Keenan is tackling a major theme of human rights activism and advocacy in mobilizing shame.? How would you put that theme into your own words?? H

Thomas Keenan

Mobilizing Shame

What difference would it make for human rights discourse to take the photo opportunity

seriously? Not the photo ops on behalf of human

rights, but the ones coming from the other side,

the other sides. What would it mean to come

to terms with the fact that there are things

which happen in front of cameras that are not

simply true or false, not simply representations

and references, but rather opportunities, events,

performances, things that are done and done

for the camera, which come into being in a

space beyond truth and falsity that is created

in view of mediation and transmission? In what

follows, I wish to respond to these questions by

focusing on what, within human rights activism

and discourse, has come to be known as ‘‘the

mobilization of shame.’’ 1

Shame and Enlightenment

It is now an unstated but I think pervasive

axiom of the human rights movement that those

agents whose behavior it wishes to affect—gov-

ernments, armies, businesses, and militias—are

exposed in some significant way to the force

of public opinion, and that they are (psychically

The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

436 Thomas Keenan

or emotionally) structured like individuals in a strong social or cultural con-

text that renders them vulnerable to feelings of dishonor, embarrassment,

disgrace, or ignominy. Shame is thought of as a primordial force that articu-

lates or links knowledge with action, a feeling or a sensation brought on not

by physical contact but by knowledge or consciousness alone. And it signi-

fies involvement in a social network, exposure to others and susceptibility

to their gaze—‘‘a painful sensation excited by a consciousness of guilt or

impropriety, or of having done something which injures reputation, or of

the exposure of that which nature or modesty prompts us to conceal.’’ 2

Those with a conscience have no need of shame; they feel self-imposed

guilt, not embarrassment that comes from others. Shaming is reserved for

those without a conscience or a capacity for feeling guilty—and is required

only where an external, enforceable law is absent. Indeed, publicity and

exposure are at the heart of the concept. Webster’s hypothesizes that the word, which is consistent as far back as Old High German and before,

descends ‘‘perhaps from a root skam meaning to cover, and akin to the root (kam) of G. hemd shirt, E. chemise. Cf. Sham.’’ In this regard, mobilizing shame has Enlightenment roots, as many have

pointed out. But they are contradictory ones. Kant defined Enlightenment

as the release or exit from heteronomy, from dependence or reliance on the

opinions of others, and as growing up out of shame and into courage, rea-

son, and conscience. But the sign of an accomplished Enlightenment is, he

adds, theuseofthatreasoninpublic,soastoengagewithothersandchange

their opinions.The Kantian moral subject is fully realized only when his or

her reason is liberated from the guidance, surveillance, pressure, or context

ofothers,butatthesametimewhenit isdestinedforpublicexchange,expo-

sure, or enlightenment. Reason must be employed in public, says Kant, if

there is to be any possibility of progress or social transformation; beliefs

and institutions have no hope of survival if they are not exposed to reason,

to judgments sparked by its critical force in public. Reason works when it

exposes, reveals, and argues.

Mobilizing Shame

Nooneseemstobeabletopinpointthemomentwhenthephrasemobilizing shame entered our lexicon. Robert Drinan, in his recent book The Mobiliza- tion of Shame, credits what his footnote calls ‘‘Turkey campaign documents, Amnesty International’’ as the source of the phrase, but fails to supply a

Mobilizing Shame 437

date or a title. 3 The first published references, though, go a long way toward

sketching the essential elements of the concept as it is practiced today.The

earliest citation I have found is from Judge B.V. A. Roling, who already put

thephraseinquotationmarksinanarticleonwarcrimespublishedin1979:

‘‘Aweakformofenforcementcanbeseenintheinfluenceofpublicopinion.

If mass violations become known, the world reacts, as it did in the Vietnam

War. That same Vietnam war demonstrates the power of this ‘mobilization

of shame.’’’ 4 The lockstep logic of if-then, in which knowledge generates

action (reaction), seems to suggest a wishful fusion of an Enlightenment

faith in the power of reason and knowledge with a realistic pessimism that

retreatstotheshameappropriatetotheunenlightened.Thispatternrepeats

itself as the concept develops.

