CSSGJ Open Seminar: "Why Amnesty International is a Church", Tue 25 Sept

Abstract:
Amnesty International is one of the touchstone organisations of global civil society, a tireless worker since 1961 for the widening and deepening of human rights observance throughout the world. As such, it is a key example for advocates of the progressive power of global moral norms under modernity. However, examining Amnesty's internal institutional life in detail, through ethnographic research, tells a different story. Amnesty, and its appeal to authority, owes as much to the past as to the future. It has, from its inception, been as concerned to recapture something that was being lost as to forge a brave new world. Faith, transcendent values, and a sense of the sacred in personal sacrifice, are all aspects of a more traditional approach to moral social change from which for their advocates universal human rights were seen as an advance. Amnesty thus evolved, especially in its International Secretariat, into something resembling a church with a priesthood, doctrine, rituals and symbols. Its inclination in this direction was embedded by the intensity that hard, under-funded, under-appreciated and highly meaningful collective work on life or death issues generates, something Durkheim saw as the essence of religious life. This 'sacred' core to rights work, implicit most of the time, has served a critical function for global civil society by helping obscure the paradox of authority that lies at the heart of modernity. This paradox ­that modernity undermines claims to authority that are expressed in the language of necessity and non-contingency while needing them for effective mobilisation - is progressively transforming Amnesty into a more political, and more commercially successful, modern non­governmental organisation. In other words, its sacred core is being delegitimized and eroded at the same time it is being capitalised upon. The implications of this for the authority of global civil society as a whole are only now beginning to emerge.