How to Talk about Human Rights in Occupied Iraq

Max Hoddinott

Graduate Panel 2

How to Talk about Human Rights in Occupied Iraq 

Max Hoddinott (University of New South Wales) 

Abstract: In scholarly accounts of the 2003–04 occupation of Iraq, human rights and neoliberalism are overwhelmingly treated as independent phenomena, resulting in two largely autonomous literatures: one concerned with the question, “What is the nature of the relationship between the occupying powers and human rights?”, and the other with the question, “On what grounds is the occupation properly described as neoliberal?”. This paper proceeds from the premise that this bifurcation is a mistake. Drawing upon conceptual resources from texts such as The Birth of Biopolitics and The History of Sexuality, as well as more recent contributions in philosophy, political theory, and intellectual history, this paper argues in favour of a methodological shift away from the dominant left-cosmopolitan and Marxist treatments of the human rights/neoliberalism relationship in the context of the Iraq occupation. Turning instead toward a Foucauldian tradition which homes in upon the functions and effects of discourse, the paper argues in favour of conceptualising the occupation as having been contoured by a neoliberal rationality, and in turn for situating the occupiers’ rhetoric within an established—albeit diffuse, fractured, and often improvisational—tradition of neoliberal human rights.

Bio: Max Hoddinott is a third-year PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of New South Wales. His research focuses on the politics of human rights discourse in the context of the 2003–04 occupation of Iraq, with a particular emphasis on questions of neoliberalism, legitimacy, and power. He previously completed an MA at UNSW on the topic of labour human rights.

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