HAQQ: SOCIALLY EMBEDDED JUSTICE

In discussions about their experiences of war, migration, and marginalization my interlocutors relied heavily on the concept and practices of haqq to claim justice (insāf). While the concept holds an important place in discussions about justice in the Islamic tradition it has also found wide circulation across religious and linguistic traditions from North Africa to the Middle East to South and South-East Asia (Arbab Reference Arbab2019; Geertz Reference Geertz1983; Kamali Reference Kamali1993; Madhok Reference Madhok2021; Rosen Reference Rosen2000). For instance, Geertz (Reference Geertz1983, 187–98) presents haqq as having wide currency from Morrocco to Malaysia as part of a wider Islamic legal oikumene overlapping in parts with Arabic and Indic norms. The region covers more than a third of the world’s population. Thus, while I focus on the discussions in Pakistan, it is important to recognize that ideas and practices of haqq enjoy wide circulation much beyond the country and already structures visions of justice for billions.

Haqq has often been translated straightforwardly as right by influential scholars of Islamic thought (e.g., An-Na’im Reference An-Na’im1990, 161–81). The interest in such cases is in presenting haqq as similar to, indeed as an uncomplicated twin of, statist liberal rights. Recent scholarship has moved beyond the impulse to accord liberal framings such primacy. In a nuanced analysis, Madhok (Reference Madhok2021) has rightly presented haqq as a central concept to engage with “vernacular rights culture” of human rights. She argues for sidestepping questions of origins and circulation of human rights to focus on “conceptual descriptions of rights talk in different contexts” (67). Moreover, she recognizes the different justificatory premises of haqq which mean that such visions of rights are “in the final instance, non-derivative from the state” (183) and produce radically different subjectivities. Nevertheless, even as she recognizes these differences her primary interest is in exploring the potential of haqq as “rights culture.” She focuses on how haqq has been utilized by grass roots mobilizations to wrest statist legislation or policy provision in favor of the marginalized and is less directly invested in parsing out those uses of haqq that bypass the state altogether. Building upon and extending Madhok’s contribution I note that ideas and practices of haqq predate and exceed the human rights regime. I am interested much more centrally with detailing the ways in which haqq was and remains “non-derivative from the state,” as well as the implications of that for engaging with alternative visions of justice. I also discuss in some depth the range of associations in Islamic thought which allow practices of haqq wider circulation beyond the South Asian context.

I start here by noting some of the ways in which haqq was used by my interlocutors as they spoke of the discrimination they faced as “tribal” migrants to underscore the differences from liberal conceptions of rights. In large part due to the conflation of tribal with terrorist in mainstream international and national media, these muhajirs faced challenges ranging from difficulty in obtaining accommodation and jobs, to being unable to register as voters. Many complained of police harassment. A tribal student made an oft-repeated complaint, “we are the Blacks [referring to African Americans] of Pakistan. If there are raids on [university] hostels to check for drugs and weapons, tribal boys are picked up first… If there is any violence in the city, all tribal men are open game for the police to label terrorists.”Footnote ⁷ This particular interview was conducted before the death of Naqeebullah Mehsud in 2018, which became a source of widespread political mobilizations across Pakistan. Mehsud, a 27 years old aspiring model and shopkeeper, was picked up by Karachi police, labeled an Islamist militant and killed in a staged “encounter” on January 13, 2018.Footnote ⁸ Soon afterward, a movement led by young tribal activists called the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (Movement for the Protection of Pashtuns) swept through the urban centers of Pakistan highlighting the vulnerability associated with tribal and Pashtun identity. While the state moved swiftly to curtail the movement by arresting its leaders and members, it led to significant debate and acknowledgment of their concerns with the Pakistani public sphere. Media attention has remained focused on this movement of young, urban Pashtuns that sought to wrest citizenship rights from the state.Footnote ⁹ It is, however, also important to pay attention to the pervasive notions of justice not captured in this reporting.

It is very difficult to convey experiences of war and migration to those who have never lived through either. When I asked Haleem Khan, one of my first interlocutors, about his experience of moving to Lahore and how his new neighbors had acted toward him and his family, he explained that he had escaped a war zone, from a war that the state of Pakistan did not officially acknowledge and few in urban Lahore had a clear sense of.

Haleem Khan was one of the first people I met when I started this research. When he narrated his experience, I was unsure if drones really did hover in sight of the villagers. It is now known that the US government did use hovering as a tool of psychological terror.Footnote ¹¹ Such tactics were justified by reference to the remote location and archaic norms of tribals, rendering their lives beyond what Butler (Reference Butler2010, 13–23) calls “grievability.” Framed as primitives and terrorists they were presented as legitimate targets of violence. Called at that time, “the most dangerous place in the world”Footnote ¹² the tribal areas were represented in mainstream international media through the tropes of rugged mountains, inaccessible villages, rough men, oppressed women, and extreme violence combined with excessive hospitality. Ignoring a long history of circular migration as far afield as Australia (Nichols Reference Nichols2006, 110–4; 140–75) the tribal regions were viewed within urban Pakistan and internationally as if existing outside history, global flows of finance and transnational migration, and the tribal people as primitives with access to modern weapons. Perceptions within urban Pakistan’s liberal intelligentsia were critical. As one of my tribal interlocutors pointed out, “I used to not tell people [in my college] that I am from Miranshah (Waziristan) because they had not heard of it, and I had to explain. But after the war started, I did not say where I am from because they had only one association with it…of terrorism.”Footnote ¹³ Such was the sense of distance from tribal lives for some that a section of Pakistani liberal civil society groups also championed the use of military actionFootnote ¹⁴ arguing that this is the most efficient way of dealing with this obdurate population.

