# Factualize and commensurate human rights violations and organized violence

Oriana Bernasconi, Paola Díaz

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Oriana Bernasconi, Paola Díaz. Factualize and commensurate human rights violations and organized violence. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2022, 5 (1), 10.1080/25729861.2022.2128595. hal-04715572

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# Factualize and commensurate human rights violations and organized violence

Oriana Bernasconi & Paola Díaz

**To cite this article:** Oriana Bernasconi & Paola Díaz (2022) Factualize and commensurate human rights violations and organized violence, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 5:1, 2128595, DOI: 10.1080/25729861.2022.2128595

**To link to this article:** https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2128595

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Published online: 18 Nov 2022.

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THEMATIC CLUSTER: DOCUMENT, FACTUALIZE AND COMMENSURATE
INTRODUCTION

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OPEN ACCESS

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# Factualize and commensurate human rights violations and organized violence

Oriana Bernasconi ID a and Paola Díaz ID b

aSociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile; bInstituto Milenio Violencia y Democracia-ANID, Santiago, Chile

In the last decades, Science, Technology and Society studies (STS) have extended their analyses to many issues beyond the classic topics with which the field was born in the 1960s (Jasanoff et al. 2001), including feminist and post-colonial studies, and research on racism and social inequalities, among other issues (Felt et al. 2017). Despite this significant expansion, the field of human rights still does not receive systematic attention from STS studies. With this Cluster, we want to contribute to bridge this gap, through empirical works concerning human rights violations and violence, past or present, whether they refer to ancestral forms of life, the death and disappearance of migrants at borders, controversies surrounding abortion, the quantification of forced disappearance and forced displacement of people, or international solidarity networks towards those suffering from exile.

Human rights safeguard a basic principle for democratic coexistence: the dignity of individuals. This is a field of political practice and also a burgeoning field of study that is moving beyond traditional disciplines (philosophy, law, and political science) to become pluralistic and interdisciplinary. In the last few years, fields that used to question the normativity and universality of these ideas, such as anthropology and sociology, have put their intellectual resources at work in the service of the question of the social sustenance of these principles and of the costs of their breakdown, providing critical examinations of local problems. Beyond universalizable principles at the moral or legal level, the social sciences have also interrogated the process of formation of human rights as principles, and the dynamics of violence (political, structural, or criminal) that cause aggression, damage or destruction of communities and of natural, cultural, or spiritual environments (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Bourgois 2012; Makaremi 2016; Melenotte 2020; Malesevic 2020, 2017).

Probably due to the heterogeneity of actors and knowledge that contribute to its development today, the human rights field is organized less by a specific conceptual perspective than by a common topic: the serious attacks against the integrity of individuals, communities, and society, perpetrated by State actors and other armed actors, such as militias, hitmen, civil guards at international borders (“vigilantes”) and self-defense groups (Cushman 2012; De Greiff 2006).

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Although STS studies have been characterized by a constructivist perspective, this does not mean assuming a relativist position and, even less, adhering to some kind of human rights negationism. For us, the importance of mobilizing the tools of STS studies and their theoretical and methodological background to investigate issues of human rights and violence lies precisely in the fact that this allows us to question how – with what concrete practices, under what circumstances, and with the participation of which agencies, materialities, and knowledge – violence and/or human rights violations go from being a lived experience of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses to a public, recognizable, claimable, and credible fact; and how the harm caused is addressed by the affected communities and societies as a whole.

Over the last ten years, efforts have emerged, albeit fragmented, to link the field of human rights to STS studies or their antecedents (such as ethnomethodology, the sociology of quantification, or the social studies of science). A heterogeneous body of research has been trying to explain how societies deal with the effects of these harms, how truth, justice, and memory are accomplished, and what societies, communities, and individuals can do to prevent events of this type to ever happen again (Straus and Waldorf 2011).

Without aspiring to exhaustiveness, by reviewing this literature, we identified studies that inquire into the constitution of this type of facts; the practices of documentation, classification, nomination, and quantification by means of which human rights violations come to be described as such and are processed to confront the damage caused, including the circulation of truth accounts, and the irruption of controversies and countermemories around processes of accountability of human rights violations. Research has also been done on the history and role of science and technology in the human rights field, and on the human rights knowledge infrastructures addressing these abuses and their legacies.

In the following, we briefly outline this background that serves as a basis for introducing the two processes we proposed to explore in this Cluster: factualization and commensuration of human rights violations and violence. Analyzing what this Cluster was able to encompass, we will end this introduction with a reflection on the lines of research, themes, and problems that remain as future challenges.

# 1. Human rights knowledge: infrastructures and the history of science and technology in the human rights field

STS studies have been particularly appropriate to shed light on research that approaches human rights crises and their management from the point of view of knowledge infrastructures. Hence, we have research on the production, circulation, and effects of artifacts, technologies, and devices of documentation, knowledge, and management of episodes where state or para-state forces have exercised violence affecting the physical integrity of individuals, communities, and their environments.

Based on an ethnography of the State, Mora-Gámez (2016) accompanied the processes of registration and qualification of victims of the Colombian armed conflict, studying how public officials and victimized persons assemble a particular notion of victimhood through State projects and their artifacts of qualification, registration, and rights restitution.
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Through ethnographies of and about human rights archives, Bernasconi and coauthors (2019) have traced genealogies of documentary artifacts that recorded the State terrorism of the Pinochet era in Chile (1973–1990), highlighting their role in the production of insur- gent knowledge and in the organization of a form of peaceful resistance to State violence. Based on a detailed analysis of the processes of nomination, definition, classification, measurement, monitoring, and reporting of victimizing facts known and denounced by human rights organizations in Chile during the dictatorship and documented in their archives, Bernasconi (2018) and Bernasconi et al. (2019) argue that the production of knowledge about human rights violations by organized civil society helped to make State terrorism intelligible as it unfolded and to dispute the regime of what could be said about these atrocities in the midst of the dictatorship. This work has shown how human rights documentation not only aims to gather key information, it also seeks to “exert control over the meaning of the events in question and fix their value” (Bernasconi 2019, 147). In turn, the work of Díaz (2012), Díaz and Gutiérrez (2008, 2009), and Bernas- coni and Ruiz (2018) has focused on the categorization processes (Widmer 2010) through which a violent, chaotic, and traumatic situation becomes nameable and identifiable as “disappearance for political reasons” while the subject “detainee-disappeared” emerges. In this same line, and based on archival work and interviews with victims and experts, Díaz (2014, 2017) has analyzed the datafication of human rights violations, through the mobilization of expert knowledge in the two truth commissions established in Chile after the dictatorship (in 1990 and 2003; Diaz 2009).

Other sociotechnical artifacts have been analyzed in their capacity to mobilize human rights demands. Human rights archives have been examined as political technologies of knowledge, resistance, and memory (Bernasconi, Ruiz and Lira 2018) and as affective and affiliative assemblages (Bernasconi 2022, 2023), while forensic medical examinations have been approached as tools for anti-rape activism in the United States (Morse 2019). In their exploration of State reparation and human rights restitution policies in post-conflict Colombia, Mora-Gámez and Brown (2018) follow the trajectories of a psychosocial proto- col of emotional recovery as a technology of reparation, showing how state and psycho- logical projects intersect and how alternative forms of reparation emerge. In their studies of violence in and of the borders of the Global North, particularly the US-Mexico border (Sonora/Arizona), Díaz and Martínez (2020) have examined the classificatory processes by which dead and missing persons are categorized in this border zone; the procedures by which dead and missing migrants are counted there; and the practices that attach ethical significance to these lives, deaths, and disappearances (Díaz 2020; Díaz and Nicolosi 2019).

Another group of studies shows how forms of knowledge production and technological capabilities intertwine with processes of truth, justice, and repair. On the one hand, regard- ing the role of the history of science and technology in the human rights arena, Medina (2018) has studied the role of computers and forensic sciences and technologies in the way Chile has approached the history of human rights abuses during the Pinochet era. In turn, Morse (2014) has examined the use of medical evidence to document mass rape since the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and Moon (2020a, 2020b) has researched the application of forensics techniques in humanitarian contexts. In so doing, Moon asks how forensic knowledge redefines death and how it challenges the human rights paradigm itself. On the other hand, examining international human rights organizations reports, Moon (2012) considers
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how discursive forms that seem indigenous to human rights and human rights advocacy stimulate and limit historicism and courses of action in this field. A number of publications have examined how documentary artifacts and human rights archives have substantiated the working of truth commissions and provided valuable evidence in the criminal prosecutions of crimes against humanity in Chile (Bernasconi, Lira, and Ruiz 2018; Bernasconi, Mansilla, and Suárez 2018; Accatino, Bernasconi, and Collins 2022), showing how human rights activism knowledge production fuels State recognition of wrongdoings and the production of official truths regarding past harm. Additionally, Merry (2016) has shown how the recent production of human rights indicators, standards, and metrics has served to create a global language that allows to evaluate the performance of States with respect to human rights standards and to ask for compliance, at the cost of homogenizing dissimilar realities and abstracting behind the numbers the complexity of these perpetrations.

