Human Rights Fetishism.

The basic question I'll attempt to answer in my paper is: why do so many intelligent, experienced people hold on to human rights law with such passion, even in the face of all we know about law's limited emancipatory powers? I will attempt to explore this question through the example of Colombian social movement's use of human rights law and discourse. Since the nineties human rights, both as law and as a banner for social movement organizing, saw a period of dramatic growth, while at the same time social violence persisted, the internal conflict escalated, social indicators deteriorated and the country lived through long periods of seriously restricted democracy. How to understand then social movements' embrace of the human rights provisions of the 1991 Constitution, considering their persistent inefficacy? I argue that it is not just a matter of the strategic use of a discourse (making the best of a bad situation) or, conversely, a delusion or a type of false consciousness. Instead I see in this insistence on human rights an example of activists' emotional attachment to law. This attachment is a form of fetishism not in the Marxist but in the Freudian sense which implies desiring and enjoying law not (only) as a means to an end but rather, as an end in itself. Like the Freudian explanation of fetishism, it implies a disavowal, that of the full effects- physical and interpretive, of the violence that renders all, victims and victimizers, inhuman. In this paper I will argue that this fetishism is of course problematic, but that at the same time it also makes emotional and political sense as a response to gross violence and injustice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]