From In(-)formation to Infrastructural Turns: The Digital Futures of Human Rights Law and Practice

Abstract In his book, The Informational Logic of Human Rights: Network Imaginaries in the Cybernetic Age, Joshua Bowsher critiques the human rights movement’s preoccupation with informational practices. Tracing the evolution of informational preoccupation of human rights organizations to the rise of cybernetics and its enmeshment with the neo-liberal project, Bowsher argues that the resulting practice of creating violations as events through capturing, cutting and noise elimination has defanged and depoliticized rights. The quest for objective, stable and predictable knowledge has permeated even the turn to algorithms and machine learning. While denouncing the human rights movement’s resistance to critical and political forms of knowledge making that interrogate subjects, norms, values and power relations, Bowsher nonetheless sees potential for salvaging the promise of human rights. What is needed, Bowsher argues, is a reconfiguration of human rights information from an assemblage of ‘brute facts’ into positional, situated knowledge-making practice that would aim to forge connections between structures of oppression and domination and sufferings of ‘particularly situated human beings’. Picking up on Bowsher’s call for human rights in(-)formation, this review essay examines the infrastructural turn needed to effectuate knowledge-generating practices attuned to the polyvalency of the situated perspectives. Focusing particularly on the growing role of digital data and infrastructures, the essay seeks to illuminate promising paths forward for human rights advocates and practitioners.