## 2. Truth accounts: truth commission and transitional justice processes

Within the field of human rights studies, as transitions from authoritarian, totalitarian, and/or racist regimes (in the case of South Africa) to – at least procedurally – democratic regimes took place in Latin America and Eastern Europe, expert practices and theories on what has been called transitional justice were developed. While these studies did not make explicit use of heuristic tools from the STS field or its antecedents, as we shall see below, some critical research has devoted analysis to the procedures by which truth commissions have established their truth accounts. In this sense, these analyses contribute to a fruitful dialogue between human rights perspectives and STS studies, accounting for the social processes through which truth accounts about past crimes are constituted, and showing the mechanisms through which the objectivity of violence is constructed, without simply considering it self-evident or defining it normatively, according to moral and/or legal principles.

The practices and theories of transitional justice consist of producing a truth account of political crimes, outside the judicial arena, as a political response to what is called the "right to truth" of the victims (Mendez 2006). Transitional justice refers to a conception of justice based primarily on the reparation of victims and not criminalizing those responsible for human rights violations, other than in exceptional cases. In this way, transitional justice aims to reconcile the interests of former officials of authoritarian/totalitarian/racists regimes with the demands for justice of the victims, their families, and human rights organizations in order to rebuild the nation-state and legitimize institutions. Truth and reconciliation commissions are the most popular device of this type of restorative justice (Lefranc 2002).

During the last decades, a plethora of studies on truth commissions has been published. Schematically, we can identify two bodies of research. First, those that describe the public work of commissions and their concordance, or not, with the self-declared missions of these devices, without delving into the performative practices that these infrastructural devices perform (Hayner 1994, 2001; Teitel 2000, 2003). Most of these studies endorse the therapeutic objective that the political discourse of the democratizing elites ascribes to these commissions and their reports, namely, to heal the nation and thus achieve reconciliation.

The second group of studies, mostly based on the analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Buur 2001; Wilson 2001) examined the political effects
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and the infrastructural aspects of this Commission. These studies analyze what Wilson (2001, 2003) calls "the methodology of the commission," that is, the legal practices (and not only the principles) concretely applied by officials and commissioners, the bureaucratic and informational practices that come to establish categories (of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses) to constitute what is finally known as a public truth account.

For her part, in her study on the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture in Chile, Díaz (2012, 2014, 2017) analyzes the procedures that allow a *translation* of the lived experience of violence (enforced disappearance and torture) into qualitative (lists) and quantitative (numbers, statistics, and public use of statistics) artifacts as a way of "putting into equivalence" (Desrosières 2006) experiences that, in principle, are incommensurable. These translations make it possible to create a panoramic view (Latour 2006) of State violence and thus to constitute the category of victim benefiting from a reparation. However, and at the same time, these translations leave untamed remainders – the singular experiences – and sometimes obliterate the critical and political potential of violated persons and groups that resist the categorization of victims in which these transitional justice devices frame them. Bernasconi, Mansilla and Suárez (2019) examined the declassification processes of the information gathered by Chile's National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, placed under embargo for 50 years. This popular declassification process led by declarants, artists, and lawyers, has allowed survivors to learn, years later, about the documents produced by the State to qualify their cases, including the transcript of their own testimony, and the inscriptions of the commission's deliberation process on the various documentary artifacts created for these purposes. The process has also made it possible to learn about the cases that did not qualify and were not part of the official report.

By examining the relationship between the visible part of truth commissions and the "backstage, invisible, inside of the bureaucratic machinery of the truth production" (Buur 2001, 150) these works contribute to the development of knowledge about issues that are at the core of STS perspectives, such as the infrastructural processes involved in the constitution of public facts or the construction of objectivity, and the processes by which the world acquires intelligibility and consistency.

Infrastructural perspectives on the production of truth about human rights violations and violence do not imply relativizing, much less denying these grave afflictions. Indeed, these authors recognize the crucial value of truth commission reports in combating the denialism of repressive regimes. However, showing how these truth accounts are formulated implies moving away from a naïve positivism and accepting that documenting the facts is not a simple act of neutral transcription. On the contrary, qualifying a person as a victim implies an active practice of evaluating the testimony according to a knowledge of the context (knowing whether the bar where the violence occurred was racist or not, in the case studied by Buur 2001) and a concrete application of the legal, classificatory and bureaucratic procedure of the commission.

