A.

Link: The Affs use of human rights

Human rights discourse sees political victims, not political subjects
this assumes the necessity of Western intervention in the form of
technical administration that actively subverts revolutionary
movements, preserving neocolonial paternalism.
Neocosmos 11 Michael. Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of South Africa, UNISA. Mass
mobilisation, democratic transition and transitional violence in Africa Pambazuka News 2011-03-31, Issue
523 http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72163
When political conditionalities proved insufficient, it was (and still is) always
possible to enforce such democracy, human rights and incorporation into the global order
through the deployment of military might, more or less justified by
notions of humanitarian intervention. This may simply have lengthened the process of
transition but was never meant to alter its final outcome. In fact the transition is apparently a never-ending one
as the ideal of the West is rarely attained. The present then is turned into an ongoing transition to an always-
the
receding future, all along guaranteeing careers in the business of good governance. Moreover,
theoretical foundation of human rights discourse (HRD), on which this whole
reasoning was constructed, is that people are seen only as victims , in particular as
victims of oppressive regimes, and not as collective subjects of their own
liberation. As such the law along with its trustees (governments, transnational and national
NGOs, multinational agencies) are understood to be their saviours.6 The
neocolonial relationship here should be apparent, not because HRD
is in itself inherently colonial, but because it is a form of state politics
which is applied to neocolonial conditions with all the zeal of a democratizing mission.7 It is these conditions which
require elucidation and analysis. The construction of indices as measures of democracy and the training by Western
NGOs of experts from Africa in the use of these, much in the same way as indices had been constructed in the past
in order to measure development, evidently shows how politics has been reduced to a technical process, for only a
technique can be quantitatively measured.8 Democratisation which ultimately has its roots in the struggles of
people from all walks of life for greater control over their daily lives hence in the self-constitution of a demos is
now transformed into a technical process removed from popular control and placed into the hands of experts such
as human rights lawyers, social entrepreneurs, governance professionals and gender mainstreamers who
together staff an industry whose tentacles hold up the liberal global hydra of the new imperial democratising
mission on the continent. Rather than a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, what occurred on the
African continent during the 1990s can be more profitably understood as a process of systematic de-politicisation, a
process of political exclusion. If we agree with the philosopher Jacques Rancire that politics begins exactly when
those who cannot do something show that in fact they can9, then it is not difficult to visualise de-politicisation
as a process whereby those same people are being convinced that they really are quite incapable, that they did not
do anything significant, new or different after all, despite what they may or may not have thought, as it would have
all happened anyway and that in any case their work is now over. Everyone should return to their allotted place in
the social structure and vacate the field of politics, leaving it to those who know how to follow unquestioningly the
this
rules of the game (of the state): The trustees of the excluded. In fact if historicist categories are preferred,
process could be described as a never-ending transition from the
inventive politics of popular agency to the oppressive technicism of
state and imperial power.
Empirically proven in the implementation of housing policy
Fitzpatrick and Watts 10. (Suzanne Fitzpatrick and Beth Watts (School of the Built Environment,
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK; Centre for Housing Policy, University of York, England, UK). The
Right to Housing for Homeless People. Homelessness Research in Europe.
2010. https://pureapps2.ac.uk/portal/files/4727232/ch05.pdf )) AD
But there are counter voices. Enforceable legal rights such as a right to housing may be thought to contribute to the
juridification of welfare, such that social policy becomes over-legalised, frustrating its fundamental purposes
There may also be practical limitations to legal rights-based
(Dean, 2002, p.157).
approaches, with Goodin (1986), for example, highlighting the costs and
difficulties faced by service users attempting to realise those rights. According to
this view, legalistic approaches are fundamentally flawed as they place the burden of
responsibility for ensuring that rights are met in the wrong place, redistributing power to those people least likely to
be able to use it: In purely rights-based systems, the rights holders alone have legal standing to com- plain if
officials fail to do their correlative duties. It seems to be sheer folly, however, to make their getting their due
contingent upon their demanding it, since we know so well that (for one reason or another) a substantial number of
them will in fact not do so. (Goodin, 1986, p.255) Moreover, enforceable legal rights may be viewed as not only
inef- ficient but also unnecessary, with good progress on addressing homelessness seeming to have been made in a
number of countries in their absence. In Ireland, for example, a legal rights-based approach was explicitly rejected
in favour of a social partnership model that appears to have worked reasonably well in reducing levels of homeless-
ness (OSullivan, 2008). Irish commentators argue that rights-based frameworks
encourage an adversarial rather than a problem-solving approach on
the part of both local author- ities and advocates (OSullivan, 2008), directing power and resources into the hands of
the legal profession and away from service provision (see also De Wispelaere and Walsh, 2007).

