Across The Line: Human rights and transnational relationships on the Kazakh-Sino border

[✎] March 2022
[✫] Originally written as an assignement for my Masters in International Politics at SOAS. This piece is a snapshot of an ongoing issue, and therefore has been out of date since the moment I published it.

In the 21st century, the relevance of ‘human rights’ is increasingly called into question. Ideas of hypocrisy, enforcement, and new modes of governance cloud the air as activists, politicians, and myriad power structures try to assert a moral sensibility within decision making processes. This essay will examine the utilisation, enforcement, and activism involved in the human rights discussion with regards to the Xinjiang region of China, and the treatment of the Uyghur people within this space. It will also examine responses and attitudes present in the neighbouring state of Kazakhstan, one of China’s most significant neighbours and one with whom it shares a vast land border [1] in addition to myriad diplomatic and trade links. Kazakhstan’s population is majority Turkic [2] sharing many roots with the Uyghur population in Xinjiang – a population increasingly suffering what many term ‘human rights abuses’ [3], ‘genocide’ [4], and other forms of control, oppression, and erasure. The proximity of the Kazakh state to both a significant Human Rights cause, as evidenced by dedicated projects [5] and reports [6], and a major global power in the form of China opens up unique questions about the role that Human Rights can play in the geopolitically volatile region of Central Asia, and subsequently world politics. Additionally, the ways in which both local and global actors quantify and respond to the actions of the Chinese state in Xinjiang offer up a means of connecting an inter-state, cross-boundary issue to wider debates on the utility of Human Rights as a global framework for acting to aid those in need.

[1] Bitabarova, Assel G. (2018). “Unpacking Sino-Central Asian engagement along the New Silk Road: a case study of Kazakhstan,” Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies, 7:2, p.153

[2] “Kazakh police detain Uyghur activists”, Times of India, 3 July 2021

[3] UHRP REPORT - “Your Family Will Suffer”: How China is Hacking, Surveilling, and Intimidating Uyghurs in Liberal Democracies”, https://uhrp.org/report/your-family-will-suffer-how-china-is-hacking-surveilling-and-intimidating-uyghurs-in-liberal-democracies/

[4] Finnegan, C. (2020) The Uyghur Minority in China: A Case Study of Cultural Genocide, Minority Rights and the Insufficiency of the International Legal Framework in Preventing State-Imposed Extinction, Laws Journal 9,1

[5] Xinjiang Victims Database - https://shahit.biz/eng

[6] UHRP Report, “Your Family Will Suffer”

In answering the question of the utility of human rights within this specific region, this essay will ascertain their relevance to identity construction, border securitization, and the social constitution of both moral causes and their potential to enable or enact change. We will start with an historical examination of the development both of human rights ideals and the various debates attached to them, forming an intellectual framework with which to proceed. We will then look at the history of the Kazakh-Chinese border, the region of Xinjiang, and the recent actions of the Chinese state, with a particular eye to the ways human rights discussions have presented in this space. Finally, in marrying our new framework to this particular issue, we will reach a conclusion on how human rights might impact discussion and action in Xinjiang, and comparative issues, into the future. In examining these questions, we will find the utility of human rights come forth both as a discursive framework and a means of directing focus. It is a troubled and often flawed system of categorising abuses, but the fact that these questions can be posed and interwoven with each other whilst retaining a sense of ongoing injustice and the need for change demonstrates its utility. The very writing of this paper, in some sense, answers my questions in a broad vector. More specifically, the main thrust of our argument can be understood as follows:

