Description
Since the mainstream human rights movement rose to prominence in the late-1970s, both knowing about and doing human rights has been marked by a very particular mode of activism: information politics. As practice, information politics operates by mobilising ‘thick rivers of fact,’ with the aim of shaming governments into reform. Much contemporary human rights practice thus combines a commitment to positivistic forms of knowledge-making that construct empirical ‘facts’ about violations, and a conviction that the mobilisation of these facts can, through shame, modify government behaviour.
In recent years, however, the rise of far right, populist governments has engendered both the ‘retreat’ of shame as an operative concept in global affairs and nourished a growing ‘post-truth’ suspicion of facts. The present conjuncture thus represents a crisis for human rights that is not only political but also an epistemological problem regarding our ‘machineries of knowing.’ And while it might be tempting to hold onto the safety of facts, this article follows scholars across Science and Technology Studies and Media Studies in suggesting that such a move relies on established hierarchies between legitimate and illegitimate or politically contentious knowledge that will only reinforce this crisis. The paper contends that at the present moment it is therefore necessary to reimagine information politics and the epistemologies underpinning it.
Pursuing this objective, this paper brings together Donna Haraway’s work on ‘situated knowledges’ and Maurizio Lazzarato’s writing on ‘counter-expertise’ to develop a more speculative and perspectival approach to human rights information. The paper outlines the ways in which the proposed approach furnishes information politics with a more democratic epistemology that is adequate to the increasingly authoritarian and post-truth conjuncture.
