The Rights of Spring: A Memoir of Innocence Abroad

by David Kennedy

Ana reported being blindfolded, doused in cold water. She was tied to a metal frame; electrodes were fastened to her body. Someone cranked a hand-operated generator.


One spring more than twenty years ago, David Kennedy visited Ana in an Uruguayan prison as part of the first wave of humanitarian activists to take the fight for human rights to the very sites where atrocities were committed. Kennedy was eager to learn what human rights workers could do, idealistic about changing the world and helping people like Ana. But he also had doubts. What could activists really change? Was there something unseemly about humanitarians from wealthy countries flitting into dictatorships, presenting themselves as white knights, and taking in the tourist sites before flying home? Kennedy wrote up a memoir of his hopes and doubts on that trip to Uruguay and combines it here with reflections on what has happened to the world of international humanitarianism since.


Now bureaucratized, naming and shaming from a great height in big-city office towers, human rights workers have achieved positions of formidable power. They have done much good. But the moral ambiguity of their work and questions about whether they can sometimes cause real harm endure. Kennedy tackles those questions here with his trademark combination of narrative drive and unflinching honesty. This is a powerful and disturbing tale of the bright sides and the dark sides of the humanitarian world built by good intentions.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

David W. Kennedy is Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School where he teaches international law, international economic policy, legal theory, law and development and European law.

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really excellent little book that is a condensed version of Kennedy's "important" (I use quotation marks as that is a quote from everybody who discusses it) larger work The Dark Sides of Virtue. It is a moment by moment deconstruction of a human rights mission to Uruguay he was a part of in the 1980s. He tries to recapture the uncertainty of a time where human rights was still developing as a field, and all the ambiguity of goals, competence, jurisdiction and effectiveness that that entails. He spends the majority of the time, however, questioning his own motives and his narrative construction of events- who really filled what role, for instance. Was Ana, the political detainee he interviewed, a total innocent telling the unvarnished truth? Was the warden a totally bad guy? What was his own role as a "witness" of atrocity while still trying to be a lawyer doing a job? How do you be a person in a situation where the boundaries of your role are so uncertain and so likely to get you into trouble if you overstep. There's wonderful stuff in here about the stories we tell ourselves and whether it is a betrayal of the whole movement to use peoples' pain to play white knight, or write a happy ending when for most people there will be no such thing. Some in my class (including the professor) felt that his self-doubt of the human rights movement (especially his narrative of its decline and fall) was published at a very interestingly good time and that his re-telling was a bit too close to marketing opportunism for their sakes. I didn't agree- I think this is a great, reflective little book that really challenges what the actual workings of human rights missions are like. He reminds us that there is no moral clarity and despite the "white knight" mission, there probably shouldn't be. Human rights is the industry of second best and there's always some failure in success- and the people giving the aid get something out of it. I do think that his disllusionment with humanitarianism as insufficiently pure these days is a bit extreme, but I loved the self-examination that he undertook to get to that point. Amazing.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A depiction of a journey centered around human rights advocacy, the importance of stories and a general naïveté. I’ll need to reflect more on this, but was a quick and interesting read for my international law course. Any mandatory reading seems to bring my rating below 5 stars, and the memoir could use some edits to get rid of sentence fragments and add clarity. “After all, politics denied is never no politics at all”.

[Alannah Turnbull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provides a very useful critique on the bureaucratisation of human rights in the international community; uses narrative style and personal experiences to illustrate an individual response of the human rights lawyer, this makes it much easier to read than the general variety of commentary upon human rights. However, because of this, the book is less useful to an academic, and the concerns raised remain very much unresolved by the end of the book.