In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the War on Terror transformed not only United States foreign policy and national security practices, but also the political landscape surrounding human rights, challenging long-standing assumptions about who was responsible for upholding human rights and where violations could occur. In this Q&A, School of International Service professor Shadi Mokhtari reflects on how torture, detention, and other post-9/11 policies challenged assumptions about American exceptionalism, while prompting activists in the Middle East to claim a greater role in judging U.S. human rights practices. Looking back on the past 25 years, she considers how these shifts disrupted the traditional geography of human rights and continue to shape debates over accountability, universality, and justice today.

In your first book, After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East, you write about some of the less discussed ways the War on Terror and U.S. policies on torture and detention shifted human rights landscapes in the U.S., in the Middle East, and between the two contexts. In terms of the U.S., how did those policies and the reaction to them reshape America’s relationship with the idea of human rights?

Before 9/11, even though the U.S. frequently exempted itself and its allies from international human rights law and accountability, many held the view that the U.S. government, despite sometimes losing its way, was overall a champion rather than a violator of human rights. For most Americans, if they were even aware it existed, the idea of human rights was something that applied to others in the world, not to the actions of the U.S. Even human rights activists in the U.S. and the Middle East in some way adhered to this type of American exceptionalism. In one of my interviews, the director of a Yemeni human rights NGO put forth a scathing indictment of American double-standards. A short while later, when a young activist sitting in asked him why the U.S. did not have a Ministry of Human Rights like Yemen did, he replied, “They don’t need one”.

Once American post-9/11 torture practices and denials of due process came to light, American politicians began speaking of (or even for the first time learning about) international treaties like the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. While before 9/11 these treaties and the idea that the U.S. had human rights obligations were absent from public discourse and consciousness, after 9/11 they appeared in everything from televised Congressional hearings on Abu Ghraib to Supreme Court rulings to Saturday Night Live skits. Human Rights Watch created a division focused on the U.S.’s human rights violations it previously did not have, and the ACLU created a human rights program it previously did not have. Many of these cracks in U.S. human rights exceptionalism endured.

Your research also looks at activists in the Middle East challenging U.S. human rights practices. How did people in the region experience and respond to U.S. policies after 9/11?

Prior to 9/11, American and Middle Eastern human rights exchanges generally followed a set itinerary as part of what I call “the East/West geography of human rights”. This geography in practice produced a one-way flow of human rights traffic. Western governments, INGOs, and universities could assess, denounce, and mobilize to challenge non-Western states’ human rights violations, but not the other way around. Local Middle Eastern and other non-Western activists were expected and funded to address only the human rights violations committed by their own states and cultures.

After 9/11, the flow of human rights traffic began also flowing in the opposite direction. Middle Eastern actors began passing judgement on U.S. human rights violations. Two examples I discuss in the book are notable. First, human rights NGOs in Yemen—a country that in 2007, when I visited, had the largest number of Guantanamo detainees—organized international conferences on Guantanamo and were called upon to pass judgment on U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Yemeni newspapers. I attended a press conference they organized featuring several NGO leaders, a recently released Guantanamo detainee, the mother of a detainee still at Guantanamo, and the father of a detainee released from Guantanamo but being held by Yemeni authorities. Each delivered passionate speeches, weaving together condemnations of American policies, emotional appeals, and invocations of human rights and international law.

Another interesting example emerged from Kuwait. In this case, with Kuwaiti government support, an advocacy group founded by the father of a Guantanamo detainee hired American lawyers to litigate Guantanamo detainees’ rights and an American public relations firm to “put a human face” on them through a media campaign which amounted to placing dozens of Op-Eds in American newspapers.

Middle Eastern activists and populations were not just denouncing American double-standards in casual café conversations as they long had in relation to the U.S.’s blindness to Israeli denials of Palestinian rights or support for their repressive authoritarian leaders. They began a path of organizing campaigns and exercising the authority to pass judgment on American human rights transgressions. This trend continued through the 2011 Arab Uprisings and is now on full display in Global Middle East (including Middle Eastern diasporas) activism around Gaza.

Guantanamo became a powerful symbol around the world. What did efforts by Yemeni activists to challenge Guantanamo tell you about the power—and limits—of human rights activism?

Even more broadly, the post-9/11 U.S. “War on Terror” was a particularly poignant example of how human rights is neither entirely co-opted by power nor entirely divorced from it but occupies a complex space in between. There were some extraordinary mobilizations throughout the world and in the U.S. that resisted the post-9/11 era’s denials of dignity. In the Middle East, activists challenged their own government’s instrumentalization of the U.S.’s instrumentalization of human rights when authoritarian leaders denounced Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo by asking, “What about our own Abu Ghraibs and Guantanamos?” Activists and ordinary people throughout the world challenged states’ widespread co-optation of the framework by invoking human rights in ways that reclaimed and restored its moral power.

Yet, at the same time, the era was largely defined by “extraordinary renditions” to torture in third countries; the graphic depictions of humiliation, abuse, and torture at Abu Ghraib; the real prospects of indefinite detention without the most basic of due process guarantees faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and other detention facilities; the “disappearing” of suspects the U.S. deemed of high value into the abyss of secret CIA black sites; and Bush administration efforts to reshape domestic and international legal prohibitions on torture. All of this was carried out by the world’s most powerful state with few prospects of high-ranking officials being held accountable. Astoundingly, it was all also carried out while the U.S. enlisted human rights norms to justify its 9/11 wars—for example, by widely invoking the plight of women in Afghanistan. Finally, many of the denials of due process and securitization regimes the post 9/11 era inaugurated continue to facilitate widespread abuses and injustice to this day.

Looking back more than two decades later, what lessons from the post-9/11 period do you think are most important for understanding human rights politics today?

The post–9/11 era made it apparent that human rights could not be neatly tied to a particular geography, place, or locale with the same degree of certainty that it had been in the past. It was now much more conceivable that torture, denials of due process, and, by extension, other human rights violations could take place anywhere. The once seemingly reliable demarcations of the East/West geography of human rights became upended and unreliable. Rather than being the part of the world that rejected human rights due to cultural or religious objections, the Middle East was in fact a place where many aspired to the promise of the human rights project, an emancipatory promise from which they had long been excluded. Again, the Arab Uprisings, waves of protest movements in Iran and mobilizations for Palestinian rights have only continued to speak to Middle Eastern human aspirations for human rights’ universal application rather than to the cultural or religious relativism the people of the region have long been assigned.