Hum Rights Review

DOI 10.1007/s12142-014-0320-8

BOOK REVIEW

Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial by Richard Price Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010

Michael S. Wilson*

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Among liberal intellectuals in the North, there is a commonly held view of tribal and indigenous

peoples as victims of the international political economy and the neoliberal model of resource

extraction. A less common perspective—despite its condemnation of ongoing colonialism and its

refusal to accept the post-colonial state’s attempt to assimilate all “others”—does not

“essentialize” and victimize them, but instead demonstrates who they are, how they see

themselves and their surroundings, and what they choose to do. Instead of victims, the second

perspective sheds light on humans and their efforts to not merely resist an imposed world order

and vision of “development,” but also pursue their own alternatives.

Falling within the second perspective and carving its own genre therein, Richard Price’s

Rainforest Warriors is a story about extraordinary people who, because of their special

relationship to their forest and the multiplying threats against it, used the Inter- American

framework of human rights law to enact social change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond

their particular communities. Throughout, the book crosses several thresholds: between the fields

of legal studies and anthropology, between the study of institutions and of the humans who

construct and are shaped by them, and between the cases for environmental sustainability and

human rights. In encapsulating an anthropological analysis of a legal case, as well as a study into

the lives of Saramakas who pushed international jurisprudence to a new high, Rainforest

Warriors is a vessel that carries an example for others to use, challenge, and improve.

The first half of the book supplies both a decolonizing historiography of the Saramaka people—

Surinamese Maroons, or descendants of self-liberated slaves—as well as deep insights into the

relationship between them and their bio-scape. This integral relationship is key to their final legal

case, for the Saramakas’ economic, social, spiritual, and cultural survival depends on it. During

the seventeenth century in the profitable Dutch colony of Suriname, Maroons escaped from

coastal plantations to the forest, where they learned to depend on nothing other than each other

and their natural environment. After repeated and failed attempts at recolonization, the Dutch

administration was forced to recognize the Maroons’ territorial sovereignty in 1762.

However, since decolonization, the Surinamese state has often breached this sacred oath. Among

such violations, two particular cases were adjudicated by the Inter-American Commission of

Human Rights (IACHR) and its Court after the victims exhausted all attempts to access justice

through the State. The first, heard in 1992, involved a military assault in which more than 20

Maroons were arbitrarily tortured, many of whom were then killed, and secretly buried (66); the

second, heard in 2005, concerned the butchering of at least 39 Maroons, mainly women and

children, at the hands of military death squads and under the excuse of an internal conflict

against armed rebels (84). Both of these cases, which the plaintiffs won, set new precedents for

the still-budding Inter-American human rights framework. Moreover, they set the stage for a

third trial, heard in 2007, regarding the deforestation of Saramaka territories at the hands of

Chinese logging companies, which operated with the full consent of the Surinamese government.

Starting with Saramakas’ encounter with the logging companies and their guards, and following

their efforts at organizing communities and requesting the intervention of the IACHR, the second

half of the book produces a careful and dense description of this third case, including the trial

proceedings. When necessary, the narrative summarizes the technical and legalese, but—much

more than that—it also furnishes details and insights excluded from official documents. Indeed,

this book demonstrates that ethnography can put a legal dispute into human context with great

effect; Price’s methods of conducting social science aptly lent themselves to describing and

interpreting the many symbolic events behind the Court’s favorable ruling.

In the final chapter and afterword, Price, consistent in his comprehensiveness, presents three

critical insights. First is a review of the state’s actions in reticent compliance and open defiance

of the Court’s mandate, accompanied by criticisms of the Court’s ability to enforce its verdict.

The second is the author’s outline of at least 14 “current hotspots” of ongoing socio-

environmental conflicts related to indigenous or tribal peoples’ rights in Suriname (227). Thirdly,

the book ends with a discussion of the verdict’s implications for the rest of the Americas.

A crucial element of this work is its interrogation of the efficacy of international law. At every

turn, Price’s argument begs the question: how and to what extent can a predominantly Western

framework of human rights law attain justice for those most excluded from Western institutions?

At least from the author’s perspective, the Court often fell short of recognizing the legitimacy of

cultural difference and ethnic autonomy. In questioning the efficacy of the law, and providing

illustrative answers, the book crosses yet another threshold: one between a human rights

advocacy perspective and a critical eye towards ethnocentricity in our “universal” mechanisms of

justice.

However, the cultural, political, and legal limitations of the IACHR are not insurmountable; they

only emphasize the importance of the groundwork done by not only community activists, but

also social and even natural scientists, whose research, documentation, and expert testimony can

further bridge the gaps between the everyday realities of the peoples and ecosystems under

threat, and the rigid structure and limited power of the laws meant to protect them.

The power of law ultimately rests with the people who decide to wield it, and Price demonstrates

this with clever multidimensionality, for ethnography is both the method of acquiring data and

the completed output; it is the story and its contents. Additionally, it is also the many cases that

will launch as a result of its example. This is why Rainforest Warriors is, for activists and jurists,

a lesson; for perpetrators of human rights violations, a warning; and for academics, journalists,

and anyone else whose career depends on fieldwork, a hope that our work can one day

reciprocate the favors of our host communities and study “subjects.”

(*) M. S. Wilson

Politics Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA

E-mail: miswilso@ucsc.edu

This book review was published by the Human Rights Review on the June 2014 issue, and is property

of Springer Science+Business Media (DOI 10.1007/s12142-014-0320-8). The publication is also

available online at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12142-014-0320-8#page-1.