Regarding the plight of the Uyghurs and the relationship between Kazakhstan and China, human rights represent a single vector of analysis within a pluralised field of competing factors. As much as states, pundits, and commentary in the West might still aim to make the case clear cut, the reality for those on both sides of the border is too complex for traditionally-understood human rights (or Human Rights as Hopgood might stylise it) to present any particular solutions. Indeed, the internally conflicted nature of Human Rights in an officialised, capitalised sense often precludes their utility. However, following the work of César Rodríguez-Garavito, I find human rights as a framework to be useful in an “ecosystem approach”, wherein “there is room for national and international diversity and network-based connections between actors, topics and strategies, is a better description of the human rights domain than Hopgood’s approach based on two separate monocultures” [7]. The very concept of human rights, and the existence of organisations such as Amnesty International, for all of their flaws, serves to enabled discussions of practicality and local-level initiatives, whilst also contributing to the hardening of borders and the creation of binaries. As the Xinjiang Victims Database puts it: “the crisis in Xinjiang is not a US-China issue and should not be seen as such, and it is unfortunate that most of the individuals and groups who are currently working on the issue are either US-based or US-funded." [8] The utility of a case study of two states who do not fit within the usual remit oh Human rights-abiding countries is that they stand outside of the traditional, western-dominated viewpoint on the issue. In allying critical discourses with a case study of non-Western actors, we can start to understand the place that human rights has beyond a world in which they are taken for granted. To draw from Gearty, “The power of the label ‘human rights’ lies in the multiplicity of meanings that it plausibly attracts” [9], and this essay will explore the benefits and drawbacks to such a framework when analysing ongoing, contemporaneous oppression.

[7] Lettinga, Doutje and van Troost, Lars, (eds.), Debating the Endtimes of Human Rights: Activism and Institutions in a Post-Westphalian World. Amsterdam: Amnesty International Netherlands, p.9

[8] Xinjiang Victims Database FAQ - https://shahit.biz/eng/#faq

[9] Gearty, C. (2014), The State of Human Rights. Glob Policy, 5: p.391

[↓] "China-Kazakhstan border trade drives Hummer driver's dream for fortune"

The work of Stephen Hopgood will loom large over this piece. A fervent writer on the impending and ongoing demise of the human rights framework as we know it, Hopgood’s writing and ideas often form the basis of intellectual discussion on the topic. There is much to be gleaned from his work over the years, namely the idea that the unflinching realism and authoritative nature of Human Rights organisations such as Amnesty International “disguises interpretation as fact” [10]. This is not something easily contested, and indeed is a significant part of the ongoing deconstruction of contemporary Western systems of rule and their legitimation, encompassing areas as broad as the colonial roots of scientific and medical methodologies [11]. It is a point that can lead both to criticism of those deploying the idea of ‘human rights’ and those on the ‘inside’, working within human rights organisations. As Bhatia makes clear, this problem for human rights activist is “also symptomatic of the wider issue of having to express their concerns in an apolitical human rights language where it was felt that there were political issues at the root cause” [12]. Bhatia’s argument that human rights can act as a veil for governments to act in a manner which still causes harm is focused on the state of Bahrain, but speaks to a root issue that all critical engagements with human rights come up against – the fact that within liberal societies, there are inevitably points at which human rights are discarded in their own name. The key distinction that Hopgood draws between the capitalised, official Human Rights and the lowercase human rights – one of humanitarianism and local action [13] – is one that can be useful but also, as we continue, must be questioned too.

[10] Hopgood, S. (2013),Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. United States: Cornell University Press, 2013.p.5

[11] Derr, J., The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt, (Stanford, 2019

[12] Luke G.G. Bhatia (2018) Intersections between the local and global: the Bahrain human rights movement, The International Journal of Human Rights, 22:2, 286-304, p.298

[13] Hopgood, S. (2014) 'The Endtimes of human rights.' In: Lettinga, Doutje and van Troost, Lars, (eds.), Debating the Endtimes of Human Rights: Activism and Institutions in a Post-Westphalian World. Amsterdam: Amnesty International Netherlands, p.17

This paradoxical quality is exhibited by states such as the United Kingdom or United States, disparaging human rights abuses abroad when they frequently violating these samite rms. Whether it be under other organisations such as NATO, who admitted the military intervention in Kosovo to be “illegal, but legitimate” [14], or their own detention and torture of suspects from specific religious and ethnic communities, as documented at Abu Gharib prison or the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. It is here that the work of Nick Vaughan-Williams can help up to understand the construction of human rights as a mode of thought very much constituted through internal dissonance. Vaughan-Williams builds on the work of Giorgio Agamben to argue that “sovereign power depends upon creating and exploiting zones of indistinction in which subjects’ recourse to conventional legal and political protection is curtailed: a technique of governance he [Agamben] argues is illustrated by the status of detainees held indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay” [15],. In the framework of our argument, we can understand the discussed sovereign power as that legitimated by human rights, articulated in a way that allows for liberal democracies to “reconcile the aspirations of universal, rights-bearing individuals with the fact that any given demos takes a particular form and must therefore draw a line between inside and out” [16].

