights program in the face of such destruction? What do we owe our students, who keep learning, working, and hoping amidst so much despair?
I can’t answer those questions fully—nor would I try to do it alone. But I can say this confidently: the answer starts with connection.
Just ask Duke Human Rights Certificate student Phoenix Chapital. In her Oliver W. Koonz Prize-winning essay, “In Defense of Love and Letters: Epistolary Resistance in This is How You Lose the Time War,” Phoenix writes about the possibilities for reclaiming humanity, and resisting tyranny, through acts as intimate as writing letters. In Phoenix’s analysis of a contemporary work of speculative fiction, the pathway towards protecting individual rights and freedoms, such as those named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is through love and connection.
When I look at the range of our efforts this year—whether on campus or at the Durham County Library, bringing speakers to campus or showcasing the work of our own students—I see an emphasis on bringing people together, off-screen and real-time, to do, together, the work that Robin Kirk calls “imagining human rights.” In a world of “fractured selves” and “pervasive loneliness,” phrases Phoenix uses to describe both the dystopia in the novella she read and our very real current state, human rights must be more than merely a legal framework or political program. They must provide ways of bringing us together to see and hear each other. “I want to live in contact. I want to be context for you, and you for me,” writes one time-travelling character to the other, in Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar’s This is How You Lose the Time War, a line Phoenix quotes in her essay. Human rights are the shared, historic context for our work at the Duke Human Rights Center. But we are, right now, the context for each other. Let’s stay connected.
Yours,
Adam Rosenblatt
Faculty Director
Duke Human Rights Center @ FHI
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