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ID:
139772
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper explores the politics of monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a new United Nations human rights monitoring mechanism which aims to promote a universal approach and equal treatment when reviewing each country’s human rights situation. To what extent are these laudable aims realised, and realisable, given entrenched representations of the West and the Rest as well as geopolitical and economic inequalities both historically and in the present? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the UN in 2010–11, the final year of the UPR’s first cycle, we explore how these aims were both pursued and subverted, paying attention to two distinct ways of talking about the UPR: first, as a learning culture in which UN member states ‘share best practice’ and engage in constructive criticism; and second, as an exam which UN member states face as students with vastly differing attitudes and competences. Accounts and experiences of diplomats from states that are not placed in the ‘good students’ category offer valuable insights into the inherent contradictions of de-historicised and de-contextualised approaches to human rights.
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| 2 |
ID:
080327
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| Publication |
2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article addresses an arresting conjuncture: the fact that the international community's involvement in states' affairs frequently coalesces around a state's management of internal difference. I outline striking parallels in the ways relations between supranational bodies, some European states, and their minorities were reconfigured in two post-imperial moments: the decade following the Great War and the present period of post-socialist transformation. In both periods supranational bodies developed regimes of supervision whose rationale and focus were minority rights and the state's governance of difference. Examining a figure I call "the supervised state," I reflect on its implications for theorisations of state and sovereignty. I place these moments of intensified supervision of selected states within a larger history of supranational scrutiny and a political landscape that entailed a spectrum of sovereignties
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