Human Rights and Social Movements - Softcover

Stammers, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074532911X ISBN 13: 9780745329116

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2009

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Neil Stammers is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of Human Rights and Social Movements (Pluto, 2009), and co-editor of Global Activism, Global Media (Pluto, 2005).

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Human Rights and Social Movements

By Neil Stammers

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2009 Neil Stammers
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2911-6

Contents

List of Figures, 
Acknowledgements, 
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
1 Getting Beyond the Hall of Mirrors, 
2 The 'Sociality' of Natural Rights, 
3 The Lost Nineteenth Century, 
4 The Paradox of Institutionalisation, 
5 New Movements? Old Wrongs?, 
6 Expressive and Instrumental Dimensions of Movement Activism, 
7 Analyses of Globalisation and Human Rights, 
8 Renewing the Challenge to Power, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

GETTING BEYOND THE HALL OF MIRRORS

To explore the significance of the relationship between social movements and human rights it is necessary to embark on a journey that traverses territory perhaps unfamiliar to some working in the field of human rights. It takes us beyond the specialist literature to draw from a range of academic disciplines and to re-examine some fundamental questions underpinning all forms of social analysis. The journey also requires some willingness to acknowledge and engage with complexity and ambiguity. The regurgitation of familiar assumptions and arguments – no matter how authoritative, established or theoretically well-honed – will not do. In particular, simplistic claims that human rights are necessarily and entirely either 'good' or 'bad' only serve to confuse and distort the debate about the origins, potential and limits of human rights. Yet much work that specifically focuses on human rights implicitly or explicitly tends towards one of these polar positions. I will use the terms 'uncritical proponents' and 'uncritical critics', sometimes shortened simply to 'proponents' and 'critics', as a way of referring to work that exhibits such tendencies. To understand why the literature on human rights is shaped in the way it is, we have to examine the ways in which assumptions and positions underlying much of that work are themselves patterned. To do this, I employ the metaphor of a hall of mirrors. My argument is that this underlying patterning has effectively hidden the link between human rights and social movements, so much so that understandings of human rights drawn from this literature are typically and systematically distorted.

While it may be relatively easy to demonstrate how the link between human rights and social movements has been obscured, to then go on to assess this link requires us to engage with specific approaches to social analysis. While these approaches are now well-recognised and well-respected within the social sciences generally, they have rarely been applied to the study of human rights. Thus to make these explicit and transparent, the second part of this chapter begins by looking at three of them: the relationship between actors, structures, agency and power; the nature of social change and social transformation, and the configuration of the relations between the social, the political, the economic and the cultural. Having set out my stall on these topics, I then look at the concept of social movements and explore how social movements impact on historical and social change. My argument here is that social movements can be innovative and creative and that, historically, ideas and practices in respect of human rights have been persistent and important constructions arising from the creative praxis of social movements.

The Hall of Mirrors

By suggesting that we can get beyond the hall of mirrors, I am not claiming that the authentic version of human rights will then somehow be magically revealed. Clearly, ideas and practices in respect of human rights do not just emanate from social movements praxis and there is no doubting that the scholarly literature has provided and developed many crucial insights in our understandings of human rights. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that we will find another story of human rights: one that is no less authentic and one which, moreover, provides us with ways to develop a new analytic framework through which the potentials and limits of human rights can be critically reassessed.

The sort of hall of mirrors I am talking about here is the type found at funfairs and carnivals: those that produce distorted, often grotesque, reflections of their subject matter. By the hall, I mean the entire range of contemporary social praxis around human rights worldwide. That includes all those ideas and practices connected to human rights whether these come from academic scholarship, non-governmental organisations, states, international institutions or social movements. The mirrors in the hall refer to that specialist scholarly literature whose specific and central focus is on human rights. This is the sort of literature that most human rights scholars would see as being 'within the field' and which is likely to appear on reading lists for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on human rights. Below I identify two ways in which those mirrors have been shaped and polished, firstly through academic disciplinarity and secondly through the ideological predispositions and commitments of authors and the institutions they are involved with. As will become clear, there are strong links between them but there are also important distinctions, not least because it is through academic disciplinarity that claims to intellectual rigour, objectivity and truth are often made.

My various discussions of the human rights literature throughout this book could quite properly be seen as an analysis of discourse. So it is worth briefly explaining why I have chosen not to present it through the methods of discourse analysis. As my above references to mirrors and distortion indicate, there is – in part – a 'realist' underpinning to my approach to social enquiry. This contrasts with 'idealist' trajectories often found in poststructuralist approaches to discourse analysis derived, for example, from the work of Michel Foucault or as developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. So, while I insist that human rights are and can only be socially constructed, the whole point of this book is to argue that there are nevertheless 'realities' to human rights that are not properly recognised or given appropriate signification in the 'rhetoric' that is the specialist scholarly literature on human rights. Linked to the above are two further specific reasons why I have chosen to work outside a 'discourse analytic' framework. Firstly, influential theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) have expanded their use of the term discourse to cover the whole of what I call here social praxis (see also Howarth 2000:Ch.6) thus threatening to obliterate any analytical distinction between 'rhetoric' and 'reality'. Secondly, key approaches to discourse analysis are rooted in what, in my view, is an untenable episte-mological assumption that models and approaches drawn from structural linguistics and its various derivatives can be usefully and meaningfully applied to the study of social relations in general (for example, Howarth 2000:13).

Academic Disciplines

Let me start with the apparently obscure point that there are strong 'imperialist' tendencies in academic disciplines. Practitioners often regard their own discipline as the 'master' discipline; the discipline through which all other academic disciplines should be understood. There are frequent attempts by one discipline to subordinate or colonise another. Additionally, practitioners in disciplines perceived as 'subordinate' often try...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 074532911X
• ISBN 13: 9780745329116
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 296
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar