Publications
After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East (New York; Cambridge University Press, 2009; paperback, 2011).
Co-Recipient, 2010 American Political Science Association Human Rights Section Best Book Award.
This book traverses three pivotal human rights struggles of the post-September 11th era: the American human rights campaign to challenge the Bush administration's 'War on Terror' torture and detention policies, Middle Eastern efforts to challenge American human rights practices (reversing the traditional West to East flow of human rights mobilizations and discourses) and Middle Eastern attempts to challenge their own leaders' human rights violations in light of American interventions. This book presents snapshots of human rights being appropriated, promoted, claimed, reclaimed and contested within and between the American and Middle Eastern contexts. The inquiry has three facets: first, it explores intersections between human rights norms and power as they unfold in the era. Second, it lays out the layers of the era's American and Middle Eastern encounter on the human rights plane. Finally, it draws out the era's key lessons for moving the human rights project forward.
Cover Image: Mural of Abu Ghraib photos in Tehran, capturing both American transgressions and the Iranian governments’ instrumentalization of them to deflect from its own human rights violations.
Select Published Articles, Book Chapters and Other Academic Publications
“Human Rights as Mockery of Morality, Manifesting Morality, and Moral Maze,” Journal of Human Rights (Nov/Dec 2023).
-Open Access Available here
-Recipient of the 2024 International Studies Association Human Rights Section Best Paper Honorable Mention Award
The article develops a typology of marginalized non-Western populations' experiences of human rights, considering the impact of each on their willingness to engage with the framework. It demonstrates the explanatory power of the typology by applying it to varied popular experiences of human rights in Egypt and the broader Middle East over three decades. The experiences laid out are of human rights being experienced as (1) mockery of morality, (2) manifesting morality and (3) moral maze. Through the typology and its application, the article argues that while human rights scholarship has long focused almost exclusively on the resonance of the content- the values, moral claims, or rhetorical promise of human rights norms, popular dispositions towards, and meanings accorded to human rights often stem not just from marginalized populations’ evaluations of the human right framework’s content, but also from these populations’ experiences of, judgements on, and emotional reactions to the morality of the practice of human rights unfolding around them. Often, contrary to what is assumed in both mainstream and critical scholarship, the content of human rights is highly resonant to marginalized non-Western populations, yet they keep a distance because in its practice, it is not persuasive to them.
“Making Human Rights Meaningful Through Practice: Lessons from the Middle East” in Why Human Rights Still Matter in World Affairs, Mahmood Monshipouri, ed. (Routledge, 2020).
The assumption that populations from the global South tend to reject human rights in part because they question the content of human rights norms so prevalent in human rights advocacy and scholarship circles is problematic because it obscures the lived experience and potential significance of human rights in many Southern contexts. In many instances, non-Western populations “want human rights” but have little reason to place faith in their actual promise. Conversely, when avenues for principled practice emerge, the human rights paradigm can be embraced by Southern populations, not only as a vehicle for challenging prevailing injustice or suffering in these societies, but also as a way of meeting a need to experience principled action. In other words, both the content and the practice of human right must be persuasive. The chapter presents the trajectory of human rights politics in the Middle East to demonstrate how movements from the global South are currently transforming human rights practice in ways that render it more compatible with its promise and are in the process breathing new life into the human rights project.
“Review of Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century by Kathryn Sikkink,” Ethics & International Affairs 32, no. 3 (2018).
For over twenty years Kathryn Sikkink has produced pioneering scholarship on the hidden effects and widely overlooked impact of international human rights norms. In Evidence for Hope, Sikkink sets out to critically engage with and challenge key assumptions and methods underlying both a string of critical academic assessments forecasting the human rights project’s impending decline and a rising sense of human rights’ futility among activists in an era punctuated by the Trump presidency and the Syrian tragedy.
“‘This Government Is Neither Islamic, Nor A Republic’: Responses to the 2009 Post-Election Crackdown” in Power and Change in Iran: Politics of Contention and Conciliation, Daniel Brumberg and Farideh Farhi eds. (University of Indiana Press, 2016).
This chapter presents a composite of the elaborate response to the Iranian government’s elaborate resort to repression to quell Iran’s 2009 “Green Movement” which emerged from four sources: (1) the de facto leaders of the Green Movement, (2) a group of mostly high-ranking “dissident clerics”, (3) jailed opposition and civil society activists, and (4) the broader Iranian population. It also considers the implications of the regime’s repression in terms of regime delegitimation and prolonged public contention. Acknowledging that the political and public focus on the state’s repression has waned since the first months following the 2009 elections, I argue that the issue as a grievance and source of delegitimation has never entirely disappeared from opposition discourses and public consciousness.
“The Politics of Human Rights in Iran Since the Green Movement” in the Routledge Handbook on Human Rights in the Middle East, Anthony Chase ed. (Routledge, 2016).
Provides an overview of human rights mobilizations and politics in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora in the period between 2012-2015.
“Human Rights and Power Amid Protest and Change in the Middle East,” Third World Quarterly 36, no. 6 (2015).
The stunning popular uprisings in the Arab world in 2011 inaugurated an era of protest, revolutions and political transitions, on the one hand, and heightened repression, civil war and renewed authoritarianism, on the other. During this era the human rights paradigm was often at the fore of political and social contests, repeatedly being claimed, co-opted and appropriated. This paper argues that within the Middle East’s uprisings and transitions, deployments of human rights had notable emancipatory effects; yet invocations of the discourse continued to emerge from, converge with or (re)produce various power-laden domestic and international political dynamics. The human rights paradigm served as a primary discourse of the most serious challenge to Arab authoritarianism and its Western sponsorship in contemporary history, with the outcome in Tunisia exemplifying its potential to influence both the processes and substance of genuine political change. The period’s events and ethos also created openings for rights claims to be made by marginalized groups and facilitated local actors’ agency in driving the region’s human rights politics and agendas after decades of ‘human rights in the Arab world’ being a discourse largely driven by foreign actors. Yet the paradigm was also frequently curtailed or instrumentalized by local rulers and Western powers clinging to longstanding authoritarian arrangements, as well as by emergent political actors vying for power.
“The Middle East and Human Rights: Inroads Towards Charting its Own Path,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 10, no. 4 (2012).
Popular protests and civil society have moved human rights to the fore of contemporary Middle Eastern politics. This article addresses the rise of an indigenous Middle Eastern human rights agenda and a recasting of the relationship between human rights and the West. There is less and less talk of human rights being Western. A more nuanced treatment of the human rights paradigm, which rejects both Western appropriations of human rights and attempts by Middle Eastern governments to exploit Western appropriations, is taking shape. There is now good reason to be optimistic about the long-term future of human rights in the Middle East.
“Human Rights in the Post-September 11th Era: Between Hegemony and Emancipation,” Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2006).
The post-September 11th era has presented immense challenges and disappointing setbacks for the advancement of human rights. Yet, the era has also been marked by complexity, paradoxes and ample opportunities for introspection as events expose contemporary human rights' various weaknesses and contradictions. This article provides an overview of the interplay between the human rights concept's various instrumental appropriations and its more autonomous emancipatory capacity manifested in post-September 11th developments. Instead of an exhaustive examination, the article simply poses and juxtaposes different dimensions and layers of the formidable presence of the human rights idea in post-September 11th developments impacting the Middle East. To this end, it places a particular emphasis on human rights' capacity to simultaneously aid, transcend and confront local and international power structures.The article begins with a discussion of the ways in which American hegemony is both bolstered and challenged through human rights discourses after September 11th. It then turns to the Middle Eastern encounter with human rights amidst the American "War on Terror." It is argued that while widespread Middle Eastern consciousness of American appropriations of human rights foster cynicism about the promise and legitimacy of human rights, post-September 11th dynamics have also resulted in greater Middle Eastern engagement with the human rights concept and international human rights norms. In subsequent sections, the article presents a brief outline of the various challenges and openings presented for human rights advocacy in the last few years followed by a discussion of the renewed imperative for a genuine international human rights dialogue. Throughout the article, examples are presented of how pre-existing human rights geographies and hierarchies ascribing relativism to the East and universalism to the West have been unsettled during this period.
“The Iranian Search for Human Rights within an Islamic Framework," The Muslim World 94, no. 4 (2004).
This article provide an overview of debates around human rights and its place in an Islamic society which took shape in Iran during the “Second of Khordad” Khatami Reform Era.
“The New American Encounter with International Human Rights Norms: The Road After Abu Ghraib” in American Society of International Law 100th Annual Meeting Proceedings (2006).
In this research, I paint a canvas of how international human rights norms have entered American civil society-governmental contests over torture and detainee rights policies after Abu Ghraib and assess the extent to which efforts by select media outlets, human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and congressional leaders produced a new American engagement with the international human rights framework.
“Editors’ Note to Inaugural issue of the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights” (Co-Authored with Mashood Baderin, Mahmood Monshipouri, and Lynn Welchman) 1 Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 1:1 (2004).
Draws out key lines of inquiry around human rights in/ vis-a-vis the Muslim World in 2004.