The earliest mentions in news articles, at least those archived in Lexis-

Nexis, quote the lawyer Irwin Cotler in his campaigns on behalf of Soviet

Jewry and dissidents. Announcing in 1983 a plan to create a center to pre-

pare amicus curiae briefs on behalf of political prisoners, showing how gov-

ernments have violated their own laws, Cotler argued that exposing the

gaps between self-professed norms and behavior could actually change that

behavior. ‘‘We intend,’’ he stated, ‘‘in the language of human rights lawyers,

to bring the mobilization of shame against the Soviet Union, to expose the

Achilles heel of their human rights violations.’’ 5

But the obscurity of its origins only strengthens the self-evidence of the

phrase. Today it is the watchword of the international human rights move-

ment. Here are some examples of this contemporary consensus at the level

of tactics. In a recent summary article on the state of things, Louis Henkin,

the dean of human rights law in the United States, writes that

the various influences that induce compliance with human rights

norms are cumulative, and some of them add up to an under-

appreciated means of enforcing human rights, which has been char-

acterized as ‘‘mobilizing shame.’’ Intergovernmental as well as gov-

ernmental policies and actions combine with those of NGOs and the

public media, and in many countries also public opinion, to mobilize

and maximize public shame.The effectiveness of such inducements to

comply is subtle but demonstrable. 6

In practice, this modesty (‘‘under-appreciated,’’ ‘‘subtle’’) is rather false.

Mobilizing shame is the predominant practice of human rights organiza-

tions, and the dominant metaphor through which human rights NGOs un-

438 Thomas Keenan

derstand their own work, as in this response from William Schulz, presi-

dent of Amnesty International USA, to an interviewer who asked, earlier

this year, ‘‘How do you exercise your power?’’

Our power is primarily the power of mobilizing grass-roots people to

speak out. ‘‘The mobilization of shame’’ is one way to put it. The eyes

of the world shining on the prisons and into the dark corners of police

stations and military barracks all over the world to try to bring inter-

national pressure to bear upon governments which are committing

human rights violations. 7

Thepervasivenessofthisconsensuscannotbeoverstated,norcanitsspecial

relationship to the mass- and especially the image-based media. The con-

cept gathers together a set of powerful metaphors—the eyes of the world,

the light of public scrutiny, the exposure of hypocrisy—as vehicles for the

dream of action, power, and enforcement. ‘‘In the absence of effective en-

forcement mechanisms’’ means: we do not have a machine, a real law, or an

institutionalized apparatus that can deliver reliable results, but we have an

informal system that attempts to approximate it. 8 It ought to function auto-

matically. Light brings knowledge, and publicity brings ‘‘compliance,’’ even

if it works by shame and not reason or conscience. Precisely because the

perpetrators are immature, dependent on the opinions of others, as are the

governments that might challenge them, they are vulnerable to shaming.

Judge Roling expresses the faith most simply: ‘‘If mass violations become

known, the world reacts.’’ 9

Becoming Shameless

The dark side of revelation is overexposure. Sometimes we call it voyeur-

ism, sometimes compassion fatigue, sometimes the obscenity of images or

‘‘disaster pornography.’’ If shame is about the revelation of what is or ought

to be covered, then the absence or failure of shaming is not only traceable

to the success of perpetrators at remaining clothed or hidden in the dark.

Today, all too often, there is more than enough light, and yet its subjects

exhibit themselves shamelessly, brazenly, and openly. 10

Obviously, this ‘‘crisis’’ has important implications for the struggle for

human rights, especially in an age when its traditional allies—the camera

and the witness—have acquired unprecedented levels of public access, bor-

dering at times on saturation, and when it increasingly finds new allies,

Mobilizing Shame 439

intentional or inadvertent, like them or not, in the armies of the world’s

most powerful nations.

