Iguanas and Enemy Combatants
Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism through Guantánamo’s Creaturely Lives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20053574 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Terri Tomsky (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Pages | 201-215 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Cosmopolitan Animals (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9781137376282_14 |
| OpenAlex | W2349191092 |
| ISBN | 9781137376282 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 13 |
Recent scholarship in animal studies has greatly invigorated understandings of human-animal relationships, including especially where the species interrelate or overlap. These accounts have been helpful not only in contesting the binary distinctions set up between human and animal, but also in subjecting to scrutiny the objectification practices that exclude the rights of individual subjects. Yet, where in the past the animalization of humans legitimated violence against them — a manoeuvre that, as Cary Wolfe (2009) notes, requires an a priori ethical view of animals as dispensable and available for human instrumentalization — we are now seeing examples of the opposite. In the American military prison complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for instance, such was the experience of extraordinary rendition, interrogation, torture and the threat of indefinite incarceration that the enemy combatants interned there eventually started pleading for (and were denied) animal rather than human rights (Stafford Smith, 2007; Zevnik, 2011).1 What does this political act do to the cosmopolitan project of human rights when the ‘human’ is deemed an insufficient vehicle for securing rights claims of individual humans? As a place where human prisoners are often treated worse than the animals populating the island, Guantánamo provides a site where we can trace the emergence of a cosmopolitanism that foregrounds rights claims and social justice, but which dispenses with the humanism that has traditionally framed these rights
Adversary · Animal rights · Cosmopolitanism · Criminology · Environmental ethics · Human rights · Interrogation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Torture · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Torture, Ethics, and Law
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |