The Social Practice of Human Rights

Joel R. Pruce

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137503763
• eBook ISBN: 9781137503770
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

The Social Practice of Human Rights bridges the conventional scholar-practitioner divide by focusing on the space in between. The volume brings together cutting-edge chapters that together set a new agenda for research, grounded in the practice of critical self-reflection on the strategies that drive communities dedicated to the advocacy and implementation of human rights. The social practice of human rights takes place not in front of a judge, but in the streets and alleys, in the backrooms and out-of-the-way places where change occurs. Contributors to this volume investigate the contexts and efforts of activists and professionals devoted to promoting human rights norms. This research takes as its subject the organizations and movements that shoulder the burden of improving respect for human dignity. It argues that through a constructive critique of these patterns and practices, scholarship can have a positive impact on the political world.

CHAPTER 1

The Practice Turn in Human Rights Research

Joel R. Pruce

Over fifty years ago, international legal scholars reflected on the role of human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in advancing norms and shaping law, and longingly forecasted our current attempt to ground human rights ideals in practical action:

The focus of international efforts might be shifted from the preparation of complex and time-consuming declarations and conventions to practical grassroots measures designed to reach real problems of real people. A way must be found to establish a more effective and meaningful link between what is done by international organizations and the actual human rights issues of everyday concern. (Bilder 1964, 732)

That human rights are inherently tied to law is not in question, but law is fundamentally limited as a tool for human rights realization. Court systems are slow, expensive, and out of reach for too many. Too often, legal instruments become mere mechanisms that create openings for advocates to work: powerful levers for highlighting hypocrisy and failed obligations rather than literal processes for justice or accountability. The social practice of human rights takes place not in front of a judge, but in the streets and alleys, backrooms, and out-of-the-way places where significant change occurs. Appreciating the social context and focusing on the situated activities of advocates permits us to forge a “meaningful and effective link” between the crucial work occupying those in international organizations and the efforts toward promotion, implementation, and protection unfolding on the ground, across the globe. Human rights practice in the twenty-first century happens in a multitude of spaces and scholars are paying close attention to this evolution.

As early as the 1960s, human rights advocacy efforts took shape as voluntary organizations composed of supporters committed to defending the dignity of silenced political prisoners. Fledgling NGOs like Amnesty International learned as they went along, rising from humble beginnings to prominence on the world stage. Recent research points in particular to the 1970s as a moment of “breakthrough” for human rights as an articulation of social justice and hope for egalitarian public policy (Eckel and Moyn 2013). The age of maturity for the advocacy sector struck following the end of the Cold War, as demands for their work expanded as did their latitude for operating. As the sheer quantity of organizations mushroomed, they began confronting one another in an increasingly competitive marketplace, struggling for media attention and donor funds. This environment motivated a transformation within the organizations themselves.

NGOs grew to include internal media divisions, enlarged development staffs, and human relations departments. Advocacy groups virtually mirror the internal flow chart of a multinational corporation or government agency. The professionalization of human rights, however, is critiqued for ushering in a period that has reshaped the incentive structures of advocacy campaigns. For instance, is it acceptable to sensationalize or stretch the truth of a case in exchange for greater media resonance? How is goal setting impacted by the necessity to produce demonstrable results to funders? Do issue agendas reflect greatest need or emergency, or does the prioritization of human rights work within an NGO depend on more instrumental concerns? The answers to these questions drive social practice scholars in human rights attuned to the context of advocacy today.

In its early years, survivors, their lawyers and family members, trade unionists, and faith groups galvanized the movement; by and large, communities constituted by individuals directly affected by political violence. For decades thereafter, the work of human rights practitioners was dismissed by politicians and ignored by scholars. I believe human rights work was characterized as a subcategory of pithy humanitarianism practiced by pot-smoking, hand-holding, Kumbaya-singing spiritualists dedicated to the cause out of faith and devotion alone. Today, human rights advocacy is a career pursued by serious people who may otherwise find themselves in an elite law practice or climbing the ladder in the public sector. Commensurate with the high-powered status of professionalized human rights advocacy should be a sufficient degree of critique to investigate the consequences of this fundamental shift.

To expose the new world of human rights practice to proper inquiry, researchers have a role to play. And this is made even more apt by the erosion of traditional silos in the human rights world that once starkly separated scholars from practitioners. Instead, the convergence of epistemic communities with communities of practice marks a contemporary era in which advocacy professionals move freely from the operations staff of NGOs into government, then for a term at a lobbying firm, and through to prestigious appointments at major universities and think tanks. This is also true in reverse: scholars consult directly for NGOs and policymaking apparatuses, and have an ever-widening platform for broadcasting ideas and sharing information in social media networks. In a strong sense, this synchronicity is a product of pressures within each sector and demands for transformation.

