This paper explores the relationships between human rights and corruption. Human rights, on the one hand, and corruption on the other, have long been addressed in both academia and policy circles as two separate domains of knowledge and practice. I address human rights and corruption, and the practices they describe in the encounter between policing authorities (state or non-state) and the policed, e.g. bribing police for not violating someone, links forms of violence and capital.
Two challenges are presented. First, they are inherently difficult to study empirically. They exist in a shadow-land where they incarnate abstract forms of the horrible and the bad. Secondly, corruption and human rights are legal categories grounded in United Nations Conventions. Although, factual legal categories, their abstract and illusory nature render them less effective as analytical categories. They are as much what needs to be studied as they are concepts that help us to understand the social reality they were designed to shape. I suggest a complementary analysis of how practices associated to human rights and corruption are linked empirically. This involves a move from legal notions to social practices and a focus on the situated contestation of authority in the administration of law and conflict mediation. I propose human rights cases and legal work, as a productive methodological empirical lens to understand, address and inhibit practices that supports and sustains corruption, and vice versa. Addressing corruption from human rights and violence.
This paper explores the relationships between human rights and corruption. Human rights, on the one hand, and corruption on the other, have long been addressed in both academia and policy circles as two separate domains of knowledge and practice. I address human rights and corruption, and the practices they describe in the encounter between policing authorities (state or non-state) and the policed, e.g. bribing police for not violating someone, links forms of violence and capital.
Two challenges are presented. First, they are inherently difficult to study empirically. They exist in a shadow-land where they incarnate abstract forms of the horrible and the bad. Secondly, corruption and human rights are legal categories grounded in United Nations Conventions. Although, factual legal categories, their abstract and illusory nature render them less effective as analytical categories. They are as much what needs to be studied as they are concepts that help us to understand the social reality they were designed to shape. I suggest a complementary analysis of how practices associated to human rights and corruption are linked empirically. This involves a move from legal notions to social practices and a focus on the situated contestation of authority in the administration of law and conflict mediation. I propose human rights cases and legal work, as a productive methodological empirical lens to understand, address and inhibit practices that supports and sustains corruption, and vice versa. Addressing corruption from human rights and violence.