[14] The Independent International Commission on Kosovo - The Kosovo Report Summary – Reliefweb 23 Oct 2000 https://reliefweb.int/report/albania/kosovo-report

[15] Vaughan-Williams, N. (2009) ‘The generalised bio-political border? Re-conceptualising the limits of sovereign power.’ Review of International Studies 35(4): 729-749. p.738

[16] Best, J. (2017) ‘Security, economy, population: The political economic logic of liberal exceptionalism.’ Security Dialogue 48(5), p.376

This is a mode of exceptionalism, something identified by Wall as erasing the serial practices of violence actually “constitutive of the internal operations of the state” [17] whilst simultaneously creating the moral groundwork for the same states to act. In much of Best’s writing, and indeed much other writing on the topic of emergency and exceptionalism in human rights and sovereignty, the states discussed are typically identified as “liberal democracies” [18], with a focus on those keenest on upholding existing human rights treaties. In these cases, human rights and the action of humanitarianism is seen as “a kind of ideological legitimation of liberalism, both as a symbol of its moral necessity and as cover for its many absences and failures” [19]. This creates what Bauman calls a “mobius strip” [20] effect, wherein both the upholding and breaking of rights are constitutive of the same liberal regime patterns. In much the same way that Ben Anderson’s ‘Emergency Futures’ argues that we are witnessing a normalisation of exception, of emergency [21], we can attach Hopgood’s idea of the ability of human rights to constitute regimes of normality. In his words: “What normal does is obscure and disguise the reality of structural violence: that ‘normal’ society is full of need, suffering, violence (including structural and institutional violence) and the everyday suppression of multiple human freedoms, and that inequality of life risks is an endemic feature of the lives of poorer people” [22].

In attaching these understandings to our case study, we can use the lens of human rights as a constitutive regime to analyse both the normalization of ‘emergency’ detention and re-education in China, and the sentiment that formalised human rights constitutes the primary valid solution to the issue. The danger of human rights discourse, as in the mobius strip, comes with its reduction of modes of action, “reducing the opportunity for alternative or indigenous alternatives’” [23]. Barnett’s contestation of the binaries inherent to Hopgood’s classification of Human Rights and ‘human rights’ as “independent, nearly binary” [24]. It is the universalising power of capitalised Human Rights which drives modes of exceptionalism, the key point for Agamben’s analysis wherein emergency measures constitute “a systemic feature of Western politics: it is the constitutive paradigm of the juridical-political order” [25]. Extreme situations such as Guantanamo Bay [26] or the re-education camps in Xinjiang function as constitutive limits, and borders to the respective state identities, fulfilling what Agamben went on to call the “radical absence” [27] of law. Human Rights become a tool to mark the edge of state power, rather than a means by which citizens are protected from it. As Tsoukala writes, the very “legitimation of the emergency measures rests upon a set of sovereignty-related arguments that reframe the notion of freedom and the place of human rights in contemporary democracies” [28], placing them as borders between one society and another.

From this perspective, it is easy to fall into a binary viewpoint, wherein Chinese-mandated “indigenous democracies based on the specific historical, political, economic, and social context of each country” [29] reflect against US-mandated liberal democracy. The comparative nature of human rights violations and specific instances such as Guantanamo Bay or Xinjiang might be utilised here to ascertain the futility of human rights. Where Hopgood sees their decline in an increasingly non-liberal world, we might also make the argument that the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the biggest supporters of Human Rights in an official capacity render them void ab initio, with both sides at fault. A realist position might then develop, again framed by Hopgood, arguing that “It does not matter how many states sign up to the ICC or R2P. There isn’t really a norm if the United States and China are not on board.” [30] It seems as though the entire field of discussion is captured, and has collapsed, under the weight of these two powers. It’s a point carried into our study by Finnegan, who notes that in spite of drawing attention to ethnically-motivated oppression, or perhaps cultural genocide, human rights actors such as herself can do very little except clamour for China to be brought before the International Criminal Court [31]. When a country already exists on the very edge of the US-dominated geopolitical space, for example in its formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to independently verify elections and ratify borders [32], Finnegan’s defeated and desperate tone makes sense. From her point of view, “the international legal framework, even if amended, would fail to protect the Uyghur minority through the conventional channels” [33].

