Politics of Neutrality, Human Rights and Armed Struggles: The Turkey Example

This chapter focuses on an NGO from Turkey, Insan Haklari Dernegi, to follow how changing discourses of human rights are being translated, adopted, and debated by human rights activists. This brings into focus the political nature of adoption of Amnesty International’s (AI) changes in its mandate after the Yokohama meeting. The history of activists plays a role in the adoption of a dominant discourse of human rights, leading to changes in human rights meanings. Consequently, debates over the adoption of AI’s line indicate the depoliticizing effect of dominant discourses and a local resistance to it. These debates show how consideration of structural problems is being converted into bodily violence of victims, which leads to ethicization of the political this chapter supports.