The crisis is not simply on the side of the audience or the public, as even

the most sophisticated commentators seem to assume, nor is it merely

one of indifference or denial or even enjoyment (voyeurism). To leave it at

that would be to leave the general structure of the shaming hypothesis or

strategy intact. But the crisis is in fact far more profound: the enjoyment or

the exposure is now, at least often enough to consider it nonaccidental, on

the side of those who appear on camera. In the age of the generalized photo

opportunity—whether the suicide bomber’s videotape, made-for-television

ethnic cleansing, or embedded reporters and videophones—what role can

publicity, the exposé, and shame (still) play?

I am not sure I can answer this question, but I can offer a pair of examples

that underline the difficult situation faced by the traditional paradigm. The

analysis is provoked, in a sense, by much of the breathless media commen-

tary about the recent war in Iraq. To judge from a lot of what we heard,

you would think reporters and photographers had never gone along for a

ride in a plane or a tank before, never stood at an intersection and waited

for someone to get shot at, never done a standup during a firefight, never

had to coordinate their logistics and movements with those of the military,

neversharedmealsandcampedoutwiththesoldiersaboutwhomtheywere

reporting, and never reported favorably on the conduct of their country’s

armies. Needless to say, they have, and they have also complained bitterly

about not being able to do those things.

‘‘We’ve never had a war like this, and we got inundated by close-ups,’’

said Nightline producer Tom Bettag in March 2003, about the war that his aging correspondent covered from a tank.

11 While it is certainly true that we

have never had a war quite like this, especially not to the extent that it hap-

penedontelevision,wedohavemanyprecedentsforit. It isworthrevisiting

some of that televisual history—here, two moments from the last decade in

Somalia and Kosovo—to think about the assumptions underwriting most

discussions about the ethics and politics of human rights struggles, includ-

ing wars, in the media.

Somalia.Elsewhere,IhavewrittenaboutthetelevisingofOperationRestore Hope, the first serious post–Cold War ‘‘humanitarian intervention,’’ in So-

malia.There, I was interested in the images of the soldiers in humanitarian

action, especially on the first night of the operation, along with the images

440 Thomas Keenan

of starvation that preceded it and the images of military debacle that eventu-

ally followed it. I wrote then that the point of Somalia was the pictures, the

transmission and archiving of a new image for a military-aesthetic complex

recently deprived of the only enemy it could remember knowing.

The tenth anniversary of the events re-created in Black Hawk Down has already passed, and all we really have left is the movie, which impressively

omits both that opening night and the critical role of a camcorder in the

ultimate conclusion of the battle on October 3, 1993. 12

And we all skipped right past the anniversary of the opening night’s

landing last December, so let me recall it for you, prime time (EST) of

December 8, 1992, as the first groups of what would ultimately be a twenty-

five-thousand-soldier force began to arrive in Mogadishu to take control of

transport facilities and enable a massive humanitarian relief operation to

proceed securely. (I leave aside many important questions here about the

wisdom of this intervention, its timing, its actual relation to the famine that

was its pretext, and so on.)

Reporting from the Mogadishu airport within (nightscope) sight of the

landing beaches, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour narrated the

goings-on rather economically: ‘‘It was a classic media event—lights flash-

ing—people desperately trying to ask the marines some questions.’’ The

Marines—a small group of Special Forces–style commandos called a Ma-

rine Reconnaissance Unit, the vanguard of the landing—were not so enthu-

siastic about answering questions on the beach. They had come, with Navy

SEALs, directly out of the water onto the beach, and seemed a bit perplexed

to be met by reporters and cameras. As an after-action report put it later,

‘‘Theteamonthebeachweresurprisedtomeetmembersofthenewsmedia

who made their job difficult with crowds of cameramen using bright lights

to get footage of the wet, camouflaged Marines who were now brilliantly lit

up in the dark night.’’ 13 Crowds of cameramen? Surprised? It seems that the

commandos were inadequately briefed on the full extent of their mission.

Or a little too isolated there on the USS Juneau offshore: the headline that morning in USA Today, after all, was ‘‘Somalia Landing Airs Live,’’ and the instructions for the viewing public were clear: ‘‘NBC and CNN plan to air

the scheduled troop landing live at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT.’’

A few minutes after the initial landing, a Marine spokesman ‘‘came

ashore,’’ as he put it, ‘‘in a rubber boat,’’ in order to deal with the ques-

tions. The assembled journalists—some estimates put the total in Mogadi-

shu that night at about six hundred, or roughly the same quantity as were

Mobilizing Shame 441

‘‘embedded’’ with all of the U.S. and U.K. troops in the war against Iraq—

interviewed Lieutenant Kirk Coker not so much about the landing itself as

about the scene of the landing, and about what they were all doing there

at the moment. It was not quite live, but within a few minutes CNN was

playing the tape:

Sir, don’t you think it’s rather bizarre that all these journalists are standing out here during— —Yes, it really was, and you guys really spoiled our nice little raid here.

We wanted to come in without anybody knowing it—

—Like it was a surprise we were here— —Well, we pretty much knew that. [. . .]

So far everything’s going well, sir? Everything seems to be going well right now. We’re not being shot at

and I’m standing here talking to all of you.

Needless to say, it was no surprise to anyone. Michael Gordon of the New York Times reported merely the obvious on the day after the landing: the cameras and lights were already on the beach because the Pentagon had told

them to be there. ‘‘All week the Pentagon had encouraged press coverage

of the Marine landing,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Reporters were told when the landing

would take place, and some network correspondents were quietly advised

where the marines would arrive so that they could set up their cameras. . . .

But having finally secured an elusive spotlight, the marines discovered that

theyhadtoomuchofagoodthing.’’ 14 Or,astheJointTaskForcecommander

Marine Brigadier General Frank Libutti had told reporters in Mombassa

(his headquarters) earlier that day, ‘‘I recommend all of you go down to the

beach if you want a good show tonight.’’ 15

There was grumbling, though, about the way the media—or the briefers

who advised them—had perhaps exposed the Marines to the risk of hos-

tile fire. As one analyst put it later, ‘‘The event was benign only because no

gunman decided to take advantage of the illuminated target area containing

both the U.S. Marines and the news media whose coverage had helped to

bring them there.’’ The key words are the last, though, not about the media

but about the Marines: ‘‘The news media whose coverage had helped to

bring them there.’’ 16 What Operation Restore Hope taught us was that war

today—hard war as in Iraq, both times, and soft war as in Somalia—was and

remains (among other things, to be sure, but crucially) a battle of images.

A CBS television producer who was there told me later that one of the

442 Thomas Keenan

first SEALs on the Mogadishu beach had shouted to his cameraman, ‘‘Kill

the lights, we’re tactical.’’ The allegory seemed to suggest that lights were

only appropriate at the strategic level. But he missed the point: the imagery

was not just strategic—even if the very strategy of the operation did depend

on reporters, cameras, uplinks, and the rest. The imagery, and the produc-

tion and transmission of imagery, was also a tactic, a ground-level move in

the prosecution of the operation.

One need not look behind or beneath the images it produced, as if they

concealed some lurking geostrategic ambition or agenda. What was most

deeply significant about the operation was that it had no depth. It was an

operation on the surface, of the surface. The agenda—the tactics and the

strategy—was the imagery: the creation of images.

