The Seductions of Quantification ─ Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking

In an age when almost anything can be somehow quantified and then measured, Sally Engle Merry’s latest book shows how quantification can hide or even distort as much as it reveals. She is particularly interested in the rise of quantitative indicators as a means of global governance. This is the realm of soft law,” where compliance depends on monitoring behavior against a set of standards. Merry focuses on three global indicators: human rights indicators used by the organizations monitoring treaties, surveys measuring violence against women, and the US State Department Trafficking in Persons report that ranks countries in terms of their compliance with anti-trafficking activities. Merry sees these and other indicators as a form of knowledge that places power in the hands of the technical experts and organizations who construct them. She investigates the techniques by which information is gathered and analyzed as well as who determines relevant categories, who collects the data, and who disseminates it. Because measurement and ranking systems typically incorporate theories about social change that are embedded in their design but are rarely explicitly acknowledged, they are a form of knowledge--and hence of power--that typically fly under the radar. The US State Department indicators, for example, assume that prosecuting traffickers as if they were a form of organized crime is the key strategy for eliminating the practice, even though it is only one of several standards and does not address cultures where women and children are often sold by their own families. As Merry persuasively shows, quantified indicators are indeed seductive in their seeming promise of providing clear and objective knowledge about how the world works. In actuality, though, such indicators reflect the values, biases, and political worldviews of those who construct and use them.

Sally Engle Merry is the Silver Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University and the faculty codirector of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. She is the author of five books, including Human Rights and Gender Violence, also published by the University of Chicago Press.