Instead of this dichotomy, and moving towards Rodríguez-Garavito’s ecosystem, requires an understanding that if this inconsistency is built-in to Human Rights, not only can they obscure, but also enlighten. Vaugh-Williams discusses the multiplicity of border realisations with reference to the work of Balibar, and asks us to consider the inutility of frameworks which are overly universal [34]. Our own interpretation of the utility of human rights in a general sense is thus informed both by his rhizomatic conception, wherein more actors create more potential for positive movement, but also the ideas of Landman, who argues that the language of human right makes them useful simply through access [35] to information and discourse. This can be seen in the pleading, hopeful tone of Finnegan’s writing, using the Uyghur case as a foregone conclusion, in the authoritative stance of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, arguing for the importance of the 1986 UN General Assembly Declaration on the Right to Development as a means by which the Chinese state might be held accountable [36], and in the work of the Xinjiang Victims Database, a voluntary NGO dispersed across an online community tracking disappearances and internment of Uyghurs across China. All of these efforts promote a discussion on the issue, and no one answer arises from their individual strands.

The actuality of the situation in Xinjiang is difficult to be certain of. As Hopgood elucidates, “To act in sovereign spaces, you need access to those spaces. This is true of any hegemonic governance regime” [37], and access to information and local reportage from within China’s ‘Great Firewall’ is extremely difficult. The issue of sovereignty also demonstrates how human rights can augment discussion which does not directly subscribe to their primacy. In Kazakhstan, there have been waves of recent protests and demonstrations by citizens in response to perceived Chinese encroachment onto Kazakh sovereignty. Anger over the proposition of legalising the sale of land to foreigners has stoked fear that Chinese businesses will establish enclaves and footholds in the country, with protests erupting in the summer of 2016 on such a scale that even the authorities were surprised [38], with thousands of protests gathering in each of the major cities across western and southern Kazakhstan [39]. The ban was made permanent in May 2021 [40, 41], indicating the precarious position the Kazakh government now finds itself in, caught between the desires of its people and the geostrategic aims of the Chinese state as realised through the incorporation of diasporic businesses, identified by Peyrouse [42]. This action falls outside of the modes of human rights discourse we have developed so far – it was based purely in terms of local contestation of sovereignty, but has its roots in an increasing public awareness of the interment of Uyghurs. Bhavna Dave stresses the difficult position the Kazakh state currently faces, wherein “Publicly, Kazakhstan has maintained that the issue of Xinjiang is an ‘internal’ or ‘domestic’ concern of China. At the same time, the government in recent years has not complied with the demands by China to return the ethnic Kazakhs who have fled to Kazakhstan, and tacitly cooperated with international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in arranging a safe passage for them to a third country” [43]. Following Dave’s work, we can understand human rights as constitutive of a dialogue between Kazakhstan and external pressures, in addition to the internal pressures of Kazakh citizens. In many ways this mirrors

Prior to contemporary issues, the region of Xinjiang has long been contested and a site of Chinese colonial domination. The very name Xinjiang means “old land newly returned” [44], with the region being contested since the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps was created in 1954 [45] with the task of developing the land. As a report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project describes, there have also been a number of subsequent projects in the region [46]. More recently, China and Kazakhstan have increased their economic partnership by means of the Silk Road Economic Belt, a large-scale and globally-oriented project driven by China to re-animate what it frames as the old Silk Road, creating new trade links and transport hubs. As Dave argues, the SREB is “decidedly Sino-centric” [47], but its impact in the region is one not only of increased mobility but of border securitisation. With a necessity to regulate and direct trade across borders, these need to be established and securitized, in a process identified by Andrew Grant as a ‘difference condenser’. Grant argues that “The materialization of this border has, at many historical moments, turned farmers, pastoralists, and traders into labor migrants and refugees” [48], demonstrative of both he changing dynamics in the region and the impact that socially-constituted frameworks such as applied sovereignty can have on local populations. We learn from Grant for example that crossing the border is a regular part of life for many Kazakhs [49], often to trade and do businesses at the newly constructed Khorgos Free Trade Zone, the only region of it’s type in China [50].

