Refractions

Former Human Rights Watch head Kenneth Roth champions the traditional human rights strategy of “naming and shaming” in his new memoir Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. He believes that public condemnation is the best way to rein in human rights abusers. But as Benardo and Waraich argue in their review, this approach has lost its effectiveness as authoritarian leaders grow immune to reputational damage. They critique Roth’s reluctance to consider strategies beyond moral denunciation: for human rights advocacy to remain relevant, it must engage more with political realities rather than relying solely on exposure and outrage.

“The human rights movement is arguably needed now more than at any time since it emerged. But to become relevant once again, it must relinquish its reluctance to confront the complicated and unpredictable domain of politics. The conceit that human rights exist on a separate moral plane—floating above the battle—is no longer adequate. This moment demands a reckoning with power, and the messy world of politics that entails.”

Cameroonian President Paul Biya’s technological modernization efforts—initiatives ranging from urban surveillance to biometric identification to digital governance—are often politically motivated rather than genuinely intended to solve structural issues. Macaire Eyenga highlights how misguided technological solutionism leads to inefficiencies, deepening inequalities, and increasing dependence on foreign actors, ultimately failing to deliver meaningful progress.

“The experience of several African countries has shown that technology can be a powerful driver of public service modernization—when adapted to local realities and backed by inclusive policies. … However, these success stories should not obscure the persistent challenges of technological solutionism in Africa. Limited internet access and digital infrastructure in rural areas, the high cost of deploying new technologies and reliance on foreign partners all raise questions about the long-term sustainability and autonomy of these projects.”

The Trump administration’s assault on USAID is not merely destructive but a deliberate shift toward private-sector-led development, part of what Gabor has dubbed the “Wall Street Consensus.” USAID funds are being rerouted to the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), turbocharging an international development paradigm that is focused on “mobilizing private capital,” which prioritizes “derisking” investments for private capital, and ultimately turns development aid into a tool for financial extraction.

“The DFC operations in 2023 offer a snapshot of its derisking activities. That year, it committed around $10 billion, $1.2 billion of which was earmarked for Ukraine, with no disclosed information on the specific programs. Its largest twenty investments are all over $100 million. The largest, totalling $747 million, committed to Gabon’s debt for nature swap. At first glance, such projects seem a win-win scenario: indebted nations like Gabon receive debt relief in exchange for commitments to environmental conservation. The problem, however, is that these swaps outsource environmental policy to external actors—in this case the US Nature Conservancy—and create profit opportunities for financiers—US Bank of America New York arranged the issuance of blue bonds. All the while, they do little to address the root causes of debt accumulation, such as exploitative trade relationships or volatile global financial markets.”

In the late 1970s, workers in post-Mao China leveraged Staff and Workers’ Congresses (SWCs) to demand improvements in wages, housing, and welfare, a shift enabled by economic reforms aimed at pacifying industrial unrest. The flourishing workplace democracy was driven by a rebellious spirit inherited from the Cultural Revolution, which allowed them to push for greater workplace participation even as the Party sought to limit their influence. Ultimately, the Party viewed this “economism” as a political threat, leading to increasing restrictions on SWCs and a gradual dismantling of workplace democracy by the mid-1980s.

“At the grassroots level, therefore, workers secured a level of functional workplace democracy for themselves largely because of their audacity to challenge factory management in overt and covert ways. This audacity was crucially fomented during the Cultural Revolution, when workers learned (for a period of time) that all structures of authority and power hierarchy could be questioned and challenged. A spirit of labor unruliness continued to permeate China’s industrial shop floor in the immediate post-Mao years and undergirded the revitalized institutions of factory democracy. Even though the Party leadership hoped that the new configuration of policies could guide China’s factories out of the “chaos” of the Cultural Revolution, workers’ lingering Cultural Revolution-style rebelliousness was precisely what empowered their more “orderly”, institutional exercise of workplace democracy to carry real weight. In a sense, the “golden age of the SWC” spoke to how the tumultuous agitations during the Cultural Revolution exerted a lasting impact on workers’ self-understanding and the balance of power inside China’s factories.”

Psychiatry in the U.S. has historically been used as a tool of social control, reinforcing existing power structures rather than solely addressing mental health needs, according to anthropologist and historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr. The deinstitutionalization movement, though well-intended, was co-opted by neoliberal policies, leading to mass homelessness and incarceration instead of genuine community-based care. Today, rising diagnoses of mental illness reflect worsening social conditions, yet critiques of psychiatry have been largely abandoned by the left, allowing the right to exploit them for reactionary ends.

“A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. Why is it that we have so much pathologization of individual mental illness and so little diagnosis of our sick and brutal capitalist society, which is so clearly the underlying problem in so many cases? I mean, maybe the answer is rather obvious—that powerful forces benefit from the status quo, and they also benefit from mystifying why the status quo is the way that it is.”