Human rights have become central to global politics and activism since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This year also marks the 75th anniversary of the first International Human Rights Day. Since the late 1990s SIS professor Shadi Mokhtari has been involved in activism and research in several Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt. Her research refutes the widely assumed notion that there is some cultural or religious resistance to human rights values in the region. On the contrary, she argues that much of the promise of the human rights idea is widely sought in the region. Yet, what often makes the human rights framework unpersuasive is Middle Eastern populations’ lived experiences of its politics and practice. Mokhtari's research was recently published in the Journal of Human Rights in an article titled “Human Rights as Mockery of Morality, Manifesting Morality and a Moral Maze.” We asked Mokhtari about her time in the Middle East, what her research reveals, and how her insights apply to the ongoing conflict in Gaza today.

What made you decide to pursue this specific kind of research?

During the time I spent in the Middle East, beginning in 1998, I noticed that the ordinary people I met rarely used the term “human rights,” despite seeming to harbor deep-seated grievances the human rights framework sought to address. I also noticed how isolated local human rights NGO activists—who largely spent their days in empty downtown offices talking to each other and foreign partners—were from their populations, despite the grandiose mission they espoused to defend peoples’ rights.

However, when I spoke the words “human rights” myself, I found that people suddenly had quite a bit to say. Overwhelmingly, they did not say human rights were a cultural imposition; rather, they indignantly objected to Western hypocrisy and lamented how far removed the reality of their lives was from the rhetorical promise of human rights. This sentiment was best captured in a retort I heard over and over again, usually uttered with an indignant tone: “What human rights? Human rights do not exist here.”

In 2011, when I arrived in Egypt just a few months after the stunning popular uprising that had ended Hosni Mubarak’s rule, I was surprised to find human rights discourses and activists enjoying a previously unimaginable popular embrace. I heard human rights being discussed on radio shows to which taxi drivers listened intently and saw sleep-deprived human rights activists’ phones buzzing with nonstop invitations to speak at public events or to provide policy recommendations.

Neither the traditional scholarship that adhered to an underlying assumption that Middle Eastern populations had some kind of cultural resistance to the content (ideals, values, or standards of moral conduct) of human rights nor the critical scholarship which largely discounted the potential for human rights to resonate popularly in Global South contexts could explain these dynamics.

This prompted me to start thinking about how Middle Eastern populations experienced human rights in practice, how they evaluated the morality of that practice, and how their judgments of human rights practice as either genuine or morally corrupted determined whether they took up the discourse.

Why is it important to analyze the impact and study the varied experiences of human rights practices? What can practitioners learn from research like this?

It helps us move beyond essentialist assumptions that non-Western populations are particularly shaped by culture and instead recognize that there are instances in which human rights norms are actually widely desired, but people choose to keep their distance because of the way power is embedded in human rights practice. This allows a shift in focus from depoliticized understandings of the suffering of marginalized populations—one which, in a sense, blames them for their own suffering—to the structures of power fostering their subjugation as the key obstacles to the realization of human rights’ emancipatory promise. Finally, recognizing that choosing to engage with human rights is just as much an act of agency as choosing not to engage with the framework (a blind spot of many critical works) further illuminates the agency of marginalized populations.

The research finds that for people to engage with human rights, not just the content, but also its practice must be, to some extent, morally persuasive. This suggests that practitioners should devote more of their efforts to countering the human rights framework’s cooptation and disingenuous practice. When human rights activists and the human rights they speak of are seen as morally consistent, meaningful, and put forth with integrity, people will not only embrace the framework in relation to rights areas that already resonate with them, like freedom from torture or economic rights, but they also will become more open to being persuaded to adopt human rights positions in marginalized rights areas such as women’s rights.

Your research primarily focuses on non-Western populations, specifically in Egypt and the Middle East following the 2011 Arab uprisings. Why did you focus on these populations in this specific period?

A central argument in my book, After Abu Ghraib, which focused on the human rights dynamic of the post-9/11 era, was that in key respects, it was Middle Eastern populations who aspired for human rights universalism, and it was American human rights practice that was relativistic. Yet, the political discourse of the time was so steeped in the need to save Middle Eastern people from their backward culture and religion that this argument was not as outwardly apparent to most Western audiences then. With the Arab Uprisings, during which millions were taking to the streets and risking their lives to demand rights and dignity, it became harder to adhere to the view that people in the Middle East have some inherent resistance to human rights that needed to be overcome. It really shed light on how, when experienced as manifesting morality, human rights could be a highly resonant discourse in the Middle East.

The Arab Uprisings were also a watershed moment because they spurred a shift in the longstanding geography of human rights vis-à-vis the region. For decades, "human rights in the Middle East" was a subject of scrutiny, debate, and mobilizations spearheaded from the West, while local activists’ and populations’ voices were at once drowned out by louder Western interventions and stifled by local governments’ repression. This resulted in minimal Middle Eastern agency in defining the nature and scope of its own predicament vis-à-vis the human rights paradigm. The 2011 Uprisings’ whirlwind of human rights mobilizations shifted the center of gravity of human rights politics from the West to the Middle East, producing human rights practices that better reflected the population’s suffering.

I should note that the framework is not limited to the Middle East, and in many ways is informed by and captures the experiences of other marginalized populations, including in the West. In fact, Patricia Williams’ work on the reasons why African Americans invoke rights in the United States, despite the “thin protection” they can sometimes offer, very much informed my thinking around the emotional dimensions of how and why human rights can be resonant among marginalized populations.