## 2.1. This Cluster

In the human rights field, human rights artifacts and procedures have been generally interrogated in terms of the information they carry rather than according to their forms of constitution, circulations, and entanglement with legal, medical, political, ethical,
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and cultural processes. As indicated in the section above, epistemic principles, questions, concepts, and tools of STS are being used to identify and explore the role and effects of a series of infrastructural (Bowker 1994) and, often, “invisible” (Leigh Star 2010, 382) operations – such as nominations, classifications, categorizations or typologies – and of various “non-strident” objects that participate in the factualization and commensuration of serious human rights violations and different kinds of violence: anthropomorphic files of disappeared people, photographic or audiovisual captures of victimizing events, passports, birth certificates, and other identity documents: “humble” (Miller 1987, 107), relegated objects that, nevertheless, possess great power due to their capacity to conventionalize behaviors and norms” (Bernasconi 2019, 29) and to attest the existence of beings, facts, and policies of violence. Objects that are able to “travel” across time and space (Gatti 2014; Díaz 2014; Nelson 2015; Toom 2020) and even to change their material support (e.g. oral to paper to digital), reaching other processes and interrogating new generations regarding the legacies of violence. As we have seen, governmental or alternative operations and objects mediate the management of these violences; generating universes, discrete phenomena, stable populations, and “thinkable subjects” (Gatti 2017). Operations and objects that, at the same time, are continually challenged, broken, and overwhelmed by the occurrence of violence; horrific actions that exceed our nomination and categorization repertoires; even more so our quantification systems. Extraordinary and mobile practices, in dislocated states, with their visibility and clandestine games and their dehumanizing methods, designed to expel people from the field of citizenship and more radically to “erase” men and women from the face of the earth. Bodies without a name, disappeared without a body, “known unknowns,” liminalities (Gatti 2014; Bernasconi and Ruiz 2018; Diéguez 2021) that appear from the margins of our “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2000), rattling (Martínez 2020) the available objectification systems.

This Cluster aims at strengthening the link between the field of STS and that of human rights, by examining two central operations that are part of the management of severe human rights violations and violence: factualizing and commeasuring.

## 3. Factualizating

Studies on the factualization of the world or experience have been at the heart of ethno-methodology since its foundation by Garfinkel (1967). In fact, the denomination of this current as “ethno-methodology” means that they transformed what until then was only a “resource” of sociology and other social sciences, i.e. methods, into a real “topic” of research (Zimmerman and Pollner 1973). Thus, they concentrated on analyzing the mundane and specialized methods (procedures, practices, and activities) through which the social order is formed, transformed, and perpetuated. In Pollner’s words:

> For radical inquiry [the ethnomethdology], by contrast, the phenomenon *par excellence* is not the world *per se* but worlding, the work whereby a world *per se* and the attendant concerns which derive from a world *per se* - truth and error, to mention two- are constructed and sustained. (Pollner 1987, 7)

This entails a shift in the understanding of methodology: it is not a more or less effective technique for discovering an external world that is already out there, but implies affirming
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that we all live in ethno-methods and use ethno-methods that shape our lifeworld (as social scientists or in everyday life).

The contributions of ethnomethodology to STS studies are central, although they have not been sufficiently highlighted today (Lynch 2011). Among others, ethnomethodology pioneered the "practical turn," later adopted by STS studies, which involves studying "the situated accomplishment of social practices as an empirical topic" (Sormani et al. 2017, 114–115). In the practical turn, factualization has been studied as the analysis of the processes and procedures by which the mere claims of individuals or groups – e.g. claiming a social benefit by arguing that it is needed (Zimmerman 1974) – are transformed into a matter of fact. This occurs, for example, when testimonies acquire the status of evidence through standardized procedures and criteria applied by institutions that have acquired the authority to apply them, such as courts of law or a given state administration (Dulong 1998).

Inspired by ethnomethodology's conceptual tools we refer to the factual constitution or factualization of the reality of a crime, violence and/or violation of human rights (Dulong 1998; Zimmerman 1974) regarding those operations of translation of lived experience; a unique and immeasurable situated experience (Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2006; Díaz 2017). These translations necessarily imply degrees of deindexicalization and can comprise verifiable qualitative abstractions in the use of categories, typologies, and forms (Thévenot 1986), and quantitative abstractions expressed in numbers, figures, and statistics (Desrosières 2010).

These translations are carried out each time an event or experience is recorded or registered, in a testimony, in a list of victims, or in an accounting record of violence. With the register we go from the level of private to public experience, from events to facts, from the "world," the flow of life, to the "reality" formatted or framed in forms and equivalences (Boltanski 2009). More fundamentally, factualizing is a way of inscribing phenomena that would otherwise be unrepresentable in the "distribution of the sensible" (Rancière 2000).

In recent years, in Europe and the United States we find an example in the mass death of migrants at international borders. These deaths have been classified as a systematic issue resulting from migration and border policies thanks to the objectifications and records carried out by militant groups (Last et al. 2017; Heller & Pécoud 2020).

Nevertheless, the attestation is not a re-presentation of reality; rather, it constitutes it and contributes to creating new distinctions and social categories such as "victim," "disappeared," "genocide," "femicide" among several others that are so common today that they seem self-evident. However, all these categories are the result of the sociotechnical work of attestation, registration, and formalization that allows them to circulate and be sustained over time through activities of various fields (legal, administrative, pedagogical, and cultural).

