Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa talks to us about his co-edited volume, Non-Human Rights: Critical Perspectives, published by Edward Elgar (2024).
The edited collection critically examines the extension of rights and legal personhood to non-human beings such as animals, ecosystems, and machines. Contributors to the volume explore the potential and limitations of non-human rights in the context of two major concerns of the 21st century: rapid technological change and the fast degradation of the environment. In documenting the foundations, genealogies, philosophies, and impacts of non-human rights, the volume also questions whether non-human rights are merely an extension of the liberal human rights discourse or, as some suggest, something fundamentally new. Are non-human rights a ‘revolution’ or just ‘more of the same’? Are they symptomatic of a new epochal zeitgeist or a reinforcement of capitalist, racist, colonialist, hetero-patriarchal, and speciesist dynamics? Are they a practical solution that could ‘save’ us from the multiple interconnected crises we face today, or are they an obstacle to broader social transformations?
The volume fills a gap in the scholarship, which, except for a few notable exceptions, has focused on animal, nature, or machine rights in isolation. It also contributes to establishing a set of studies on the subject of ‘non-human rights’ as a general emerging field of inquiry. Drawing on a variety of perspectives – ranging from the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology to new materialism, post-human feminism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, and other similar approaches informed by decolonial thinking, phenomenology, poststructuralism, Indigenous scholarship, and critical animal studies – the authors of the volume provide a rich and comprehensive overview of what non-human rights are today and how we can engage with them (and sometimes sympathize with them) without lowering our critical threshold.
The idea for this project first arose during my time at the European University Institute (EUI) as a Max Weber Fellow. In 2020, one of the editors from Elgar approached me with a proposal to edit a book on my research project on ‘non-human rights,’ which I was just beginning to develop at that time. Shortly after, the pandemic hit, and the book project was significantly delayed. Costas Douzinas, who was interested in issues related to machine rights, joined as a co-editor in 2021, giving the project a significant boost.
From a conceptual point of view, the idea for the book originated from observing an emerging phenomenon that required thorough theoretical and critical analysis. By addressing animal rights, nature rights, and machine rights together, the book aims to highlight that the expansion of rights beyond human beings follows similar trends and is part of the same phenomenon.
Moreover, we aimed not only to edit a collection on an emerging topic but also to introduce a critical perspective largely absent from the discussions in each of these individual fields, which were mainly advocacy-oriented. This is why the contributors to the volume are not mainstream voices but rather important dissenting voices who, for various reasons, view this trend with suspicion. This does not necessarily mean they are against non-human rights (although some might be), but they are skeptical of its virtues and purported positive effects. For all these reasons, the book is quite unique, as no similar publications address the topic in the same way.
Non-human rights are becoming part of our ordinary legal landscape and vocabulary. Animals, rivers, mountains, rainforests, ecosystems and synthetic or artificial entities such as machines, AI and robots are currently regarded or in the process of being considered subjects of rights in different parts of the world. This trend has spread in domestic jurisdictions and is rapidly gaining ground in regional and international settings.
Interestingly, however, this surge in rights for non-humans has coincided with a growing uncertainty about the future of human rights. Human rights seem to be suffering from an ‘existential crisis’, as the reactions of states and international organizations indicate, and critical appraisals in the scholarship have evinced for some time now. The perceived ineffectiveness of human rights in preventing humanitarian disasters and their misuse in justifying war, imperialism, and uneven power-dynamics, and, more generally, their lack of success in delivering their messianic promise of a fairer, equal, and just world, have led to doubts about their moral authority and universal predicament. Recent events such as the response of states to the global pandemic—driven more by political opportunism and economic or medical pragmatism than by the ethics of human rights—further underscore the diminishing relevance of human rights. How to explain this dual trajectory of the discourse of rights? How can we understand these circumstances which signal the vitality and extension of the rights rhetoric as well as its agony and contraction? Is the expansion of rights to non-humans an outcome of the twilight of human rights, or something that occurs despite their apparent decline?