Of course, the Somalis could watch television too, and it was obvious very

quickly that the battlefield was one of pictures. The Americans used satel-

lite uplinks, the forces of General Aidid a camcorder, but the war of images

could and was fought with skill and craft by both sides. After all, the disas-

ter of October 3 (Black Hawk Down)—a disaster not only for the eighteen

dead Americans but more so for the perhaps thousand Somalis who died

that night—was also a photo opportunity and a media event. Bodies were

presented—as they had been on earlier occasions as well—for the scrutiny

of the cameras, not simply dragged around for fun. As British journalist

Richard Dowden tells the story,

Television pictures brought US troops to Somalia and television pic-

tures will pull them out. . . . The pictures raise serious questions about

the nature of news-gathering in Somalia, especially since the gunmen

clearly perform for the camera. 17

It is tempting to talk about these photo ops and made-for-television

events—both the December and October ones—in dismissive terms, as if

the prearranged presence of the camera somehow renders the events it wit-

nesses less serious or less real. But the second set of images reminds us why

we have to take the first set seriously. The stakes of this mediatic scenario

are high; we cannot understand, nor have a properly political relation to,

invasions and war crimes, military operations and paramilitary atrocities—

bothofmaximalimportanceforhumanrightscampaigners—inthepresent

and future if we do not attend to the centrality of image production and

management in them.We will be at an even greater loss if we do not admit

that the high-speed electronic news media have created new opportunities

Mobilizing Shame 443

not just for activism and awareness, but also for performance, presentation,

advertising, propaganda, and for political work of all kinds.

Kosovo. Just a week before the war over Kosovo began, in mid-March 1999, the Yugoslav and Serbian forces operating there taught the world a lesson

about publicity, exposure, the politics of information, and what Michael

Ignatieff called, as the title of his book about Kosovo, ‘‘virtual war.’’ They

taught it using those very media.

As the week of March 15, 1999, began, a set of villages about twenty

kilometers north of Pristina on the road to Vucitrn (seven kilometers fur-

ther north) were under assault, ostensibly, as the OSCE’s (Organization for

Security and Co-operation in Europe) monitors later reported, in retalia-

tion for the presence of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas. Report-

ers from around the world were in place throughout Kosovo, and it was

to this area (a short drive in the morning) of operations between Pristina

and Vucitrn that many of them gravitated. They found much to see and to

reporton,butthereportsfromthefrontlineatthattimeshareonedominant

self-referential trope. Reporters seemed determined to underline that they

could not see everything, that things were being hidden from them, that

the warring factions were interested in concealing the full extent of their

activities.Their reports further underlined the nature of the problem—and

of the self-understanding—by brandishing the evidence of their successful

evasion of these restrictions and repressions. The paradigm of revelation,

exposure,andshamingwereinfulloperation.Theirreportswereimportant

in the run up to the war, NATO’s first full-scale combat, and one undertaken

not in the name of national interest, imminent threat, regional stability, or

controlofterritorybutratherof humanrights,andawarthatinthemindsof

its authors in Washington and London and Brussels was a de facto apology

for their years of inaction in Bosnia and Croatia.

On March 11, an Agence France Presse (AFP) correspondent wrote from

along the shifting front lines:

‘‘Get out! You’re in a war zone,’’ barked a Kosovo Liberation Army

(KLA) commander named Labinot in Mijalic village, where the rebels

and security forces were less than 500 meters (yards) apart. Sev-

eral armored vehicles closed in on the village, as did Serbian special

forces wearing masks and bulletproof vests for protection against the

Kalashnikov-armed guerrillas. 18

444 Thomas Keenan

The next day, Friday, March 12, two Serb policemen were shot and wounded

in Mijalic, and the confrontation intensified over the weekend. AP’s Anne

Thompson reported,

With the villages empty of civilians, army troops and Serb police

started looting Mijalic and Drvare and burning down houses Satur-

day, said diplomatic monitors whose mission is led by the Operation

for Security and Cooperation in Europe. While much of the shelling

was aimed at driving the rebels west over the mountains and into

their traditional Drenica region, monitors said the burning was sheer

vengeance. 19

By Sunday, wrote Julius Strauss in the Daily Telegraph,

[in Drvare] the charred remains of some houses were still smolder-

ing. All the locals had fled. The only sign of life was a large and ner-

vous horse who snorted as the army trucks rolled past.The Serb police

turned us back with a swear-word and a universal gesture. Skirting

round the position through scrubby fields to the west gave a clearer

vantage point. Smoke could be seen rising from Mijalic, the next vil-

lage, which locals said had been completely torched by the Serb forces.

On top of a ridge-line aYugoslav army half-track with a heavy machine-

gun mounted and an armored personnel carrier could be seen. Some

nearby gardens and small trees had been shredded by the passage of

tanks. One could be heard rumbling into a new position just out of

our view. 20

And Reuters reported on the same day:

Reporters who reached the centre of Mijalic, about six kms (four miles)

southwestof Vucitrn,foundthevillageasmoulderingruin,emptysave

for Serbian police in armored vehicles who warned of sniper activity.

