(Photo by iStock/Chonlatee Sangsawang)
Critics of the human rights movement allege that it reflects the neoliberal interests of developed countries and their NGO proxies in the Global South. Elsewhere in the world, this stream of thought goes, oppressed groups have progressed past human rights vocabulary and would rather use different language—social justice, for instance—to describe their own experience and their resistance to domination.
A new paper examines this critique by using Google Trends data to find out the country-to-country popularity of using Google to search for “human rights” and related terms in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Arabic.
“This article confronts high-level debates over whether human rights will remain relevant in the future, and whether the discourse still animates counter-hegemonic modes of resistance,” write the authors, Geoff Dancy, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and Christopher J. Fariss, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan. “The answer to both questions, our research suggests, is ‘yes.’”
The findings lend credence to the hypothesis that people around the world in a variety of countries and circumstances—but especially in countries of the Global South—continue to find the language of human rights useful. The criticism of human rights as a Western imposition onto the rest of the world often emanates from developed-country elites, Dancy says: “This is a classic case of people in the Global North continuing to speak for people in the Global South without actually asking questions about it or investigating evidence.”
The paper considers two models of how people view human rights. “The top-down model predicts that nationwide interest in human rights is attributable mainly to external factors such as foreign direct investment, transnational NGO campaigns, or international legalization, whereas the bottom-up model highlights the importance of internal factors such as economic growth and persistent repression,” the authors write.
The latter model better explains people’s search patterns for the term “human rights,” the authors argue. “Not only is interest in human rights more concentrated in the Global South, but the discourse is also most resonant where people face regular state violence,” the authors write.
Fariss and Dancy met as undergraduates at the University of North Texas and started working together formally after both had finished their PhDs. The pair hit upon their research question during a working weekend in New Orleans just after Mardi Gras, in March 2018. Dancy had been reading the book Everybody Lies, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, which details how Google searches can illuminate population trends. (Dancy often reads outside of the political-science field for ideas. Otherwise, “you can end up with groupthink,” he says.) A few political-science researchers have used this Google data trove, but it’s more commonly found in the fields of public health, economics, and media studies, the authors note in the paper.
“This is a classic case of people in the Global North continuing to speak for people in the Global South without actually asking questions about it or investigating evidence.”
Fariss was initially skeptical when Dancy pitched the idea of using Google aggregate search data to answer questions about the resonance of human rights, but he quickly realized how useful the data could be once he started working with it, Dancy recalled.
“We realized there was a wealth of untapped info we could use, all sorts of interesting community-level data,” Fariss says.
The paper’s findings are important because research shows that a sustained effort toward solving social issues bears fruit, Dancy said, but “there’s an impulse among the donor community to move on to the newest, shiniest thing.” Rather than switching away from the language of human rights, NGOs and activists can now see that human rights are still important to the people they’re trying to help.
“Debates in human rights scholarship have been dominated by sweeping claims about the alleged ‘end times’ of human rights, which rest on very thin empirical evidence and a limited view of human rights practice as seen from the Global North,” said César Rodríguez-Garavito, a professor of clinical law and the chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “Dancy and Fariss’ rigorously researched article puts this view to rest, demonstrates the continued relevance of human rights, and opens new avenues for research.”
Geoff Dancy and Christopher J. Fariss, “The Global Resonance of Human Rights: What Google Trends Can Tell Us,” American Political Science Review, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.