B: Impact: The Aff presents these images of suffering in the

suggestion that human rights rhetoric will suddenly solve. They
present this in a form of virtue signaling, but while trying to solve they
only end up re-entrenching the relationship between the colonialists
and the dehumanized
In this colonial relationship, all the difficult questions of decision
making need to be left to the professionals people are no longer
able to make their own choices, instead forced into the silent
regime of complacent liberation perpetuating the violent cycle of
colonization
Neocosmos 11 2 Michael. Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of South Africa, UNISA.
Mass mobilisation, democratic transition and transitional violence in Africa Pambazuka News 2011-03-31, Issue
523 http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72163
A core feature of this process in South Africa in particular has been the
construction of people as political victims rather than (and after many had
been) political subjects, through an emphasis on legal procedures
which evidently only recognise juridical agency but not political
agency.10 The relative success of this process has in the past relied inter alia on peoples lassitude with
violence and demands for justice which they have so long been denied, on the physical and emotional exhaustion of
daily militancy, and on the fetishism of power.
The latter promises a world in which the
difficult questions and problems of decision-making can and should be
left to professionals eminently qualified, and hence paid, to do so. Yet it is apparent that
this process, as currently constituted, merely gives rise to political exclusion which is not overcome by the creation
The result is that
of a civil society for the latters politics are in harmony with those of the state.11
violence does not necessarily disappear along with the construction
of a democratic state. A new oligarchy is formed (or the old one is reconstituted) precisely as a
result of the de-politicisation of the masses and their political exclusion, so that the authoritarianism against which
the people had rebelled in the first place is likely re-created, although now within the context of a somewhat
different mode of rule and different forms of political exclusion. Of course such de-politicisation in practice is simply
replicated within, as well as enabled by thought and subjectivities, as analysis becomes focussed on visualising the
world through state categories. Such categories (governance, civil society, power, democracy, law, reparations, etc)
objectify politics by representing the social and thereby stress the immutability of given social places, cultures,
identities and hierarchies to such an extent that state thinking becomes constructed as natural and the
immutability of place as an incontrovertible fact evident to all. The inevitable conclusion is that there can indeed
be no alternative to the politics of the state. The neocolonial state in Africa exhibits characteristics which, in
addition to its neoliberal features much emphasised in the current conjuncture by political economy12, give rise to
a fundamental contradiction between human rights and the rule of law on the one hand and state nationalism and
the current concerns of national consciousness founded on state-propagated notions of the (often newly acquired)
rights of the indigenous on the other. While democracy is said by the state to be its guiding principle, nationalism
is partially collapsed into vulgar nativism and corrupt practices from which is derived for example the oligarchys
right to steal justified in terms of the national interest private accumulation is said to be in the public interest but
it is also manifest in popular struggles against such practices, most clearly in North Africa in the current sequence.
This overall contradiction is manifested in different ways in different cases but appears to be a universal feature of
the state in Africa in the current period of globalised neoliberal politics.13 This contradiction, which is a product of
state politics in the neocolony, is largely insoluble through elite consensus, partly because national grievances are
irresolvable through the medium of human rights discourse and partly because the oligarchy is provided with
legitimised forms of enrichment at the expense of the nation. It thus regularly finds expression in forms of violence,
which seem largely incontestable within the framework of the neo-colonial state without the deployment of more
state (or multi-state) repressive violence. These violent contradictions arguably currently include the repressive
violence of the state in Zimbabwe where the state sees human rights as little more than an imperial conspiracy, the
current conflict between presidents in Cte DIvoire (where one relies on international support for his legitimacy and
the other denounces foreign intervention), as well as the ongoing popular upsurge against the compromised
nationalism of the North African secular and militaristic authoritarianisms. They also include the case of xenophobic
violence in South Africa itself the archetype of a successful transition to democracy which erupted in the public
sphere in all its chauvinistic starkness in May 2008. Despite its popular character, this xenophobia was founded on
a state politics of fear.14 South Africa had also experienced a mass popular uprising against an authoritarian regime
lasting approximately from 1984 to 1988 which was also referred to as peoples power.15 From 1990, this was
followed by an explicit and extensive transition which systematically depoliticised and closed down popular
political agency in favour of state politics, inter alia by transforming political agents into victims of human rights
abuses (the now famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission process). In this case, which I have discussed
elsewhere at some length16, HRD has arguably provided one of the conditions of existence of xenophobic violence
as HRD is simultaneously opposed to a resolution of the national question and inimical to the self-empowerment of
because HRD is not so much concerned
the politically excluded. This is fundamentally
with the inclusion in the field of politics of the excluded, as with legal redress. It is not so
much concerned with encouraging militancy (or even less radically with enabling an active citizenship) as with
producing the passivity of victims: It thus privileges state solutions
and through prioritising the law, reduces all political thought to
state subjectivity. In this manner, people become transformed from
subjects of history to victims of power and subjected to oppression
until they re-discover their political agency along with an Idea of freedom and equality. It follows that to attempt to
understand political change in Africa through the medium of a transition from authoritarianism to democracy
privileges the thinking of state politics. As a result, it can only fail to make sense of the increase in certain pervasive
forms of violence in neo-colonial (post-democratic) African states. Such forms of violence are not an indication of
regression to authoritarianism or of loss of momentum in an ongoing democratic transition, but rather are a
necessary outcome of the combination of neoliberal capitalism and neoliberal democracy in a context of
neocolonialism wherein a dominant form of oppression is national in content.