In the face of such marginalization and discrimination, I was surprised to hear Haleem Khan say, “it was the haqq of our neighbours in Lahore to ask about the war we had just experienced.” Others I interviewed expressed similar ideas. Gul Bibi, who lost her husband and a granddaughter to aerial and ground attacks, by the Pakistani army and a militant group respectively, said in a similar vein, “we were refugees. It was the haqq of the people in Lahore to look after us. If they failed to do it properly that is their loss ultimately. We try to fulfill our haqq to them at least when we can.”Footnote ¹⁵ She implied that it was a loss for her neighbors both in their inability to recognize the truth of the war, as well as the possibility of ethical development through dispensing their responsibilities toward marginalized refugees. She went on to say, “many helped us but many created problems for us, even when it was their haqq to ask us and try to understand why we had undertaken hijrat (migration).” In claiming that she and her family had dispensed with their haqq as refugees toward her new neighbors Gil Bibi pointed toward the contribution she had made in times of marriages and mourning (gham khadi) in the neighborhood, for instance by opening her family’s meager living spaces to the guests of her neighbors. In building such webs of obligation and entitlement Gul Bibi and other refugees asserted their own agency, and yet again this use of haqq exceeds easy translation: these refugees cannot be seen as suggesting that looking after them and trying to understand their plight was the right of their new neighbors in Lahore.

Many of their neighbors did recognize the relationship of ethical duty and responsibility that having refugees in their midst placed on them. Such understandings of haqq have come to the fore again since November 2023 when the Pakistani state instigated a crackdown on the approximately 1.7 million Afghan refugees without valid authorizations. An estimated 450,000 were forcibly repatriated by January 2024. The state has not responded to pressure by various social and political groups calling for the renunciation of this decision. However, local groups, neighbors, and co-workers hid refugees in their homes, rented homes for them in their own names, and organized food deliveries during police crackdowns.Footnote ¹⁶ One such Pakistani citizen who organized for his Afghan friends to stay with his family in another part of the city during a police crackdown said, “I don’t know if I have properly fulfilled my haqq to them, that is for them to judge, but I did what I could.”Footnote ¹⁷ Here Abdullah Ahmed spoke of his haqq or duty to the refugees.

Similarly, after recounting the difficulties that made them leave their homes, the trials they faced on the way to their present locations, the problems of finding livelihood in cities, many of my tribal interlocutors said, “all we want is aman (peace) and insāf (justice). This is our haqq but also the haqq of the state/government (hakumat).” Again, this denotes something more than our understanding of statist rights can fully capture. Were the refugees proposing that it was the right of the state to provide peace and justice? Gul Bibi, who emerged as formidable neighborhood organizer over the years that I got to know her, explained in some detail, “we say in my village that rulers change, subjects do not. For us, there is little difference between government by the British or by Pakistan. Our conditions are the same. But the Pakistani rulers have to ask themselves, have they managed their haqq? It was their haqq that we should be better off in Pakistan than under colonial rule, because we have fulfilled our haqq to them.”Footnote ¹⁸ In emphasizing the relational aspects of haqq between the refugees and Pakistani rulers Gul Bibi is claiming equal moral footing for herself and her community. At the very least, these statements signal a complex interplay of obligations and entitlements bound up in an ethical framework.

Moreover, refugees across the age, class, and gender spectrum were defiant and consistent in the assertation that “we are on haqq, and therefore, we have nothing to fear.” Here the term haqq is being used to refer to truth or reality. This association with truth plays an important role in producing a subjectivity very different from statist rights claims. Within the wider Islamic philosophical and juridical tradition, truth and justice have a close and mutually reinforcing relationship (Hallaq Reference Hallaq2009, 95, 144; Khadduri Reference Khadduri1984, 70–87). While my interlocutors did not refer to juridical debates, this close relationship with truth was an important element of their understanding of haqq. These associations between haqq and truth as lived experience of marginalization were further popularized by anticolonial activists such as those involved with the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the region. Haqq as truth had pervaded Khudai Khidmatgar discourse (Arbab Reference Arbab2019, 204, 206). This takes on particular significance once we realize the importance of nonviolent resistance in undermining the legitimacy of the state’s use of violence and promoting a vision of social change based on principles of friendship as Arbab (Reference Arbab2019, 203–215) has convincingly argued.

For Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988), a prominent anti-colonial activist and leader of the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar movement in parts of colonial India that included the tribal areas,Footnote ¹⁹ just politics required a foregrounding of individual responsibility to society. The implications of mobilizations that built on the language of haqq as truth were that the mostly peasant members of the Khudai Khidmatgars were drawn into a thick language of anticolonial resistance, individual responsibility, and social solidarity (Banerjee Reference Banerjee2000). Two decades later another wave of mobilizations among peasants in the region was carried out by the Mazdoor Kissan Party (Worker and Peasant Party). Its leader Major Ishaq framed the struggle for land rights in terms of a battle for haqq, and another leader, Sibghatullah was remembered as haqiqat pasand or truth seeker (Ali and Raza Reference Ali and Raza2022, 495–6).

This imbrication of truth and justice in haqq raises some concerns for those schooled in statist justice. A reified vision of European historical experience informs such considerations where long-running wars of religion are believed to be linked inextricably to the assertion of monopoly over truth by Protestant and Catholic sovereigns. This has led to significant suspicion regarding invocations of truth given authoritarian uses. We can, however, start by recognizing the historical parochiality of the reasons for this discomfort, and, more critically, acknowledging a key difference with invocations of haqq: haqq is primarily socially established and in the Islamic tradition the state has historically not been associated with adjudicating haqq. That is to say, there is an important difference between the imposition of a monarch or state’s version of the truth and its invocation by those seeking to resist marginalization. Being able to speak of their experiences, recount their realities and claim their histories as truth has long been a strategy of resistance by subaltern groups (Scott Reference Scott2010; Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995). Such visions of the truth are inherently dialogical and socially embedded.

Finally, many, particularly students and youth, demanded, “are we not citizens of Pakistan? Do we not have the haqq to have proper roads and schools built in our areas?” At a public event in London pointing toward the Pakistani state’s complicity in US drone strikes in the Tribal Areas, Noor Behram, a journalist from Wazirabad asked, “are we not citizens of Pakistan? Do we not have the haqq to be safe in our homes?”Footnote ²⁰ Such statements suggest the more familiar political claims made by citizens of their state. Clearly, claims from the state can also be included within haqq. But as the discussion above indicates to think about haqq only as a local term for statist legal rights would be to miss the wide range of associations that allow us an insight into another vision of justice.

I want to emphasize the difficulty of parsing the different elements of haqq out and the importance of approaching these as mutually constitutive rather than easily separable strands. Even from these brief examples, it is possible to appreciate the range of associations and the complexity that haqq incorporates. First, haqq carries at least four different meanings: truth; social responsibility or duty; social entitlement; and political claim. Second, it is not primarily associated with the individual. Third, and somewhat counterintuitively haqq seems to belong to both the oppressed and the oppressor as well as others watching an injustice unfold. It is not only associated with the victims or claimants of an entitlement. This diffused ownership is in part related to the deep association with truth that haqq carries connecting it conceptually to an understanding that justice flows from acknowledgement of a reality, which oppressors as well as bystanders are seen to be capable of undertaking. The oppressor in this framing is, thus, never beyond persuasion, and the bystander has important ethical responsibilities.

In Islamic juridical thought and practice discussions about haqq are further refined by the distinction between haquq Allah and haquq al ’ibad. These are often roughly translated as the rights of God and the rights of individuals. But the right of God is a surprising idea: who can dispense justice to God? There is scholarly consensus that haquq Allah captures those interests that serve the public well-being including public order and social harmony while haquq al ’ibad refers to the obligations and dues toward an individual (Kamali Reference Kamali1993, 350–1; Moosa Reference Moosa2000, 192). While there is debate about how best to dispense haquq Allah the general principle that these are aimed toward public good is widely accepted. Emon (Reference Emon2006) has rightly argued that the line between haquq al ’ibad and haquq Allah was not and could not be conclusively drawn. Separating social and individual good is often difficult and sometimes impossible. Emon suggests that they are a conceptual heuristic that early Islamic jurists had developed, and consequent debate within the Islamic legal tradition has centered on multiple conceptions of the relationship between the good and the right, individual and community. One important implication of this lack of delineation, not entirely unintended by the jurists, was that this fostered a more socially embedded notion of justice. The very instability of the two categories and the difficulty of demarcating individual and public good conclusively is generative.

The explicitly acknowledged interest in keeping both communal and individual concerns at the forefront renders haqq and related vision of justice to be more easily embedded in society. Attention to this social embeddedness is revealed in the explicitly stated reminder jurists set for themselves and their audiences that individual and community rights are linked and that both need to be balanced. The emphasis on the balance between individual and social concerns has been noted not just by historians of Islamic political ideas (Darling Reference Darling2002; Hallaq Reference Hallaq2009, 159–221) but also by anthropologists of contemporary Muslim societies from across Africa and Middle East to South and South-East Asia (Agrama Reference Agrama and Turki2016; Geertz Reference Geertz1983, 181–220; Rosen Reference Rosen2000). Moreover, Hallaq (Reference Hallaq2009, 171) points out that the historical record suggests that these socially embedded, and thus accessible, norms of justice meant that “social underdogs” often initiated and won litigation in sharia courts. These resonances carry on today and may go some way toward explaining the continued appeal of sharia for contemporary Muslims. It is crucial here to remind ourselves that sharia has operated historically, and continues in large part today, primarily as a self-imposed set of guidelines to be interpreted according to specific situations rather than state-imposed laws unlike the European experience of centralized and statist church (Hallaq Reference Hallaq2014).

