Can human rights defeat nationalism? Dr. Lea David - Thursday November 23, 1pm, D418, Newman Building. All welcome.

School of Sociology – Seminar Series 2017-2018           

           

Thursday, November 23^rd, 2017, 1pm, D418, Newman Building

Dr. Lea David – Marie Curie Research Fellow

Can human rights defeat nationalism?

The focus of this lecture is the way in which collective memory and memorialization processes are understood within the human rights centred ideology and how such understanding affects nationalism. The basic difference between human rights and nationalist understanding and promotion of memorialization processes is that human rights stand for world-wide inclusion of all people into one moral community, whereas nationalism presumes nationally bounded collectives. For the ideology of nationalism, historical memory is perceived in terms of continuity, provides legitimacy for sovereignty, however, human rights as the grand narrative in the world polity, has provided a new definition – that of coming to terms with (one specific version of) the past - by which collectives are supposed to remember, a phenomenon coined here as “memorialization isomorphism”. Memorialization isomorphism refers to the standardized set of norms, promoted through human rights infrastructures in the world polity, through which societies are supposed to deal with the legacies of mass human rights abuses. States, in particular weak and post-conflict states with troubled pasts, are expected to conform to the international human rights norms of facing their criminal past and becoming accountable for past massive human rights abuses.

I ask here how successful memorialization isomorphism is in promoting universalist human rights values and whether memorialization isomorphism is capable of harvesting micro-solidarity in order to become an ideological cement that can overcome nationalism. Since the experience of micro-solidarity is not instinctive but rather a function of an interpretation of symbols and history, I argue that in contexts within which ethnic symbols and collective histories have played immediate roles in conflicts, and were further legitimized and embedded by peace agreements and human rights institutions, it is nationalist apparatus which has become the ultimate factor in the processes of recollecting micro-solidarity. In other words, I argue that at the world polity level, human rights have produced a norm of memorialization isomorphism that does not actually lead to the advancement of human rights values but is instead likely to further promote nationalist ideologies. Finally, I suggest we look at the current reappearance of nationalism world-wide partially as a result of a graduate and accumulative process of standardization of memory - from “duty to remember” as a moral instance onto policy-oriented “proper way to remember” and try to assess the impact such process has on the perception of the “self” and “other”.