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, labour conditions, to people displaced through industrialisation, refugees, and so on. These repeated sites of injury can be amenable to more cooperative, multi-levelled, enmeshed and tactical ways of working with rights. While such an approach is hardly novel, it could become more the heart of an international human rights practice. Although highly sensitive (how many governments are happy to reveal the state of their prisons or the practices of their police forces?) such ventures need not be so persistently structured by the dynamics of contending sovereignties. Nor
between the governing and the governed. In settled colonies like South Africa and Kenya, white communities made often unreasonable demands about labour conditions, and there were tensions over unequal political and economic distribution which caused ‘permanent headaches’ to British politicians and officials (Gann and Duigan, 1978: 8). These contentious issues could only thicken political and social organisation as the authorities were pulled in to resolve differences and to take sides and ultimately led to much more violent independence struggles. It was much more
people wholeheartedly. They are ruthless to the enemy, but kind to the people’ (Chen Xitong, then Mayor of Beijing, in Yi Mu and Thompson, 1989: 75). We have tended to romanticise Tiananmen in a way that we do not romanticise the extraordinarily high proportion of indigenous and black people in the prisons of many states, for example, or the sale of women into prostitution or abusive labour conditions. This is because Tiananmen echoes so pointedly an idealisation of themes running through our own political mythos. In the words of George Hicks