In explicitly foregrounding social relationships, as Rosen (Reference Rosen2000, 6) notes in the case of contemporary Arab world, a “sense of mutual ingratiation and indebtedness is broadly subsumed…. under the central Arabic concept of haqq.” This emphasis on mutual indebtedness is seen by some scholars as linked to the weight placed on duty or responsibility in Islamic visions of justice. Indeed, in the orientalist tradition, some scholars argued that Islam only recognizes obligations (Schacht Reference Schacht and Holt1970, 540–1), implying a contrast to the emphasis on rights as entitlements in the European tradition. On the other side, some Muslim modernists claimed that the Islamic tradition presented greater clarity about the reciprocity of rights and obligations than European legal norms (Brohi Reference Brohi1978, 179–81). The subtext in these conversations has been an assertion and rebuttal of the claim about the simultaneously unique and universal place of Europe in facilitating progress through the invention of a distinctive tool of governance that is political rights. The shift from duties to rights is a part of this narrative of progress that is deeply significant for contemporary political theory more generally and debates about migration specifically. Duties have, by and large, become associated with restrictions, such that by the late twentieth century, Raz (Reference Raz1989, 6) noted in his critical assessment of rights, the dominant view of rights allowed that these confer benefits on people while duties act as “fetters and restrict people’s ability to do as they wish.”

Without minimizing the value of rights and entitlements, it is perhaps important to remind ourselves to appreciate the foundational role that duties play. There is a long-running debate about the practical value of establishing a direct correspondence between rights and duties in Euro-American philosophy (Waldron Reference Waldron1987). In Islamic debates, and in some contradiction with Brohi’s claims regarding the clarity of the relationship between rights and duties, there is a blurred and overlapping relationship. Kamali (Reference Kamali1993, 357) notes in his detailed review of scholarship on haqq that an important feature of Islamic juridical debates is that “right and duty merge into justice so much so that they become, in principle, an extension of one another” without either eliminating or emphasizing the duality between the two. Similarly, noting the widespread use of such notions in contemporary North African countries, Rosen (Reference Rosen2000, 156) argues that translating haqq as either right or duty misses the wide range and subtle uses it allows otherwise.

Noteworthy in these debates about haqq in the Islamic tradition, as well as its use by my tribal interlocutors, is the relative absence of the state in defining and enforcing it. This does not conclusively preclude a role for the state. Nor does it prevent questioning of power arrangements and hierarchies. However, very clearly the sites for claims and persuasion are other individuals and social groups. This aspect, in particular, has been deployed and extended beyond juridical and philosophical debates by activists and marginalized communities across religious traditions within the South Asian context. Haqq speaks to multiple situations and a distinctive feature is the combined focus on collective and individual, moral and political, that local activists, from landless Christian peasants in Pakistan to laboring Hindu women in India put to use against large corporations, military encroachments, and statist marginalization (Madhok Reference Madhok2021, 100–44; Rizvi Reference Rizvi2019, 81–98).

The multiple registers that haqq can operate upon were mobilized by these activists to highlight their own agency. For my interlocutors, the ability to influence the behavior of their neighbors, co-workers, and others through invocations of haqq and practices of mutual obligations were important and meaningful. In calling for their own and the haqq of others in Lahore refugees and migrants engaged different groups. Over the years of my interaction with Haleem Khan, for instance, I saw him and my other interlocutors making a space for themselves within their new contexts. Their sense of agency was often heightened through the deployment of haqq as they sought to build local alliances, form collective responses and engage in specific concerns by creating relationships of mutual dependency. Some like Haleem Khan helped form a neighborhood association of small traders in the area he lived and worked in, and in the process educated his Lahore neighbors about the war he had fled. Others mobilized with Punjabi colleagues to expand spaces in local schools for refugee children. Many spoke of the collective pool they had created for arranging burial in tribal areas of those who died away from their watan (homeland). Sending dead bodies from the city to the tribal areas was expensive, and for accompanying relatives dangerous in those years. However, recognizing it as the haqq of the dead, the living saw it as an assertion of their own agency.