Rights based reforms create social hierarchies and reinforce cycles

of structural violence the aff erodes existing protections and
exploits vulnerable groups
Nogales 14, Jaya Ramji-Nogales (Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law),
"Undocumented Migrants and the Failures of Universal Individualism" vanderbilt journal of transnational law ~vol.
47:699, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/78/Ramji_Undocumented-Migrants-and-the-Failures-of-
Universal-Individualism.pdf//ghs-mr

Human rights law fails in its claims to universality of applicability, as

illustrated in further detail through the example of undocumented migrants. This overclaiming
prevents groups whose fundamental rights lie outside the scope of
international human rights law from obtaining protection, rendering such
groups vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. International human rights law
has become the hegemon of antivulnerability discourse, such that
rights not included in its canon can be dismissed as not worthy of protection. This is
particularly troubling given that the limitations on the content of human rights law reflect the
priorities of powerful interests that human rights law claims to
combat. Moreover, the locating of certain forms of vulnerability outside the scope of human rights dismisses
such claims to protection from the discourse altogether. Several scholars have noted that
reliance on a rights-based framework creates a hierarchy of
suffering that prioritizes the supposedly unjust suffering of
certain innocent victims at the expense of others who suffer in
different ways or are less able to meet increasingly strict and
unrealistic standards of morality.13 Rights necessarily establish categories and must by
definition rank members of some categories above members of other categories. These stigmatized categories are
rights accommodate
the basis for exclusion of certain groups from protection. In this way,
subordination through law.14 Rights can be viewed as trump cards that allow some subsets of
migrants to attain fundamental rights, while others become vulnerable to exploitation and abuse because they
cannot squeeze themselves into the appropriate category laid out by the rights framework.15 The hierarchies
created by these legal categories also influence moral values and social norms. The prioritizing of certain rights in
international human rights law erases other rights from the discourse and from popular imagination. In the realm of
international 13. See, e.g., Upendra Baxi, Voices of Suffering and the Future of Human Rights, 8 TRANSNATL L. &
CONTEMP. PROBS. 125, 15455 (1998); Marie-Bndicte Dembour & Marie Martin, The French Calais: Transit Zone or
Dead-End?, in ARE HUMAN RIGHTS FOR MIGRANTS?: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE STATUS OF IRREGULAR
MIGRANTS IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES 123, 14245 (Marie-Bndicte Dembour & Tobias Kelly eds., 2011);
DAVID KENNEDY, THE DARK SIDES OF VIRTUE 1415 (2004). 14. See COLIN DAYAN, THE STORY OF CRUEL &
UNUSUAL 57 (2007) (discussing the human rights implications of the treatment of prisoners is supermax prisons).
15. KENNEDY, supra note 13, at 17; Martti Koskeniemmi, Human Rights Mainstreaming as a Strategy for Institutional
Power, 1 HUMANITY 47, 48 (2010). 2014]undocumented migrants 707 human rights law, individuals fleeing
persecution and torture are granted certain rights to nondiscrimination based on immigration status, procedural
due process rights in deportation proceedings, and, if they win their claim, the right to territorial security.16
Undocumented migrants fleeing poverty and starvation are awarded
few, if any, of these rights, in the text of international human rights treaties or otherwise.17 They
are instead branded economic migrants who have entered their host country in violation of the law, and who
migrants are thus
should therefore be accorded only a limited set of human rights.18 Undocumented
depicted by human rights law itself as somehow less than human . The
expressive dimension of these hierarchies should not be underestimated.19 States understand that
they need not expend effort protecting those outside the scope of
human rights law and can instead focus their limited resources on
the rights of those who fall within the human rights framework. The
legal categories also circumscribe the scope of the debate, focusing public discussion around migrants on questions
of immigration status rather than inequality and need. The categorical hierarchies created by human rights law
impoverish the imagination even of those who seek to