Some of the questions that we were interested in addressing in this specific dimension of the Cluster were: what kind of practices, devices, and operations participate in the factualization of crimes, violence, and violation of human rights? What are the effects of factualization practices? What epistemological, political, and ethical paths can be traced by following the registry of victims and victimizing events? What are some of the dynamics between objectifications of violence and the break/rupture/subversion of such objectifications?
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4. Commensuration

Commensurability has long been studied as a theoretical object, especially in philosophy, while been considered a self-evident and non-problematic practice in the social sciences. However, since the 1990s, especially in anthropology and sociology, empirical research has been conducted on commensuration as a social process and as an object of study in its own right (Porter 1995; Radin 1996; Espeland and Stevens 1998; Desrosières 1991; 1992, 1995, Zelizer 1994; Verran 2010, 2012; Devlin 2000; Andreas & Greenhill 2010; Mennicken and Espeland 2019).

Commensuration entails establishing parameters to bring together a series of experi-
ences and events under a unique criterion, which makes it possible to order them and
stabilize an objective evaluation scale according to a qualitative value (from small to
large, for example, an order of gravity of human rights violations) or a quantitative
value (in numbers and statistics of crimes, violations, victims, etc.) (Bowker and Leigh
Star 2000; Centemeri 2015; Espeland and Stevens 1998). For example, a law, regulation,
or standard that would otherwise be dissimilar and irreducible, as in the particular case
of a person “disappeared” in Chile in 1973 and another “disappeared” in Mexico in
2022. In both cases, qualitative and quantitative commensuration imply homogenization
and equivalence operations in order to organize elements, events, or individuals on the
same level (Desrosières 2006, 2008, 2010).

Both justice and metrics, although in different ways, commensurate. Justice is not
emancipated from ethics and the singularity of jurisprudence, but requires equalizing
the subject and his experiences under the same regulations to distribute penalties and
reparations (Desanti 2004). Metric, on the other hand, is a deindexicalization procedure
that detaches itself from the singular case and the specific situation, and operates by gen-
erating a new universe of visibility that otherwise did not exist: the measurable panorama
of reality.

Emblematic numbers of victims are one of these measurable panoramas, allowing us to
convey part of the magnitude of the violence inflicted to diverse communities around the
world: the 6 million victims of the Holocaust, the 30,000 disappeared from the Argentine
dictatorship or the 50,000 from that of Guatemala, and many more. The production of
figures makes it possible to show and denounce the systematic nature of crimes, raise
general causes and transform this violence into public problems (Díaz 2014; Díaz 2017;
Bernasconi 2018, 2019). Figures also contribute to governmental management of peace
after a conflict, providing synthetic and universal messages capable of impacting large
audiences. A clear example is the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia, which went
through, among others, the closure of the casualty count and the production of a total
number with which to continue acting and affirming the end of a five-decade-long
internal conflict.

The social sciences and humanities have analyzed quantification processes mainly as
devices and technologies of power and knowledge that are at the disposal of the
control of populations, bodies, and the self (Foucault 2004; Rose 1991). Indeed, the
massive quantification of social phenomena is born as part of the State's management,
regulation, and control apparatus (Desrosières 2008, 2014) and is prolonged in different
forms of governmentality. However, as argued long ago by anthropology (Goody 1977)
and recently restated by ethno-accounting studies (Cottereau 2016) and the sociology
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of quantification (Desrosières 2010), quantification practices are, in general, useful not only for governmentality purposes but also to intervene in daily life, objectifying and organizing our practices and social coordination.

As mentioned, the process by which atrocity is quantified is one of the areas in which human rights studies and STS studies (and its antecedents) have begun to converge. In fact, in the face of state, racial, ethnic, or gender violence, various metrics – figures, statistics, trends, distributions, among others – are participating in the identification and monitoring of situations in which human rights have been violated, of situations of non-compliance with obligations regarding these rights, as well as in the justification of the need for new laws and policies in the field (Longard and Fukuda-Parr 2012; Fukuda-Parr 2011; Merry 2016).

In addition to studying the forms in which violence has been quantified (Nelson 2010, 2015) and the procedures for producing metrics of human rights violations, some studies have begun to explore how the field of human rights and globalized and professionalized humanitarianism (Fassin 2016), have been "seduced" (Merry 2016) by metalanguages, among them that of quantification (Merry and Bibler 2013) and data visualization (Rall et al. 2016).

Another field of practice and study of the commensuration of violence and gross human rights violations is the reparation of victims. For this, it is indispensable to establish commensuration operations to measure damages and determine compensation to victims, which has generally been done through symbolic acknowledgments and monetary compensation. Monetary reparation policies have sometimes generated great controversy, and some victims' organizations have called them "blood money" (Hamber and Wilson 2002). First, because the damage is considered irreparable and second because the damages are not comparable given that they are singular experiences and therefore incommensurable (Díaz 2017, Díaz 2018). However, the monetary compensation could be resignified by the victims as in the case studied by Barbot and Dodier (2017) and Dodier and Barbot (2016) where the parents of deceased children, due to the inoculation of the growth hormone in France, invest the money of the compensation in support of medical research or in their criminal proceedings.

The problem of commensurability has as its counterpart that of incommensurability. As defined by Centemeri (2015) this can be an "order incommensurability" when it is a public conflict about the different criteria to value something, according to different "order of worth" (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991). In these conflicts, in various circumstances it is possible to reach a solution that is not entirely satisfactory but operative through compromises between different forms of valuation. However, there are also problems of "constitutive incommensurability" (Raz, 1986 in Centemeri 2015) or, as Centemeri (2015) calls it, "radical incommensurability" when it is not only a matter of disagreements on how commensurate "but whether to commensurate" (Centemeri 2015, 309). This latter form of incommensurability is especially acute with regard to violence and violation of human rights that are often irreducible to a common standard of valuation and resist operations of interchangeability.

How do we commensurate human rights violations? What do we assume when commensurating these abuses? What are the public, political, militant, and governmental uses of human rights violations commensurations? What are the figures for human rights violations made of? What is their social life? What are the limits of the commensuration of the
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experience of violence? These are some of the questions that we were interested in addressing in this axis of the Cluster.

## 5. Contributions overview

The articles in this Cluster deal with different issues related to the violation of human and non-human rights, as well as different forms of violence, based on empirical evidence, mobilizing some of the categories we set out to explore.

The contribution of María Eugenia Ulfe and Roxana Uribe, based on an ethnographic work in the Kukama Kukamiria community of Peru, analyzes what Centemeri (2015) calls "order incommensurability" and "radical incommensurability," regarding the different criteria to commensurate the damages caused by the rupture of the Norperuvian Pipeline in view of a compensation by legal means. This Indigenous community has been one of the most affected by the rupture of this pipeline and has participated in the legal claims against the pipeline. In this context, on the one hand, the problem of incommensurability arises between the parameters and categories of legal compensation and the Kukama KuKamiria community's criteria for assessing the damage. On the other hand, from this conflict of order of incommensurability, emerges the question of the impossibility to commensurate the Indigenous world and the damage caused to it, because there are afflictions that the community deems incommensurable ("radical incommensurability") since they are considered an intrinsic part of their lives and form of life.

Díaz and Fischer study forensic and counter-forensic *factualization devices* (Dulong 1998) (International Committee of the Red Cross, Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner with the NGO Colibrí Center for human rights in Arizona, and Forensic Oceanography) that objectify the death and disappearance of migrants trying to cross both the land border of Mexico with the United States (Sonora/Arizona) and the maritime border between North Africa and Italy through the central Mediterranean Sea. This contribution highlights the importance of considering not only the processes, practices, and technologies of fact constitution (factualization) but also their imbrication in processes of valuation, that is, the attribution of value and importance to the events that have been factualized, in this case to the life, death, and disappearance of people crossing borders. In this sense, the authors call the work of these forensic and counter-forensic devices an "entanglement phenomenon" (Putnam 2002), where the normative (ethical and political) and the factual give rise to the texture of reality.

As we have already seen, the study of factualization processes involves the observation of the practices of production of facts and their transformation into storable, accumulable, and mobilizable data in different contexts, i.e. what Latour (2006) has called "immutable mobile." Moreover, processes of factualization are intertwined with knowledge production. Both processes act politically at least on two levels: how reality is objectified and how knowledge is mobilized in the public space. The work presented in this Cluster by María Torres is concerned with the latter question through an analysis of the controversy between neoconservative and pro-choice groups in their political use of abortion data in Ecuador. The conflict between these positions is highly moral and religious, and those arguments prevailed until recently when the terms of the controversy have become more complex. Although official data in Ecuador are very scarce, given that abortion is illegal (except when the woman's life is at risk or the pregnancy is the
result of rape) now what publicly legitimizes pro-abortion or anti-abortion arguments is neither morality nor religion, but science. This is what Torres calls the datafication of the abortion controversy in Ecuador.

