Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines

Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

by Anja Jetschke

Winner of the 2011 Cecil B. Currey Book Award from the Association of Third World Studies In recent years, influential studies have shown that the activities of human rights organizations are central in convincing violating governments to improve their practices. Yet some governments continue to get away with human rights violations despite mobilizations against them. In Human Rights and State Indonesia and the Philippines , Anja Jetschke considers the impact of transnational human rights advocacy on the process of human rights reform and democratization in two countries that have been successful in resisting international human rights pressure. Jetschke details the effects of campaigns waged by international and domestic NGOs, foreign governments, local opposition leaders, and international organizations. She argues that the literature on transnational advocacy overlooks the ability of governments to justify and excuse human rights violations in their public dialogue with human rights organizations. Describing efforts of international and domestic human rights advocates to protect the rights of various groups, the case studies in this book suggest that governments successfully block or evade pressures if they invoke threats to state security. Jetschke finds that state security puts into play a set of powerful international norms related to sovereignty—a state's right to territorial integrity, the secular organization of the state, or a government's lack of control over the means of organized violence. If governments frame persuasive arguments around these norms, they can effectively mobilize competing domestic and international groups and trump human rights advocacy. Human Rights and State Security shows that the content and arguments on behalf of human rights matter and provide opportunities for both governments and civil society organizations to advance their agendas.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 2010

Reviews

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book makes parallel case studies of human rights violations by the Indonesian and Philippine governments against communist and regional separatist dissidents, together with the role of transnational organizations like Amnesty International in mediating between local and foreign resistance. In Indonesia, its account starts with the mass killings and imprisonments of communists at the beginning of Suharto's New Order regime and continues through the independence of East Timor and the less successful separatist movements in Aceh and Irian Jaya. In the Philippines, it covers the conflict between the government, both the authoritarian Marcos government and the more democratic regime of the 1990s and 2000s, and armed uprisings against it. It alternates chapter by chapter between the two countries.

Unfortunately, this book's historical narrative is organized around a theoretical argument that it doesn't support very well. It tries to advocate a "constructivist" theory of international relations - basically, that the outcome of conflicts between governments and human rights organizations depends on their rhetorical success in describing the situation to fit a globally accepted norm that works in their favor. But the book often doesn't examine what motivated anyone to take the decisions they took. An especially glaring failure is the failure to analyze the U.S. government's motivations, since it seems to have been the most influential foreign source of pressure or support for both the Indonesian and Philippine governments. If you don't distinguish norm-enforcing behavior from self-interested behavior in specific cases, you can't say which is more important in general.