Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine the practices of translation, comparison and scale-making through which individual cases of harm are aggregated into pictures of humanitarian crisis and suffering that justify intervention through the European Human Rights convention system.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have argued that scale-making is a semiotically- mediated process for organizing social contexts through categories of space, size, and hierarchy. These processes ultimately rely on comparison and contrast. As Diane Nelson has argued, it is through such scale-making that individual experiences are represented as quantities and qualities that justify humanitarian and human rights intervention. In this paper, I examine the practices of translation, comparison and scale-making through which individual cases of harm are aggregated into pictures of humanitarian crisis and suffering that justify human rights intervention. Focusing on cases of enforced disappearance, I examine the practices of aggregation and inference through which Court actors and applicants translate individualized cases of harm into pictures of mass harm that require more robust forms of international intervention and adjudication. I show how legal remedies at the European Court of Human Rights require isolating individual cases of harm within the atomizing logic of human rights. But addressing and implementing judgements requires creating more comprehensive and nuanced pictures of loss and suffering to justify structural interventions and oversight. In this the European Court and the execution process is an exemplary site to analyze how differently individualizing and collectivizing logics of human rights and humanitarian suffering overlap.