No doubt all of this was also exhausting, and most of my interlocutors would have preferred not to have to do this work of persuasion and collaboration to assert their haqq. However, grounding their justifications in truth, seeing themselves as agents of justice, and persuading others to collaborate with them created a subjectivity that far exceeds statist legality and relationships of dependence. Their visions of haqq created space for persuasion in multiple registers and emboldened them to engage with others as equal moral agents. This is not dissimilar to the role that haqq seems to have played for non-Muslim Dalit (lower caste) women mobilizers against rape in India, where Madhok (Reference Madhok2021, 135) notes truth as a justificatory premise “enables an existential and structural critique of the life of marginalized gendered subjects while also shoring up an ideal of justice in social and political life.” In moving beyond statist legality and indicating a space for a relationship of moral equality haqq enabled refugees and migrants to enter life in new contexts as agents. It is important to note that my interlocutors were keenly aware of power dynamics within society, particularly class and ethnic distinctions in their new contexts. Several articulated a version of the sentiment expressed by Asad Afridi when he said, “our main ‘fault’ is that we are poor, this society is not for the poor…In the city it is like living in a hotel, you have to pay for everything and if you can’t, you can starve.”Footnote ²¹ Their reliance on haqq was not predicated on romanticized visions of society as an organic whole in opposition to the state. Rather they saw social and ethical practices of haqq as providing them with a viable and valuable means for influencing just outcomes.

In contrast to the insistent focus on social and ethical relationships facilitated by haqq, the dominant trend in contemporary migration ethics debates is to engage with the state as the naturalized container of society. However, as Kukathas (Reference Kukathas2012, 664) reminds us, societies “precede, and generally survive states and other forms of political organization.” More importantly, Kukathas (Reference Kukathas2021) has rightly warned that immigration controls change social norms and potentially narrow the space for oppositional politics within the nation-state. Controls at the border form only one part of a complex web that includes the monitoring of places of work and employment, romantic relationships, and educational careers, as well as continuous disruption through raids and deportations (Kukathas Reference Kukathas2021, chap. 3). Indeed, the border today cannot be understood as a thin line depicted on maps, but as a system of surveillance and management that begins in other countries and today relies increasingly on mass electronic monitoring (Longo Reference Longo2018). It is hard to refute the claim that today “the only feasible way of monitoring would-be immigrants is to monitor and control the local population” (Kukathas Reference Kukathas2021, 5). With border controls seen in this light the questions raised through considering the concept of haqq, about the naturalness and universality of the nation-state and the focus on entitlements only, take on new urgency, and I turn now to these by considering the relationship between colonialism and statist rights.

COLONIALISM AND THE UNIVERSALITY OF STATIST RIGHTS

Political theory debates about justice tend to rest primarily on the possibility and scope of rights that can be afforded by states. In the case of migration, the ethical question addressed then has been focused on the receiving state’s right to exclude, even by those who argue for open borders. Such a framing of the ethical question can mean that “Anglo-American philosophers implicitly situate themselves as policy makers within wealthy states facing a problem of uninvited intruders” (Jaggar Reference Jaggar2020, 106). Often this position is occupied without recognizing the fact that these are the very states that take far fewer refugees than their Global South counterparts despite their proclaimed role in drawing up the international refugee law regime. This leads to a situation where “we have an international political system accustomed to tolerating the ‘under-supply of asylum’ from countries nominally supporting the refugee law regime” (Fine Reference Fine2020, 13). Colonial legacies of forced migration and racialization, alongside neocolonial legacies of economic extraction, support for dictatorships, and passing on of environmental costs to the Global South leading to natural disasters are beginning to receive attention from those concerned with migration ethics (Amighetti and Nuti Reference Amighetti and Nuti2016; Cole Reference Cole2020b; Fine Reference Fine2020; Finlayson Reference Finlayson2020; Jaggar Reference Jaggar2020; Reed-Sandoval Reference Reed-Sandoval2016; Valdez Reference Valdez2021). There is an emerging consensus that these dynamics impact not just migration patterns but crucially the framing of the ethical question at stake. It is the framing, the ready acceptance of statist rights as universal vehicle of justice that my interlocutors’ ideas raise fundamental questions about. This questioning of the state as the sovereign enforcer of rights is not premised on libertarian assumptions about individual freedom but is instead tied deeply to collective and individual considerations about truth and responsibility.

A burgeoning body of research by decolonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial scholars has started raising important concerns about statist rights as primary vehicles of justice. For indigenous North Americans colonialism is an ongoing reality and many have pointed out the paradox of demanding rights from what is to them an ongoing occupying, colonial state (Taiaiake Reference Taiaiake2021). The concerns that Marx had about the legitimization of theft and dispossession under the framework of primitive accumulation remain central to the concerns of many, particularly indigenous populations (Nichols Reference Nichols2018). Indigenous activists ask: what protection can statist rights provide when the colonizer and occupier is also the guarantor of those rights? At the very least, the colonial history of rights complicates their seemingly straightforward association with progress and justice that most Euro-American theorists rely upon to build a picture of steady expansion of rights to those previously excluded from their exercise.

For many, rights are “colonial modes of recognition” that rely upon legal personhood to accept the humanity of colonized and racialized groups (Rawson and Mansfield Reference Rawson and Mansfield2018, 115–6). Due to these associations, those who may now be recognized as full rights-bearing individuals continue to have a fractured relationship with them. Referring to the experience of African American women, for instance, Bonnie Honig notes perceptively that the vision of new segments of population coming into full possession of formal rights, “does not also note that these subjects have still never come to bear those rights in the same way as their original bearers” (Honig Reference Honig, Benhabib and Post2006, 112). The relationship of many such populations with statist rights is fraught in large part due to the realization that recognition of their humanity is dependent upon statist logics that are largely outside of their influence. Given colonial histories of equating humanity with legal personhood and dehumanization through withholding of rights, for some, this raises the grave concern that the more we approach “humanity as a juridical status, the more dehumanization is possible” (Esmeir Reference Esmeir2006, 1549–50). In the case of migrants the disenfranchisement of many alongside the enfranchisement of some, particularly through racialized divisions, has left traces that continue to shape debates (Valdez Reference Valdez2021).

