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Tamar Shirinian is a cultural anthropologist and former assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). Her work primarily focuses on queer studies, feminist anthropology, and postsocialist societies, particularly in Armenia.

For issue 179 of The Internationalist, she examines how Mahmoud Khalil’s question from an ICE prison exposes how liberalism’s post-1948 “universal” human rights framework is built on colonial apartheid logic, granting full personhood only to certain subjects while systematically excluding, disappearing, and bombing those deemed unworthy.

In a letter issued from a U.S. ICE prison, after being illegally detained, snatched from his home and disappeared, with no explanation other than so-called “terrorism,” from his eight-month pregnant wife, Mahmoud Khalil asks “Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil here is directly referring to the immigrants held with no charge and no ability to communicate with their loved ones from a prison – some held for years in deportation proceedings. He refers to the inherent racism of the U.S. immigration system. “Jus-tice escapes the contours of this nation’s im-migration facilities,” Khalil writes. He refers to the Palestinian people, most of whom have, since 1948, been displaced from one place to another and another from their historic lands and who today – whether doctors, journalists, farmers, or just children – are snatched out of their homes or the streets and taken to torture camps with impunity. He refers to the violence against protestors (in the U.S., the UK, Germany, and elsewhere) who have been struggling against their own governments that have been supplying arms – 2000-pound bombs, planes, drones, surveillance technologies, and ships – to commit the most visible genocide in history against the Palestinian people. No right to free speech; no right to stand against genocide.

But, I want to reflect on this question beyond the direct and immediate contexts Khalil references in his letter from prison. “Who has the right to have rights?” I argue, is a question that needs to be read as an accusation not just about Trump’s U.S., or about U.S. immigration, or about Palestine. The question is an accusation of liberalism – a political-economic philosophy embedded not just in the international structures of a post-WWII new world order emanating from the metropoles of colonial power, but also a philosophy of lifeworld that is now, through various forms of soft and hard power, been (forcefully) exported throughout the world, creating new forms of political claim-making, new subjectivities, and new dreams. These are not the dreams of “freedom” and “liberty” in all their forms, dreams that exist and have ex-isted in political discourse in many non-lib-eral forms for centuries – “Liberty or Death!” called out anti-slavery forces who led toward the making of the first free Black Republic in Haiti in 1804, “Tear off the chains and the en-tire world will be free!” called out the revolu-tionaries in 1917 Russia, the “Freedom Char-ter” named by South African anti-apartheid activists in 1955, liberdade as the inhabitants of Brazillian favelas call practices of everyday free life-making. No, in interrogating the language of “rights,” Khalil is directly pointing to the various documents, charters, conventions, and agencies that produced the discourse of “Human Rights” following the foundation of the United Nations in 1945 and especially the much-touted and often-cited – especially in those parts of the world that remained colo-nized at the time of its drafting – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.

1948. This was a big year. While much of the world remained colonized when “the world” began to unite under the banner of “human rights,” there are a few more spatiotemporal signs that we might read into this new discourse on rights. The year that the UDHR was established, was also the year that the State of Israel was founded, after the massacres, forced deportations, and the crowding into ghettos that Palestinians refer to as al-Nakba (The Catastrophe). It is states that make up the United Nations, and it is states that are seen as the main agents in maintaining a human rights regime. It is also the very logic of a “nation-state” – a supremacist, ethnonationalist, and inherently violent and exclusive (apartheid) institution, exemplified perhaps most perfectly in the State of Israel – that acts as a general guideline to the very framework of how we might read all nation-states. In producing a State of Israel, an entire people had to be killed, shuffled around, and placed under military occupation. As Ariella Azoulay reminds us, we cannot seriously consider the legacy of the regime of rights within the international order today without also considering this basic fact. One of the first agencies of the United Nations was the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) founded in 1949 that would work to resettle and provide aid to the massively displaced people from Palestine. UNRWA remains today the only UN agency that works specifically with one population. An exceptional case. Today, the very states at the center of the drafting of these various doctrines of human rights and the establishment of the new world order, refer to UNRWA as a terrorist organization. These considerations should be central to how we understand what we mean when we say “rights.” The right of Israel to exist. Also uncoincidental to the estab-lishment of “rights” in 1948 as the new world order was the establishment of South Africa’s apartheid regime, a racialist division (“separateness”) that designated particular rights and entitlements to varying groups within “civil law” and also established “customary law” for those racialized as African natives. Some people, in other words, had rights (still limited by race) while others (indigenous people) had “customs” by which they would have to abide by colonially-administered (by the white central government) native authoritarian regimes known as “bantustans.” Khalil’s question “Who has the right to have rights?” might be read as directly citing this colonial administrative system, concurrent to the UDHR. That liberalism, established as the new world order in 1948, was a continuation of colonialism.