Examining the solidarity network in West Germany for Chilean exiles during Cold War and dictatorial times in Chile, Verónica Troncoso and Francisca Ugarte's contribution mobilizes cartographic resources as a symmetrical and nonhierarchical representation and as a memory artifact conveying international solidarity networks with Chilean exiles. Almost 50 years later, the visual representation of this network, through the voices and archives of key actors, shows how cultural, political, and affective elements fuel transnational solidarity, a movement able to challenge the notions of state sovereignty and of social activism, blurring the limits of the nation-state in favor of an international human rights movement. The spatialization of human rights knowledge that this cartographic work accomplishes, deserves further attention when discussing factualization processes and products: how artifacts and technologies not only help to produce human rights violations knowledge but also how they mobilize such knowledge across places.

The second group of articles addresses the question of commensuration focusing on the quantification of human rights violations. Rather than end products or passive indicators, these articles approach numbers as entities acting in different capacities – ordering, valuing, relating – and thus, participating in handling human rights issues (Holtrop 2018).

The article by Andrés Suarez opens the black box of the official statistical production regarding the number of victims of forced displacement as a consequence of the armed conflict in Colombia, demonstrating that the material on which these calculations are based, i.e. the testimonial accounts of the people affected, is not fixed or immutable but changes depending on state policies and the context of a long-armed conflict. In Suárez's argument, this would explain the differences in the quantifications provided by the 20-year-old official record in relation to other figures produced by social organizations. Moreover, it would also be the reason for the variations in the attribution of responsibility for this event to the different armed actors involved in the conflict. In this case, according to Suárez, opening the black box implies "asking about the conditions under which registration technologies operate and how public policies and the dynamics of the armed conflict can interfere in the production of testimonies that are translated into figures." In this way, Suárez's article posits the question of the quantification production of human rights violations. In this case, quantification is problematic due to an issue of translation of its "raw data"; an inflow experience proving recalcitrant to fixation, as the same conflict it tries to represent. Indeed, numbers do not hold for long when quantifying human rights violations in national contexts. This is especially radical in the case of the practice of enforced disappearances, a crime whose cruelty relies in part on leaving no traces of it. The article by Bernasconi, Jaramillo, and López follows the six decades-long trajectory of the quantification of victims of enforced disappearance in contemporary Latin American history. Exploring the social life of this number in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, it proves that numbers in the human rights field are not rigid; nor are they conspicuous, singular, or permanent and that their transitivity is not an inherent property (Daston 1995, 10) but a mathematical, cognitive, and political achievement. Examining the vitality of transitive, referential, and provisional numbers, this article also points out
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /></figure>

the symbolic and political work numbers do in this field. As inscription devices numbers
capture a practice denied by those responsible, and even if incompletely, they establish
the relation one/many, helping to constitute the event and its magnitude in the public
eye.

The Cluster also includes two book reviews, one by Eva Muzzoppapa of the book *Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America: Documenting Atrocity* (Bernasconi 2019); the other by Fredy Mora-Gámez on the edited collection *Technologies of Human Rights Representation* (Moore and Dawes 2022).

The first book examines the unusual case of documentation of Human Rights violations undertaken by civil society organizations during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Inspired by STS scholarship, it shows how a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a range of technologies, and a complex informational infrastructure emerged, constituting a form of peaceful resistance to an oppressive regime. It also goes on exploring the contribution that state terror documentation practices have made to later processes of state recognition, reparation, justice, and memory in this particular society. In turn, Moore and Dawes's book focuses on the role of technologies in shaping human rights work, and the representation of human rights abuses, bringing to the fore issues of social responsibility of scientific work, assessment of science, symmetry, the relation between legal and scientific fields, and that of digitalization, human rights representations, and cultural memory.

**6. Future lines of inquiry at the crossroads of STS & human rights**

By bringing together empirical research that draws on the principles, approaches, and concepts of STS studies and their antecedents, for investigating and problematizing factualization and commensuration of severe human rights violations and violence, this Cluster poses the challenge of bringing to the field of STS studies two issues that have been difficult to address: the question about the subject, the lived experience and with it, questions of intelligibility, significance, and valuation; and the issue of politics, criticism, and responsibility.

In the human rights field, it is essential to think of the subject as an agent and victim of
violence in order to assign responsibilities and blame (Donnelly 2003; Goodale and Merry
2007), and critically examine how human rights atrocities produce harmed subjectivities
and constrain human intelligibility (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). Exploring factualization
and commensuration practices and procedures, this Cluster contributes to the compre-
hension of the work done by some of the sociotechnical materialities through which
those lives are claimed: oral traces, corpses, mass graves, identification documents,
DNA samples, digital traces, visual prosthesis, polluted water, registration forms, songs,
or legal appeals. It also brings to the fore different epistemic communities – legal, scien-
tific, Indigenous, artistic – contributing to make such lives matter. It also shows how the
material products of processes of claiming, denouncing, disputing, counting, or adminis-
trating are of use for hegemonic and insurgent knowledge production and for memory
practices in the hand of other past actors and new generations, who may relate to
those harmed lives through current concerns. In terms of future challenges, we believe
STS studies, and more globally, materialistic, pragmatic, and immanent sensibilities,
may contribute to raise a posthuman human rights agenda. An agenda that takes dis-
tance from humanism as a political economy that locates "man" as the epicenter of
progress (Braidotti 2013), and opens up the field to the critical examination of forms of inflicting and repairing harm to fellow beings alongside Earthbeings (De la Cadena 1995).