This historical experience raises profound questions about the presumed universality of statist rights. For the colonized, the rupture between pre-colonial norms and colonial legal structures was intense, and critically, empowered selectively while using the language of universal access. Statist rights were often imposed by colonial regimes, and while this created opportunities for some, others were marginalized in profound ways. For instance, as a result of colonial legal changes, the property rights of the wife were pitted against the rights of the sister in matrilineal contexts of South India where women were the primary inheritors of property. In the interest of standardized statist rights and in accordance with British social norms colonial legal regimes ultimately skewed inheritance rights in the interest of men. Based on these and other examples, the feminist theorist Nivedita Menon (Reference Menon2004, 8–9) has suggested that the language of rights clearly “empowered some subaltern sections against indigenous elites, but contrary to the claim of this language to universality, was not unambiguously emancipatory for all. Indeed, it had devastating consequences for many subaltern sections which were drastically marginalized and disciplined by the operation of modern codes of identity and governance.” Menon’s argument cautions in approaching statist rights as universal vehicles of justice and seeking resolution to political concerns through state-enforced laws alone.

While some see human rights as having the potential to move beyond such colonial histories there are important limitations to consider here too. In the first instance, human right enforcement remains dependent upon states. Second, there are important questions about the role played by human rights regime in diverting political energies away from other utopias proposed by revolutionary struggles in the then recently decolonized states of the Global South and continued patterns of paternalistic universalism in the architecture of the human rights regime set up in the shadow of empire and racism (Moyn Reference Moyn2010). In later work, Moyn (Reference Moyn2018) traces the development of theories of global justice in Anglo-American political philosophy against the backdrop of decolonization as well as the New International Economic Order, and the increasing orientation of the field toward a rights-based approach. This, he suggests, oriented the field away from a focus on structures of persistent inequality to providing justice to “deserving individuals” through legal minimums without engaging deeply with structural analyses (Moyn Reference Moyn2018, 159). More egregiously for many, the institutionalization of corporate property rights and the internationalization of human rights are parallel, historically contemporary moves that have entrenched dispossession at the same time as promising greater freedom and equality. For some activists and scholars like D’Souza (Reference D’Souza2018, 69) the move by some activists to constrain the IMF and global corporations through a recourse to human rights is deeply ironic because, “the more legal ‘persons’ (corporations and economic actors) are required to behave like natural person, to respect and comply with ‘human’ rights responsibilities, the greater is the acceptance, recognition, and reification of the hypostatised legal ‘person’ as an equal of the natural person.” In this context, while corporations claim rights at par with natural persons, they have many more resources at their disposal than individuals.

For Global South activists like D’Souza (Reference D’Souza2018, 71) the implication is clear: “the struggle against capitalism is the struggle against imperialism and its ideology of rights.” Others are concerned to delineate the precise relationship between human rights and market fundamentalism or neoliberalism moving beyond historical correlation. For Moyn (Reference Moyn2018, 216) a key concern about human rights is that “that they are unambitious in theory and ineffectual in practice in the face of market fundamentalism’s success.” The dramatic downsizing of ambition and relatedly, a methodological focus on the individual meant that human rights could not offer meaningful resistance to sharply increasing inequality within a neoliberal framework. Thus, when philosophers framed debates about the privatization of public resources and institutions in terms of rights of one group against another, some worried that this “will yield us at best a flimsy defence of the right conclusions for the wrong reasons, and at worst an ideological smokescreen for a perverse and damaging system” (Finlayson Reference Finlayson2020, 128). The dominance of abstracted and statist visions of justice in debates about global justice as well as migration, means that there is at times a profound disconnect between the political and philosophical modes of thinking, such that it is possible to get away with deeply racist assertions regarding who is allowed to enter a state and on what conditions (Finlayson Reference Finlayson2020).

The occlusions associated with statist rights are linked quite profoundly to the abstraction of politics as an autonomous sphere of human life, hived off from social and embodied life that tends to define philosophical approaches. Such an abstraction of politics brings at least two key problems when we consider rights. First, the distance from social life might render statist rights meaningless for precisely those individuals and groups who rights are meant to support (Nielson Reference Nielson2000). Not only might they not see those rights as addressing their substantive concerns, but the process of accessing those rights might create significant challenges for them. Second, and central to my argument here, this abstraction and distance from social life, strengthens the legitimacy and control of the state. Reducing the inherent richness of human interaction and obscuring the force that moral economies of relationships play, the reification of the politico-juridical sphere leads to strengthening the role of state institutions in managing social life. In the context of gender liberation, this gives rise, for Wendy Brown, to a profound paradox regarding statist legal rights. First, echoing Marxist concerns regarding rights she wants us to recall that historically, “rights almost always serve as a mitigation—not a resolution—of subordinating powers” (Brown Reference Brown2000, 231). Then she lays out the paradox in the context of gender justice “the more highly specified are rights as rights for women, the more likely they are to build that fence around us at that site, regulating rather than challenging the conditions within” and yet, the more abstract they are the more they are likely to benefit dominant members of society, in this case, men (231–2). That is, statist rights can also end up reinforcing unjust hierarchies quite profoundly.