While apartheid was an official regime in South Africa and a less official but certainly structural regime in Israel, it was also the logic by which the rights regime would function within the new world order. This is especially true within the very systems of “justice” set up by this new world order that would attempt to “enforce” new international laws, conventions, and doctrines – the Hague as the center of world justice in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court later. The very notion of a “universal” subject under a new “universal” doctrine of rights has, much like the colonial order (reflected within the apartheid regime in South Africa as well as the present-day apartheid regime in the State of Israel), made a clear distinction between this “universal” and its “other.” This “universal” must be read as a white, liberal subject against its non-white uncivilized, savage, and barbaric “other.” To date, no colonial or imperialist power has been held accountable for any of their crimes within this structure of enforcement. Not Germany for its “first genocide in modern history” against the Herero people of German Southwest Africa. Not for its later and more well-known Genocide against the European Jewish people, communists, Poles, Roma, people with disabilities, and homosexuals. For these latter crimes, West Germany was recuperated for cheap in exchange for the recognition of and aid to the State of Israel, as its raison d’etat. Nor France for its various massacres and crimes of colonialism across the world, perhaps most concretized in Algeria, where it fought bitterly to hold on to a settler colony (and lost). Not Belgium for its massacring over 6 million Congolese and terrorising and amputating countless more under the reign of Leopold II nor for executing by firing squad and then destroying, in sulfuric acid, the body of Patrice Lumumba, the democratic leader of a free Republic of Congo in 1961 (with the help of the U.S., the UK, and the United Nations). Not the U.S. for its use of nuclear weapons on the civilian population of Japan, nor for its many, many other crimes against humanity.

Today’s political liberal apparatuses come hand in hand with the intensification of economic liberalism in the form of neoliberalism, where freedom constitutes private property and liberalization refers to the further and further privatization and the destruction of publics. Publics in the form of governmental care, publics in the form of masses of human life. As the new world order developed the United Nations and its various conventions, documents, and agencies, it also produced the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and various other organs that – under the guise of a “universal” freedom for humanity – further divided the world into the universal subject and its others. If the United Nations exists largely to adjudicate a necropolitical formation of who lives, who dies, who is judged, and who is righteous through spectacular violence, these other institutions see to a slower violence, a less spectacular one. The complete restructuring of local and global economies attuned to the Washington consensus against life have devastated working-class people as well as working-class society throughout the world, destroying necessary social reproductive mechanisms. But this party line – of economic freedom by all means necessary – has also prompted spectacular violence and death as wars and coups are campaigned for more wealth to get to the top and security forces intensify to maintain the bottom in the face of resistance and attempts at making other ways of life. Neoliberalism is not just an economic philosophy, afterall. It requires violent political technologies. This devastation, of course, is not accounted for within the World Courts and special agencies, save for a few programs that aim, somehow, to end child hunger, to save women from violence, and to promote equality all, somehow (perhaps magically?) without calling attention to capitalism and its main political ideology: (neo)liberalism. So when Mahmoud Khalil asks “Who has the right to have rights?” he draws us into the wider spatiotemporal field of liberalism and its centuries-long discontents and far beyond the narrow scope of Trump’s fascist reign, U.S. Universities’ clear allegiance to fascism, and Netanyahu’s and his horde’s (Ben-Gvir, Gallant, Karhi, to name a few) extreme supremacist ideology and genocidal campaign in Gaza. Khalil asks us to think about the very question of “rights” in a global parlance that has divided the world into those who are deserving and those who are not, a discourse and a framework that came directly out of the colonial encounter and was to become the new phase of imperialist order. Some might argue that none of these present-day discontents are about liberalism at all, that indeed neither Trump in the U.S. or the genocidal horde in the State of Israel are particularly “liberal” in their leanings. And some refer to them as illiberal. To this, we might point out that what Trump or Netanyahu have been doing is not a rupture of the world that once was, but a continuity of it, perhaps in more intense ways. For instance, take the very immigrants that Khalil writes about in his letter. These are not people who have been arrested and waiting for deportation proceedings since the beginning of “Trump 2.0.” Indeed, most of them were detained under the Biden administration. In the first month of Trump 2.0, there have been 37,660 deportations. In Biden’s last year in office, however, there was an average of 57,000 deportations from the U.S. every month. The framework of “liberal” and “illiberal” further falls apart when we remember what Biden’s deportations looked like. White, armed border patrol agents wearing cowboy hats, on horseback, chasing Haitian men, sometimes barefoot, holding plastic bags of what were likely their only belongings in the world. While liberals in the U.S. and beyond have largely ignored this actual history, and the images that harken back to slave patrols, the continuities between liberal fascism and illiberal fascism are clear. Perhaps Khalil would not have been arrested and detained had a Democratic administration come to power again. But, perhaps other forms of violence, if not the same ones, were awaiting. Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in 2024, sat in an administration that unleashed the most unspeakable horrors on the Palestinian people for 15 months. 15 months of unrelenting bombings, 15 months of doctors and nurses being targeted for killing, arrest, torture, and kidnapping. 15 months of clear direct targeting of children, journalists, and those very same UN workers that make up one part of the global liberal order. 15 months of mothers giving birth without clean water, while bombs fall all around them, sometimes enduring c-sections without anesthetics. 15 months of premature babies in incubators when there is no power, when hospitals are being ordered to evacuate, when patients and doctors are being sniped and kidnapped into torture camps. Harris smiled and cackled through this horror and told us, time and again: Israel has the right to defend itself. And thus Israel defended itself for 15 months by sniping children with bullets to the head and chest, over and over and over again.

Liberalism, human rights, freedom. Underneath these claims are not only past violences but also an inherent ideology that locates entitlement to a particular kind of subject, who can be drawn into the world of private property, commodified domesticity built on the “free” labor of the undeserving, and an autonomous self that is self-owned and self-defined and estranged from the social not made in these forms. Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy about individual liberty – an individual free from social ties and free from social constraints, free from any collectivity – a freedom made possible through the commodity form. Illiberals might reject identity politics or a narrative of equality, but if we look closely – at the liber-alization of Chile following the U.S.-backed 1973 coup, of Brazil following the U.S.-backed coup in 1964, in Argentina, Indonesia, South Korea, and on and on and on – we find that liberalism and liberalization speak the lan-guage of equality but at the heart these have been (and indeed, must be) campaigns of in-equality. Liberalism demands illiberalism. If not one and the same, they are mirror images that produce one another. Liberal. Illiber-al. The prefix – “il” – seems to connote not a rupture or discontinuity but, maybe like the “post” in “postcolonial,” a certain continuity. Not something else, but a particular (and only partial) negation. Illiberalism, in other words, and not anti-imperialism, not communism, not a new world order.

Against the many coups, military occupations, and today’s genocide in Gaza brought about by the liberal world order, those fighting back often speak in this very language that liberalism provides. They have even used the tools of this new world order – the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the General Assembly of the United Nations, as well as the United Nations Security Council. In response to the South Africa vs. Israel case currently at the ICJ, the Court delivered provisional measures, instructing Israel to “prevent the commission of all acts”, having to say the same again later in March when the situation in Gaza was made worse by Israeli bombard-ment, and yet again in May when the risk in Gaza was seen by the court to be “exception-ally grave.” The Court, over and over again, continued to demand that Israel immediately halt its military offensive. Israel and the Courts did nothing of the sort. As Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur to the Occupied Territories, writes in her October 2024 Report, “Despite this, Israel, and most other States, continue to disregard such orders, with arms continuing to flow to Israel.” After the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant in November 2024, the U.S. sanctioned the ICC for “engag[ing] in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” and Germany’s Friedrich Merz, the next Prime Minister, announced that he would welcome Netanyahu despite the arrest warrant. It is not a coincidence that those facing death will seek the tools of the new world order to save themselves. And we cannot blame them. These tools speak in the name of human rights, human dignity, the right of all to enjoy life. The very use of human rights language by those facing these crimes exposes the reality of this order – that it was never meant for those who stand up against imperialist regimes. Malcolm X discovered this very early on when he attempted to align African Americans with the African governments and African leaders of newly decolonized nations in the 1950s and 1960s through UN appara-tuses and discovered that the Conventions of the United Nations, including the Conven-tion on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, was never meant for him, for the liberation of formerly enslaved people, for the just world that would bring an end to enslavement, colonialism, lynchings, and sys-tematic inequalities. That the UN was a pretext for the reconsolidation of colonial power. 

Excerpted with permission from Revolutionary Health and Health for Revolution, published by Common Notions Press.

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