ABSTRACT
Ten years after 11 September 2001, the United States and other nation-states continue to wage counter-terrorism operations in the name of human rightsas well as women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights in other countries or regions-to liberate select religious or ethnic groups. In this chapter, I explore not just the articulation of human rights with counter-terrorism, but also what the paradigm of terrorism and counter-terrorism obscures, elides, or reframes via the framework of human rights in the post-9/11 era. The central paradox I grapple with emerges from the ways a particular model of human rights and women’s rights, constructed in the context of a regime of counterterrorism and global policing, legitimizes a US project of military, economic, and political hegemony. The humanitarian imperialism of the “War on Terror,” or what Paul Gilroy calls “armored cosmopolitanism” (2005: 60), relies on deeply gendered imaginaries and state policies. Opposing this regime of counter-terrorism are movements and groups that often resort, paradoxically, to the discourse of human rights deployed against them. In this political and discursive battleground, young activists must grapple with the contradictory politics of rights-based mobilization as they attempt to invoke notions of civil or human rights to challenge state violence and repression.
