Fixing the past, mediating the future? Human rights brokers in Nepal and Sri Lanka

In this article we focus on human rights brokerage in Nepal and Sri Lanka – two countries undergoing different kinds of post-war crises, which opened spaces and demands for brokers. We zoom in on the lives of two individuals who became human rights brokers in these turbulent moments of change, and explore their positionalities, roles and effects as brokers. We seek to move beyond simplistic portrayals of such brokers as a dissembling, self-interested and professionalized class of gatekeepers, and instead focus on the brokers’ narratives, understandings, and everyday practices. Based on detailed life history research, this article reveals a more complex picture of brokerage during crisis. It is argued that we need to take seriously the accounts of human rights brokers, how they understand their own positionality, actions and impacts on society. We focus on the complex temporalities surrounding human rights brokerage in post war contexts; how brokers mediate between a traumatic past (linked to human rights abuses and justice denied) and a desired future (involving restitution, access to rights and justice) in the context of an unstable present marked by violence, churning politics, and institutional inertia. Human rights brokers’ ability to navigate these contested understandings of time is shaped by their own past histories and their current positionalities. Whilst being cautious not to generalize from the lives of two human rights brokers, our work offers a corrective to accounts of brokerage as a value-free, transactional activity; instead, we reveal how, for these brokers at least, ethics, values and political beliefs played an important role in driving their actions, even though declared goals were rarely met in practice.