Although texts such as Diaz and Fischer's, in this Cluster, deal with the question of the relationship between the processes of factualization and valuation, this is a line of research that could be expanded at the crossroads of STS and human rights studies, since it addresses a central issue: the intertwining of ethical and factual issues in human rights violations and in any event of violence. In terms of processes and practices of valuation, it also seems central to us to expand and deepen studies on incommensurability, as Ulfe and Uribe do in this Cluster, examining its ethical, political, and socio-psychic implications.

The question of politics (in the broad sense of the term) has been addressed in different ways by all the articles in this Cluster and deserves to be extended in future studies. In particular, how infrastructural processes (often considered objective and technical) are imbricated in local, national, and international political processes. Some contributions to this Cluster examine processes of factualization and commensuration across national borders (Díaz & Fisher; Troncoso & Ugarte) and in different societies (Bernasconi, Jaramillo, and López), revealing the central role that geopolitics plays in the human rights field, both at the level of the production or the denunciation and sanction of such transgressions. Another fertile area of work relates to human rights violations remediation, statehood, and international law. Questions may be raised concerning how access to rights and compensations is mediated by governmental and international information infrastructures and sociotechnical artifacts, protocols, and standards; how such processes enact forms of inclusion and exclusion and how, sometimes, emergent arrangements defy instituted boundaries. The movement of human rights cases between the local, national, and international levels is also a fruitful area of exploration, particularly, how standards of justice or accountability implemented at one level are claimed to be met at another.

This Cluster has made evident that the space of critique does not rely solely in the deconstruction of governmental practices regarding human rights abuses, such as for some versions of humanitarism (Fassin 2016), but also in the examination of the role played by alternative, counterhegemonic, and dissident representations of human rights violations. In the field of statistics production, one of the cases we have pointed out has been "statactivism," as a critical mobilization of official statistics and/or creation of alternative data sets and knowledge practices (Bruno, Didier, and Prévieux 2014). In this sense, we believe it is vital to devote scholarly attention to the sociomaterial practices that make such alternative knowledge possible as well as to the processes of accountability, justice, and truth to which they may contribute. So much so if we bear in mind that research on this area may have important and direct consequences in the construction of public policies on human rights, security, and violence prevention.

The problem of responsibility for crimes, violence, and human rights violations, as well as the responsibility to prevent, remedy, and repair damage, are areas that have been extensively worked on in the social sciences and humanities. However, the situated, linguistic, and sociomaterial practices of responsibility attribution have not been explored in detail. For example, a specific way of enunciating and categorizing an event may lead to identify certain perpetrators (usually the direct perpetrators), and not others (the political perpetrators); certain frames of interpretation, representations, and infrastructures of documentation of violent events may lead to emphasize the responsibility of some agents (e.g.
<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>

guerrillas, drug traffickers), and dismissing others (private enterprise in the case, for example, of crimes against environmental leaders); certain conceptions of the "subject" of harm, and prevailing accountability frameworks (legal, medical) may lead to restrictive views of the damage inflicted and the reparation needed (anthropocentric, individualistic, modernist). Future studies may critically assess how responsibility, justice, and repair regarding these abuses get established and how they affect democratic coexistence.

## Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

## Notes on contributors

**Oriana Bernasconi** is Professor of Sociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile. Her work examines configurations of subjects and subjectivities. In the last years, her research has focused on the subjects of political violence and on the role that documentation of human rights violations and archives play in a society's capacity to come to terms with evil pasts. Her work has been published in *Subjectivity, Sociology, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Colombia Internacional, Discourse & Society*, and *Qualitative Sociological Research*, among other journals. Her last book is *Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America. Documenting Atrocity* (2019).

**Paola Díaz** holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris). She is currently an associate researcher at the Violence and Democracy Institute (VioDemos, ANID-Chile), the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES-ANID-Chile), and the Centre of Social Movements Studies (CEMS-EHESS-France). Her research areas are political, criminal, and social violence, border studies, and sociological pragmatism. https://ehess.academia.edu/PaolaDIAZ.

## ORCID

Oriana Bernasconi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0685-124X

Paola Díaz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3606-516X

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