These contradictory tendencies also seem to be part of how the scholarship perceives this ‘non-human turn’ in the law. Non-human rights have been met with enthusiasm and derision. They have been considered both ‘revolutionary’—a ‘paradigm shift’—and ‘not radical enough’, an ‘ontological opening’ and the affirmation of the Western humanistic episteme, a threat to the human condition and its assertion by other means. Some see in them a ‘decentring of the human’, others a form of veiled anthropocentrism. Some think they are a useful ‘juridical fiction’, while others believe they represent a timely acknowledgement of non-humans’ sentiency or intelligence. Some assert that these rights express non-human agentivity, others that they sacrifice their alterity. While many believe that basic rights are a safeguard to non-humans’ ‘interests’, ‘intrinsic worth’ or ‘dignity’, others contend that they are not enough to uphold their moral status. Non-human rights have been considered a recognition of non-Western beliefs, ontologies and epistemes, as well as a cultural appropriation of Indigenous practices, a straitjacket to their worldviews, not sufficiently ‘decolonizing’ or a new tool for neo-colonialism. While some consider they are a way of protecting non-humans from exploitation, an alternative to developmental practices, and a potential means to confront capitalism, others see a form of masking extractivism and neoliberal policies. Some assert they are a renewed ‘nonsense upon stilts’—will pets or house appliances be able to sue us if we mistreat them, and we will sue rivers if someone drowns in them?—others the step forward the law must take to keep pace with the times, whether this is seen as the age of the ‘intrusion of Gaia’, the transhumanist ‘Singularity’, the Anthropocene (or any of its multiple variants) or simply, ‘the end of the world’ In most cases, it is difficult to assert which of these opposing accounts is valid. It is as if non-human rights were a bit of both, or as if they were strained by the new ‘trying to emerge’ and the old ‘refusing to let go’. Is it, as Marx said, that the new often appears in old garments? Is the old pregnant with the new?
These are some of the questions this book raises and attempts to, if not answer, at least address. Moreover, as can be anticipated from the questions formulated above, this volume proposes a somewhat different approach to the study of non-human rights. Far from exacerbated optimism, it attempts to cast a critical light on this trend’s rapid emergence and how it is gradually shaping how we perceive, understand, and engage with non-humans in the law. This has not been the default position in the literature. Arguably, while non-human rights are the product of different political movements and theoretical perspectives that have been critical in their orientation and have confronted both the environmental crisis, driven by the capitalist form of accumulation and production, and the anthropocentrism of our political institutions, their approach to the law has not been equally problematizing and critical. In particular, the discourse of rights and legal reform has been taken as unquestioned values, ends in themselves that do not require further scrutiny. There seems to be little interest in questioning the law, either as part of the problem or as part of the solution to our current difficulties […] Since much of the scholarship has attempted to influence policymaking or the attitude of courts, it has focused on challenging legal institutions that exclude non-humans as right holders, and its agenda has been essentially advocacy-orientated. This has meant that theoretical concerns and a critical orientation have been sidelined, preventing us from seeing that non-human rights often produce and reproduce the logics and rationalities that they were supposed to challenge.
This book presents three strands together that are usually studied separately: animal rights, nature rights and robot rights. These strands, in turn, have similarities with a number of discussions that are left out of this volume about the status of the unborn, the nature of human tissue, the personhood of religious idols, etc. This book’s particular focus assumes that animal rights, nature’s rights and robot rights are discursively connected and must be analysed in tandem as part of the same phenomenon. While the historical emergence of each of these strands can be differentiated, they share ideological assumptions, political and legal imaginaries, discursive justifications, and a core of common tenets, goals and ideas. Moreover, there is a chronological correlation between them as they emerged in parallel and have gained momentum together, sometimes feeding back on each other. The reason for this is that they respond to the same set of concerns and motivations revolving around the technological revolution, on the one hand, and the impact that this has had on the environment and the habitability of the planet, on the other. In this regard, non-human rights make sense and are explicable in what Peter Frase has called the ‘two spectres’ that haunt the 21st century: ‘ecological catastrophe and automation.’ It could be said that if human rights were ‘the ideology at the end of history’—epitomized by the fall of the Soviet Union and the triumph of capitalism—non-human rights are the ideology at ‘the end of the world’—epitomized by the devastating effects of the technical revolution on the ecological milieu.
Read the complete version of the introduction.