What we learn from an examination of the history of the region of Xinjiang, and its current economized status, is that it has consistently been a contested, developing space in numerous ways. The latest round of investments totalling $16.3 billion into cities like Khorgos, Kashgar, and Alataw [51] is in service of Chinese policy which sees, or claims to see, the alleviation of poverty and economic development as totally necessary. It is here that a discussion in terms of human rights can both complicate and elucidate the matter. Complicating in adding a plurality of competing interpretations to the result, and elucidating in offering a means by which these might be separated and understood. Winter brings to our attention the way in which a discussion of trade along the Silk Road “foregrounds neoliberal depictions of trade and technological exchange, and relies on romanticised ideas about the flow of ideas, population movements, and the rising and falling of regional powers” [52], with development and urbanization held up as indicators of positive progress in the region, something applicable beyond the confines of Chinese state development to traditionally western organisations such as the World Bank and IMF. Inherent to this process though, has been high rates of urbanization and subsequent demolition of long-standing cities, almost always majority Uyghur populated as these are regions more afflicted by poverty [53]. The old city of Kashgar was entirely demolished.

The work of Ciara Finnegan on cultural genocide because of this ‘economic development’ is a particularly useful case study of the complicating and yet necessary framework of human rights when put into action. At its core, Finnegan’s article argues that the urbanization and displacement of the Uyghur populations through the guise of development constitutes a form of cultural genocide through removal and erasure of tangible forms of culture. Citing the work of Raphael Lemkin, core theorist of genocide as an international legal term, Finnegan writes of radical urbanization and development that “While none of these proposed acts would result in the physical extinction of a group, they would have a detrimental effect on a group’s culture. Thus, the definition highlighted the fact that cultural genocide “does not literally annihilate communities, but destroys their culture and thereby their identity”" [54].

This presents a new form of narrative. Often adherence to human rights are deemed a necessity for access to funding and developmental opportunities, as Bhatia’s study on Bahrain argues [55]. Surface-level acquiescence to their framework is a prerequisite within a global governance framework that holds human rights in high esteem. In the case of China in Xinjiang, the opposite is true, where developmental goals are set in spite of their incompatibility with ideas of human rights. Indeed, on the other side of the border, Kazakh President Nazarbayev has been careful in courting Chinese funding through the Silk Road Economic Belt to present a tough exterior, resistant to Western pressure and human rights initiative. As Peyrouse elaborates, the receipt of Chinese support in Kazakhstan is in large part “thanks to former President Nazarbayev’s ability to take tough measures to keep stability and order, and to his ban on some Western-funded non-governmental organizations and strict control over their activities, to his extreme distrust of Western propaganda, and to his choice to implement reforms based on the principle of “economy first, then politics”” [56]. The Kazakh state invests a significant amount of effort into reassuring its populace that economic projects represent progress for the country, posited in exact opposition to Western interference as characterised by NGOs and activists [57], and “has long used the Silk Road metaphor to articulate its historical interconnectedness with China as well as its land bridge function connecting different parts of the Eurasian continent. Symbolically, the first train that traveled from Almaty (the then capital of Kazakhstan) to Urumqi via Alashankou on 20 June of 1992 was named “Silk Road.” [58]

Indeed, we see critical engagement with the utility even of the term genocide too, with Oliver Walton’s work on the framing of genocide in Sri Lanka bringing forward the conclusion that it can sometimes undermine the credibility or direction of local actors [59]. In addition, we see Walton argue that a liberal interpretation sees genocide as “the intended action of a coherent agent (like an authoritarian state” [60], whereas the reality can be far more complicated due to the range of actors involved. It is important to note that not only can the liberal worldview be directly attached to Human Rights [61], but that the two, following Hopgood, constitute each other. Where Walton’s case study differs significantly from ours is his note of uncertainty over actors – the Chinese state is highly centralised and the actions of urbanization stick closely to delineated plans for the region of Xinjiang. Nevertheless, the idea that genocide might be a contested terminology is not something that Finnegan considers, choosing only to advocate for an integration of cultural genocide into the framework of the Internatnional Criminal Court, in spite of the fact that “the international legal framework, even if amended, would fail to protect the Uyghur minority through the conventional channels” [62]