My argument here builds upon but goes beyond recognizing the paradoxical role of rights to questioning the association of universal provision of justice, within and across states, through statist rights that contemporary political theorists of migration continue to rely upon. The lack of a relationship with the state among the muhajirs I interacted with is not as unusual as political theorists are primed to believe. The sudden and somewhat contingent rise of the nation-state as a political institution in the twentieth century is beginning to receive some attention among historians and historical sociologists (Li and Hicks Reference Li and Hicks2016; Wimmer and Feinstein Reference Wimmer and Feinstein2010). Burbank and Cooper (Reference Burbank and Cooper2010, 1) reminded readers a decade ago that “the world of nation-states we take for granted is barely sixty years old.” Rather than taking the nation-state as a given and a relationship with it as a universal, it is worth pausing to think about both its very recent appearance and variegated relationship with it across the globe. While ideas about nation-states have existed for two centuries the actual rise in this institutional form is a twentieth-century phenomenon, its peak coinciding with decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century. The irony here is that many anticolonial thinkers and movements were, for different reasons, deeply suspicious of states as well as nations, concerned about the colonial legacies embedded in statist legal structures and proposed a variety of political units other than the nation-state (Fanon [1963] Reference Fanon2004; Mantena Reference Mantena2012; Mehta Reference Mehta2010; Harper Reference Harper2020; Iqtidar Reference Iqtidar2021). Yet “successful” decolonization was recognized through the formation of a nation-state as the inheritor of colonial administration, a process facilitated by international agencies like the United Nations and departing colonial powers (Mazower Reference Mazower2009).

Of particular relevance to questions of migration is the process through which borders delineating many of these states were drawn to reflect colonial interests and power games. Tribes, ethnic groups and sometimes even villages were divided callously. Like many others around the Global South, muhajirs from tribal areas of Pakistan continue to live through precisely that colonial legacy and reject the border drawn between Pakistan and Afghanistan. By accepting and reinforcing the nation-state’s legitimacy as the most viable container of society and consequently self-determination, theorists of migration have underplayed questions about whether states can be vehicles of justice especially given concerns about the legacy of colonialism in the order of sovereign states. For these and related reasons, an anticolonial perspective needs “to dethrone the bounded territorial sovereign state as the primary site of collective self-determination” (Lu Reference Lu and Bell2019, 270). Indeed, for many of the muhajirs I engaged with the state was an active obstacle to their existing norms and institutions of collective self-determination, and the border cutting across family and other associative relationships, an imposition. As part of this self-determination they explicitly acknowledged duties as an expression of their agency, and I turn now toward the place of obligations in thinking about alternative visions of justice.

RESPONSIBILITY AND AGENCY

Decolonial and anticolonial scholarship on rights has highlighted not just colonial imperatives baked into statist justice but the epistemic erasure of alternatives. As decolonial scholars engage more deeply with historically marginalized traditions of thought, an important, yet relatively underacknowledged, theme can be discerned: the centrality of collective and individual responsibility/duty in facilitating justice in contrast to the emphasis on individual entitlements in statist rights. Haqq too underscores obligation, and approaches concerns regarding non-normative individuals and social groups through the development of an ethic of responsibility.

Drawing upon the Sikh tradition, Sokhi-Bulley (Reference Sokhi-Bulley2023, 2) pushes us to imagine a politics of solidarity with “strangers,” including racialized immigrants, moving “both beside and beyond the confines of legal rights” by centering hukam, and the related ethic of service and obligation. In her reading hukam foregrounds duty as part of a cosmological orientation that mandates friendship with the stranger, in terms of sharing the political and social burden that the stranger carries. For Sokhi-Bulley hukam as a way of life imbued with this ethic of service (seva) pushes its members to speak to their duty toward and entitlement of the stranger, be they racialized refugees or caste outsiders, “as opposed to the collective,” as the normative (Sokhi-Bulley Reference Sokhi-Bulley2023, 7). Haqq demonstrates similar plasticity and is open to addressing different substantive concerns. It has been mobilized in recent years by queer activists and migrant women to highlight both their own agency and the responsibility of those around them through collectives such as Halal and Queer (Haq) and Apna Haq that seek to change social norms. While there is often significant suspicion regarding concepts associated with religious traditions, it is useful to remind ourselves that in the last century, egregious harm to the marginalized has been wrought through statist impositions of truncated versions of sharia, while orientalist conceptions of static Muslim communal norms continue to inform much legal debate including in predominantly Muslim countries.