In your article, you explain that many populations in the Middle East did not use the term “human rights” on their own. Why was this?

Well, for quite some time in the Middle East, when ordinary people looked around, they saw their states adroitly co-opting human rights by signing treaties or vying for seats on UN human rights bodies, only to simultaneously regurgitate human rights scripts and undermine the framework. They saw Western governments paying lip service to human rights and funding token human rights initiatives linking human rights to their culture—but not to power or politics—while shaking hands in lavish settings and pursuing arms deals and military cooperation with their repressive regimes. Finally, they saw many local and international human rights NGOs and UN officials as all too willing to tread lightly and play along instead of catalyzing meaningful change. Everywhere they looked, the loudest voices they heard using the language of human rights seemed to be doing so in disingenuous ways. This “mockery of morality” practice prompted them to adhere to the notion that, in its practice, human rights were so circumscribed by the operation of power that it could not bear fruit for them, even as it could be meaningfully realized elsewhere.

There is an important emotional dimension here. Experiencing a global discourse claiming to uphold moral values they seek as overwhelmingly corrupted and off limits to them, essentially flying in the face of its moral promise and professed universal application, can give rise to strong feelings of injustice and indignation as well as resignation, despair, and powerlessness. The fact that the framework’s corruption is so uncensored and out in the open can foster disbelief and indignation, making it alienating and ultimately insulting—adding insult to injury. These emotions, in turn, produce cynicism and little desire to place faith in the framework.

In the moral maze experience, where people find themselves bombarded by human rights claims combined with sensationalist rumors, conspiracy theories, and accusations of falsified testimonies or doctored photos coming from every direction, they may disengage because they have a hard time passing moral judgment on whether the practice of human rights around them is corrupt or genuine.

In both instances, they keep a distance from human rights because the practice is not morally persuasive to them, not because they reject the values the human rights paradigm espouses. Nonetheless, in each case, they retain a sliver of hope that the promise of human rights can one day become a reality for them.

In your article, you introduced a typology, or classification system, capturing three Middle Eastern experiences of human rights. How does it apply to recent developments in Iran, which you also follow in your research?

I am currently involved in research that applies Iranian experiences to the typology, focusing in particular on last year’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” mobilizations.

Many of the same dynamics I discuss in the article are at play with respect to Iran. Despite the similarities, however, I think the Iranian experience is different in two critical ways.

First, the Iranian experience of “human rights as mockery of morality” stems not just from traditional savioristic human rights politics, but also from a progressive savioristic politics committed to resisting it. Increasingly, many in left and progressive segments of Western societies have come to recognize that their own governments’ past and present policies have resulted in grave suffering in the Global South. Seeking to avoid reproducing the same hollow deployments of human rights and women’s rights used to justify Western policies, such as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they often end up uncritically accepting the Iranian government’s branding of itself and its policies as “anti-imperialist” or “Islamic.” This leads them to view any human rights challenges to the Iranian regime’s repression or impositions of religious dictates as manifestations of Western imperialism. Iranians invoking human rights then become delegitimized as Western lackeys, and Iranian experiences of subjugation at the hand of their anti-imperialist, victim-branding state are eclipsed. I try to capture this aspect of the Iranian experience in another article, tentatively titled “Iranian State Anti-Imperialist Victim Branding and the Reverse Savages, Victims, and Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights.”

Second, the Iranian case is also notable for how quickly the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests went from the immense manifesting morality and accordant moral clarity on display in the images of women raising their fists, burning veils, and taking on security forces to demand rights to a dizzying moral maze experience of human rights. This is likely due to a combination of the layers of complexity of Iranian (particularly diaspora) opposition politics and the increasing sophistication of state digital disinformation capabilities.

How do the insights of the typology apply to the current war in Gaza and the broader Palestinian experience?

The Palestinian experience has long been the quintessential “mockery of morality” experience of human rights, not only for Palestinians themselves, but also for broader Middle Eastern populations who are perpetually astounded by how glaring, unrelenting, and unconcealed Palestinians’ exclusion from the protection of human rights has been.

Today, as the Israeli military buries Gaza under rubble, killing 16,000 civilians, leaving 1.8 million displaced and with nowhere to go, destroying or damaging 60% of housing, bombing libraries, schools, community centers, infrastructure, and refugee camps, all with powerful Western governments’ rhetorical support and most advanced weaponry, the power-laden practice of human rights is once again on full display.

Yet, Gaza is, at least in one key respect, less of human rights as a mockery of morality experience than that of the post-9/11 era. There is an array of voices loudly and much more audibly invoking human rights in meaningful ways against the Israeli state’s atrocities. Middle Eastern and international human rights NGOs and activists; UN officials; protesters from Indonesia, the UK, South Africa, and Chile; Jewish activists; and some Palestinian officials speaking in international fora are posing potent challenges to the latest episode of Palestinians’ blatant exemption from human rights and international humanitarian law. While the primary battle is clearly one to save Gazans and Gaza, there is a secondary battle underway. Instead of abandoning human rights, Middle Eastern activists and their global allies are insisting on its universal and morally coherent application. This is in line with a trend I have been observing and writing about for the last few years: while, following 9/11, human rights were tasked with saving the Middle East, it may just be that it is the Middle East (and broader Global South) that ends up saving human rights from forecasts of its impending demise by making its practice more meaningful.