Seyhan, in her work on the pandemic powers acquiesced and often retained by Western governments, sees the continual massing of centralised power in liberal democracies as a threat to human rights rather than an enabler of their pursuit [63]. Indeed, rather than arguing for economic rights as central, Seyhan finds a need for the retention of civil and political rights at the core of the debate. Instead of seeing economics as the foundational point for all rights within a capitalist system, she offers us a way of understanding these political rights as a mean of enabling further change. This is a privileged position to hold, and in particular is demonstrative of the ways in which the plurality of human rights can damage their exercise. In a state such as Kazakhstan, placing 131 out of 176 countries on the Corruption Perception index [64], it is hard to understand how a striving for civil and political rights which do not exist might enable the bettering of citizens’ lives. If anything, in a corrupt system, money is usually the universal language.

Returning to the work of Bauman and his integration into the ‘mobius stirp’ of constitutive inconsistency, we we might better understand the contemporary constitution of the borders between Chinese and Kazakh states, as epitomised by the ways in which the Chinese state treats the Uyghur population. Policies of surveillance, citizenship denial, relocation, and cultural erasure constitute formal violations of human rights, and yet must also be understood within the more complex frameworks of Kazakh-Chinese relationships and the localised history of Xinjiang and the Uyghur population. The argument of this section is that the framework of human rights allows us to better understand the ways in which its violation is useful for both Kazakh and Chinese states, homogenising identities, extending sovereignty, and constituting borders. However, whilst human rights offers an initial mode of investigation, it is also limited and must be contextualised. César Rodríguez-Garavito’s ‘ecosystem’, as discussed, is key to this operation.

We understand the right to privacy as one of the fundamental tenet of Human Rights. Bauman’s work on the topic of surveillance informs us that “The right to respect for a person’s privacy is the overarching international human right. It is found in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, and its legal form is found in the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966” [65], and while the primacy of his paper relies upon the centrality of privacy to human rights on the whole, it’s historical presence in the charter from 1948 tells us enough. Privacy is of keen importance to the exercise of other freedoms. In this light, the actions of the Chinese state’s surveillance program clearly communicate their indifference towards such charters, principles which have been asserted as “Western-centric and tools to constrain China’s development” [66]. Peyrouse argues that Chinese surveillance is responsive and conservative, that it aims to prevent a ‘domino effect’ of democratization in associated states [67] and defends against a democratic system which, according to philosophers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “has failed to provide a world for all people and is unable to do so as it is inherently flawed by excessive interest in personality, money, and marketing” [68]. This is a viewpoint supported by the work of both Chen and Borzel, who find that there is “little evidence that they seek to promote their own or any other non-democratic regime type beyond their own borders” [69], and that the “Chinese Communist Party counteracts EU and US democracy promotion only in cases threatening its own regime survival, but not in pursuit of geostrategic interests” [70]. The cross-border nature of human rights does not map well onto discussions of the sovereignty it tries to protect, instead being consistently formed and reformed through “bodies in transit that can be categorised into politically qualified life on the one hand and bare life on the other” [71]. The escape of Uyghurs across the border into Kazakhstan, and the trans-border surveillance [72] of Uyghurs by the Chinese state, represent the limits at which a human rights concerned with sovereignty and geographic space operate. Much like the emergency interment camp and surveillance powers, borders represent the exception which defines the rule – the edge case of sovereignty allowing for its exercise.

The difference in the conception of the border between Kazakhstan and China comes in the open Chinese acceptance of the methods employed to securitize it, and the pressure instead that human rights exert upon the Kazakh state to attempt to contest this approach. The recent banning of researcher Yevgeniy Bunin from Kazakhstan is indicative of the fragmented response that human rights have forced from the Kazakh state [73], and in conclusion the fragmented lines of discussion they foment as a whole. Human rights are not, as Hopgood argues, doomed. However their utility in the future will only come with a contextualising, pluralised ecosystem of both global and local actors working reciprocally. Counter to Finnegan’s writing, we find too that in the actions of the Kazakh state there are still opportunities to aid those suffering in Xinjiang. Action, however, requires us to step outside of the Human Rights binary and into the rhizomatic worldview.