‘‘Turn around. Get out of here. This is a military zone and there are

snipers firing in this area,’’ a police officer in a flak jacket ordered.

He spoke amidst shell-shattered, burned-out houses at an intersec-

tion strewn with downed electric and telephone lines.

Houses on the ridge-line above the village centre were still smoking

and at least one was in full flame. Occasional automatic weapons fire

ripped the air above the ruins. 21

The next day, March 15, Carlotta Gall reported for the New York Times:

Mobilizing Shame 445

The OSCE has watched as a string of villages has come under tank and

mortar fire for more than a week now.Yugoslav army forces took over

the Albanian village of Mijalic and were guarding the entrance with a

tank and several troop trucks, keeping journalists and monitors away.

‘‘This is a war zone,’’ said a young Serbian soldier guarding the road, an

automatic rifle at the ready across his chest. ‘‘It is dangerous and you

must leave.’’ 22

Taken together, these five stories demonstrate a solid consensus about at

least one thing. This is a rather traditional war story: war means no access.

And more often than not, no access is taken as a sign of the reality, the

authenticity, of the war. It is the job of reporters, monitors, and human

rights advocates to ‘‘skirt around the positions’’ and expose the violent re-

ality. No photo ops here: only serious business.

But in fact, on March 16, the next day, something quite different hap-

pened. Correspondent Bill Neely of Britain’s Independent Television News

(ITN) reported from that very village of Mijalic, where his camera crew—

along with another crew from the BBC with reporter Angus Roxburgh in

tow—was videotaping, from the ridgeline, no doubt, as Serbian policemen

and nearby villagers looted and destroyed it. It was very good—and brave—

reporting. But what was interesting, or especially interesting, about it was

what was remarkably different from the experiences reported by Gall and

the other reporters. The men destroying Mijalic were not surprised in the

act of destruction. They were not exposed, caught on tape unawares. They

did it for the cameras. As both television reporters noted, the men ‘‘cleans-

ing’’ the village were watching the cameras that watched them, and acted

in full knowledge of the fact that their deeds were being recorded. Neely

spoke, simply and eloquently, about this knowledge:

As we are filming from afar, three men come to burn the village of

Mijalic, which until a week ago was full of Albanians. It is now being

looted by Serbs: one man, stealing a television, is a policeman. The

five men move from house to house and with a matchbox wipe Mijalic

from the map, one, a Serb civilian, robbing his Albanian neighbor’s

television.The men are making it difficult for Albanians ever to return.

The Serbs know we are filming them, but they make the law here, and

they break it. So they burn Mijalic to the ground. 23

The BBC’s Roxburgh said something similar: ‘‘The village was razed before

our eyes; they knew we were filming them, they didn’t care.’’ The ITN video

446 Thomas Keenan

log, which catalogs the film shot by shot, also reports the scene succinctly:

‘‘Looters out of house waving to cameras.’’

OnMarch19theOSCEobservermissionwithdrew,unabletodoitswork.

NATO’s air campaign began a week later.

A wave. With this simple gesture of the hand, not simply cynical or ironic, not simply nihilistic, no matter how destructive, these policemen an-

nounced the effective erasure of a fundamental axiom of the human rights

movement in an age of publicity: that the exposure of violence is feared by

its perpetrators, and hence that the act of witness is not simply an ethical

gesture but an active intervention.

Mobilizing shame presupposes that dark deeds are done in the dark, and

that the light of publicity—especially of the television camera—thus has

the power to strike preemptively on behalf of justice. With a wave, these

policemen announced their comfort with the camera, their knowledge of

the actual power of truth and representation.

How should we read this wave, this repeated succession of hand gestures

quitedifferentfromtheother‘‘universalgesture’’withwhichcorrespondent

Strauss of the Daily Telegraph had been greeted just a few days earlier? It is a mark of

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