The centrality of responsibility in alternative epistemologies is more readily accessible in a different body of scholarship that is beginning to coalesce into a debate about the Rights of Nature among scholars concerned with environmental justice. Some have argued for assigning legal personhood and rights to the environment in the hope that such rights would protect the environment, and indigenous peoples. Scholars resisting this move claim that in practice assigning legal rights to nature has led to an increase in the commodification of natural resources as well as the legitimization of statist control (Radcliffe Reference Radcliffe2012) and naturalized Western juridical norms as universal (Rawson and Mansfield Reference Rawson and Mansfield2018). This is particularly the case when indigenous epistemologies and traditions of thought, such as Aymara and Quechua or Sumak Kawsay were drawn upon with an intention to provide an overlap with statist legal rights. Building more productively on differences, some have argued for shifting the focus away from rights and entitlements to thinking with the emphasis in indigenous epistemologies on obligation. Birrell and Matthews (Reference Birrell and Matthews2020, 284) suggest seriously considering alternatives that “begin with a question of obligation” so that we can focus on “concerns that are occluded by rights and the priority normally afforded rights-bearing subjects.” Such a move requires moving beyond the association with duties as primarily conservative and invested in maintaining the status quo. To think about obligations seriously and move beyond statist rights as universal requires precisely the unlearning the Scott spoke of regarding the uniquely and universally emancipatory role of rights in European history and their place in political projects of progress.

I have argued here that the ideas and practices associated with haqq braid together collective and individual ethical responsibilities as well as entitlements, support greater openness to engagement across multiple registers, emphasize social relationship and shift the focus away from state enforcement. We can, therefore, approach haqq as both practice and concept. As socially embedded, deeply relational practice haqq has wide resonance among at least a third of the world’s population. Practices related to haqq are not universal. Instead of universality, my interest here is in noting the generalizability, beyond Pakistan, of haqq across North Africa to South-East Asia. Thinking through the divergence between statist rights and haqq as articulated by my interlocutors mandates in the first instance a recognition of the variation in historical experiences and relationships with states and disabusing ourselves of the idea that statist rights are universal vehicles of justice. This does not mean jettisoning statist rights altogether but appreciating their limitations as well as the value of more specific responses rather than searching for universal ones. For instance, in proposing a decolonization of the ethics of migration by following the lives of transborder Oaxacan communities that exceed the boundaries of the American and Mexican states, Amy Reed-Sandoval (Reference Reed-Sandoval2016, 103) proposes solutions specific to transborder communities and the need to engage with the diversity of the migration experiences, beyond the “limited, philosophically speaking…simple categories of ‘immigrant community’ or ‘national minority.’”

Even as we recognize the regionally embedded practical valence of haqq, we can also approach it as a generative concept available for deployment in situations where we wish to denote or think about non-statist justice. Thinking with the concept shifts the focus toward the agency of the migrants in political and epistemic terms. How would it change the ethical questions that shape our discussion if we approach Global South migrants with a view that rather than “being powerless, refugees have the power to completely disrupt our theoretical framework for understanding the international political order of things” (Cole Reference Cole2020a, 36)? My interlocutors were insistent about being equal moral agents and as such they recognized that they carry duties as well as entitlements. As equal moral agents, they expected to demonstrate responsibility themselves and demanded reciprocal responsibility from their new neighbors. This was foundational to their claims for justice. In arguing that victims also have duties as equal moral agents, Visanthakumar (Reference Visanthakumar2018, 471) has reminded us that we “do, and should, look askance at resistance movements that involve victims only as mute objects of rescue.” As a concept haqq builds in an explicit role for migrant agency in building relationships of obligation and entitlement. Agency, however, is not the same as success. I do not suggest here that practices of haqq are always successful in facilitating justice for migrants. Of course, neither are statist rights.

An important implication of thinking with the concept of haqq and of global south migrants as agentive actors is that it opens the potential for building transnational alliances based on mutual engagement rather than as acts of charity and benevolence. Foregrounding colonial legacies as well as transnational relationships of solidarity rather than benevolence and abstract ethical commitments, we might, as Valdez (Reference Valdez and Bell2019) has argued persuasively, move beyond statist visions and focus instead on alliances between marginalized segments of society across sub-national and supra-national levels. Such alliances can become effective means of addressing shared injustices as many twentieth-century anti-colonial activists and thinkers had proposed in their bid to move beyond the nation-state. As an already influential conception of non-statist justice haqq can help us think of “non-scripted futures” beyond liberal, statist rights (Odysseos Reference Odysseos2023, 17) and a new “long term agenda to challenge the very terms set by existing frameworks” (Menon Reference Menon2004, 238).

Ultimately, most borders in the world are neither fully open nor closed, they are porous. Thinking with and through the concept of haqq, with its emphasis on collective as well as individual responsibility and entitlement beyond the state to enable justice produces a different ethical question for theorists of migration. Rather than focusing on the state’s right to exclude, an important question that emerges for our consideration is: how should I and my community respond to migrants and refugees?