NGOs are thirsty for the analytical tools that academics can bring to bear on their work, simply for the fact that organizations are not equipped with the capacity for deliberative self-reflection—and, as is suggested later, the insular qualities of communities impede precisely the type of self-reflection that is necessary. Advocates and aid agencies bear the weight of their checkered histories and are currently undergoing a period of introspection, rethinking old assumptions and positioning themselves for future improvement. Scholars, on the other hand, regularly face the challenge of demonstrating the relevance of their research in the “real world.” Particularly in the field of human rights, studying the diffusion or promotion of norms can appear arcane, unless the proper framework helps to explain the pragmatic consequences of such research. Scholar–practitioner partnerships are increasingly common as centers and institutes conduct work with a normative slant geared toward making demonstrable change. The social practice of human rights captures the overlap of work at the intersection of research and advocacy.

This chapter rolls out the concept of the social practice of human rights and introduces the substantive chapters that make up the volume. With reference to other areas of study that have undergone a practice turn, I explain why a field might make this shift and what benefits a practice perspective lends. For human rights in particular, the question of social practice compels a deep investigation into the constitution of the “human rights community,” permits a glimpse behind the scenes at the inner-workings of the organizations, coalitions, and movements that drive the agenda, and compels a normative research program emphasizing constructive critique. Social practice is where the proverbial rubber hits the road, where the action happens. Exploring the social practice of human rights demands that scholars take a more active role in directing their resources in the service of advocacy efforts. By problematizing and deconstructing the activities of practitioners, scholars of social practice extend beyond research-for-its-own sake into the realm of research-for-a-purpose.

What Does It Mean to Practice Human Rights?

We know what it means to practice juggling or dancing, but human rights is not a talent to rehearse or a skillset to perfect. As a political project, human rights attends to suffering, discrimination, and insecurity. Underwritten by global norms stipulated in international law, human rights aims to check the arbitrary exercise of state power and mitigate the ill effects of market excess. But, exactly how these lofty and worthwhile goals are pursued in the world remains subject to the strategic thinking of defenders and their efforts to manifest ideals through action. We use many verbs to describe human rights acts: to implement, enforce, comply, monitor, evaluate, assess, measure, protect, provide, defend, claim, uphold, struggle, advocate, exercise, enjoy, intervene, codify, institutionalize, and internalize, among others. Collectively these terms sketch out the universe of human rights work, cobbled together to patch the cracks in the edifice of social life through which human welfare often slips. The practice of human rights is the active process by which norms and ideas are brought to bear in the lives of those worse off, and as a concept captures crucial qualities of the work that goes into making human rights a reality.

In order to determine the meaning and significance of practice in the context of human rights, perhaps a better analogy, rather than juggling or dancing, is the practice of medicine. For this sector, to practice is to participate in a structured set of activities and patterned behaviors, governed by rules, relating to a specific professionalized environment. By building on lessons learned and guided by advancements in science and technology, the sector develops frameworks of practice to appropriately respond to a broad range of emergency situations. Through training and with repetition, the practical details are disseminated throughout the sector, as well as being reflexively shaped by those engaged in the practice itself.

Social practice is the performance of norms in lived experience. Not in the sense that norms are diffused or learned, which, while significant, only stands in for real practices, remaining abstract and ethereal. Whether or not states comply with norms remains important, but practice involves the activities by which compliance occurs, the local transformations compliance brings about, and the pressure to maintain compliance. For human rights, social practice is the grind of giving corporeal form to ideas and values, through the labor of actual people whose energies are directed at improving the lives of others.

To execute these functions, the human rights universe is constituted by a diverse array of personnel: states, international organizations, regional alliances, corporations, social movements, nongovernmental organizations, and philanthropic foundations. These agents concern themselves with human rights practice for a mix of odd reasons, sometimes taking action willfully and often kicking and screaming. But when we speak of practitioners, those people in the trenches, on the frontlines, in the field, and on the ground, only a sliver of this catalogue counts. In ordinary usage, “practitioners” does not imply diplomats, policymakers, or CEOs. It may even be the case that lawyers—fundamentally connected to human rights as legal instruments—should be excluded from the list of practitioners in the sense in which we normally use the word. This is not to say that law, diplomacy, and policy do not occupy important roles, but rather that focusing on social practice contributes additional layers to our traditional understanding of human rights. Indeed, there must be some identifiable relationship between practitioners and these other kinds of actors: antagonistic, symbiotic, parasitic, and other. A social practice lens helps tease out these dynamics.

Social practice occurs where these areas converge. This is where work gets done. The social practice of human rights is the conduct of a community engaged in ordered, habituated action with the stated objective of safeguarding human dignity. Scholars are compelled to study behavior and phenomena in this area because of its impact in the lives of actual people, far removed from elite halls of power. For this very reason, however, social practice is often overlooked as being just outside the frame of relevance, a tendency that reproduces and reinforces biases that favor privilege and hierarchy. If the subject of inquiry becomes the practices themselves and the environments in which they happen, we can glean novel insight about actors and the consequences of their interventions. New research, such as that contained in this volume, investigates the social practice of human rights in an effort to unpack assumptions about strategies, motivations, and impact, and explore significant dilemmas raised in the process of translating global norms for varied audiences and contexts. The “practice turn” trains its sights on the space in which advocates and agencies strive to make actual changes in the world, forced to confront resource constraints, cultural barriers, and geopolitical hurdles. It is crucial, however, to understand this new research agenda as the most recent development in a lineage of human rights studies.