C. Alt: View negating as an alternative to the inherent neocolonial

paternalism the aff propagates, only by refusing to participate in
human rights discourse can true self-liberation be achieved.
Freire 93 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED Paulo Freire. 1993

This lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed
themselves and from those who are truly solidary with them. As individuals or as peoples, by
fighting for the restoration of their humanity they will be attempting the
restoration of true generosity. Who are better prepared than the
oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive
society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed?
Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this
liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight
this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute
for it. And
an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the
oppressors' violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity. But almost always, during the
initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors,
or "sub-oppressors." The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete,
existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be
oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain
moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor. Under these
circumstances they cannot "consider" him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him -- to discover him "outside"
themselves. This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their
perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level,
their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to
overcome the contradictions (2) the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole.
[Footnote # 2: As used throughout this book, the term "contradiction" denotes the dialectical conflict between
opposing social forces.-Translator's note.] In this situation the oppressed do not see the "new man" as the person to
be born from the resolution of this contradiction, as oppression gives way to liberation. For them, the new man or
woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their
identification with the oppressor, they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an
oppressed class. It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus
become landowners -- or, more precisely, bosses over other workers .
It is a rare peasant who, once
"promoted" to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former
comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasants
situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged. In this example, the overseer, in
order to make sure of his job, must be as tough as the owner -- and more so. Thus is
illustrated our previous assertion that during the initial stage of their struggle the oppressed find in the oppressor
the model of "manhood." Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the
process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate
in revolution intend --conditioned by the myths of the old order -- to make it their private revolution. The shadow of
their former oppressor is still cast over them. The "fear of freedom" which afflicts the oppressed, (3) a fear which
may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be
examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is 'prescription.' Every
prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of
the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber's consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the
oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.

Thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best creates a pedagogical
approach to challenge the human rights model of liberation.

Giroux 12 [Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University

in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie:
The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism June 6, 2012 http://truth-
out.org/opinion/item/9865-beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-
and-the-new-authoritarianism]
While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either one's politics or society, it is a crucial
precondition for connecting what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it possible to act otherwise.
The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a political deficit,
serving to make many oppressed individuals complicit with oppressive
ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made clear, democracy requires "critical thinkers capable of
putting existing institutions into question.... while simultaneously creating the conditions for individual and social
autonomy."(41) Nothing will change politically or economically until new and emerging
social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of radical
reform and create new public spheres that support the knowledge, skills and critical thought that are necessary
features of a democratic formative culture. Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical thought, civic
engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting distortions, misrepresentations and
falsehoods produced by politicians, media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will also require addressing
how new sites of pedagogy have become central to any viable notion of agency, politics and democracy itself . This
is not a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of power as much as it is a rethinking of how
power deploys culture and how culture as a mode of education positions power. James Baldwin, the legendary
African-American writer and civil rights activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of American identity and
politics and is symptomatic of "a backward society" that has descended into madness, "especially when one is
forced to lie about one's aspect of anybody's history, [because you then] must lie about it all."(42) He goes on to
argue "that one of the paradoxes of education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a
conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of
yourself as an educated person."(43) What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility
to trigger a critical engagement with oneself, others and the larger society
- education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for
domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change. Tragically, in
our current climate "learning" merely contributes to a vast reserve of manipulation
and self-inflicted ignorance. Our education deficit is neither reducible to the failure
of particular types of teaching nor the decent into madness by the spokespersons
for the new authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters of knowledge, values
and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics. Surviving the
current education deficit will depend on progressives using history, memory and
knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals to the everyday needs of ordinary
people, but also to jumpstart social movements by making education central to
organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy.
Prefer my framework because

1. Our criticisms is a prerequisite to their policy action, we must

first look to the K in order to stop the dangerous pattern of
neocolonialism.
2. Its an epistemological prereq, because everything the affirmative
tells you to vote off of is based of a false premise of human rights
discourse.