Generations of Scholarship on Human Rights Advocacy

The manner in which scholars approach the study of human rights advocacy has undergone a series of generational shifts over roughly the past fifty years. Let us recall, it is not obvious or natural that this subject—the work of nongovernmental organizations and all that exists in their orbit—should fall within the purview of research in social science or the humanities. Initially, human rights belonged firmly to lawyers and legal scholarship. Therefore, observing and analyzing advocacy demanded particular focus on the relationship of NGOs to international law and institutions. Because human rights are most clearly enumerated in these instruments, the first generation of research on human rights advocacy framed the practice by reference to human rights organizations as valuable but ancillary supporting actors to broader global processes.

Considering advocacy NGOs as supporting actors prioritizes international organizations as the central building blocks of international society, which is not at all unreasonable. Therefore, this research emphasizes the role played by advocates in the context of global governance mechanisms largely tied to the United Nations (Cassese 1979). Two core functions of NGOs pertain to fact-finding and standard-setting, with clear corollaries between them. Reporting on human rights violations entails collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses and survivors, and constructing a narrative of events (Orentlicher 1990). Once all information has been corroborated, NGOs bring their findings to the attention of the international community, and to the violators directly. As the custodians of crucial information, NGOs positioned themselves as experts—professionals indispensable to the system of human rights promotion and protection. Bringing human stories to light makes everything possible.

With member states and organizations virtually dependent on NGO reporting, NGOs were situated to deploy their fact-finding in strategic ways, creating space to affect global norms on human rights as embodied in UN treaties, covenants, and declarations. NGOs set standards in human rights protection particularly by motivating the adoption of new issues and by participating in the drafting stages of emergent UN documents (Van Boven 1989). Effectively, from the Helsinki Accords on, human rights NGOs sought to establish themselves as global watchdogs and inject themselves in each step of the development of new law, including the post-stages of implementation and monitoring outcomes; mechanisms like UN consultative status made this increasingly possible. To disseminate their findings, NGOs utilized the chambers of the Economic and Social Council or Human Rights Committee. International organizations and institutions provided both the framework for analysis as well as served as the primary audience. The United Nations, its bodies, and regional organizations are opportune venues for calling out abusive states. Leveraging public humiliation as political pressure, NGOs skillfully asserted their perspective and wielded soft power on the grandest of stages. However, even as legal journals chronicled their emergence and impact, advocacy NGOs were seen as supporting actors and outside agitators moving the conscience of the UN and finding their voices in the process.

By examining advocacy through the narrow lens of international law and institutions, our conceptualization of NGOs is limited by their impact on specific mechanisms of global governance. Second generation studies of advocacy made more overt reference to NGOs in their relationship to the state, as a subfield within International Relations (IR) began to focus attention on nonstate actors in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union. Even within the area of nonstate actors, human rights organizations were distinguished primarily due to their ethical and normative orientation. Contrasted with multinational corporations, global terror networks, and drug cartels, human rights embodied the liberal values of moral progress, hope, and cosmopolitanism and personified the promise of globalization. Human rights illustrated a world bent toward the common good, rather than realpolitik. While neoliberalism espoused a vision of freedom and prosperity through the spread of capitalism, human rights anchored an increasingly mainstream outlook committed to the realization of human dignity against the arbitrary exercise of state power and encroachment of markets.

Second generation studies coalesced around NGOs as principled actors, driven by the work of constructivist IR scholars and a new set of analytical tools with respect to the role and power of norms. Human rights or environmental organizations, formed on the basis of shared values to pursue public goods, can confront material power and emerge victorious. As Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink describe in their important article on international norm dynamics, this body of scholarship focuses on the impact of ideas of justice and good on the behavior of humans. What distinguishes a norm is its “prescriptive (or evaluative) quality of ‘oughtness’” and a focus on “standards of ‘appropriate’ or ‘proper’ behavior” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 891). Frequently cited campaigns promoting international norms include women’s suffrage, antislavery, antiapartheid, antilandmine, and the treatment of war wounded (Klotz 1995; Price 1998; Cameron et al. 1998). These campaigns offer empirical evidence of norm emergence and deepen our understanding of how norms work in the world.

To further enrich our comprehension of the operational elements of advocacy, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink built theory around the question of the composition of transnational advocacy networks (TANs). This important research agenda, in certain ways, stretches back to the early legalistic work that argued that NGOs offered critical connections between the international and domestic/local spheres. Keck and Sikkink proposed a schematic for approaching this relationship that linked moral impetus with instrumental imperatives. As originally conceived, the “boomerang effect” within transnational advocacy networks is a set of connections sparked by domestic organizations that “bypass their state and directly search out international allies to try to bring pressure on their states from outside” (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 12). In a campaign, the alliances between the domestic organization and international allies are, at a glance, mutually beneficial: “for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1  The Practice Turn in Human Rights Research
• Part I   Constructive Critique
• Part II   Grassroots Sites of Practice
• Part III   Institutional Sites of Practice
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index