Human Rights, Power and Civic Action

Comparative analyses of struggles for rights in developing societies

Bård A. Andreassen, Gordon Crawford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134121175
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Human Rights, Power and Civic Action examines the interrelationship between struggles for human rights and the dynamics of power, focusing on situations of poverty and oppression in developing countries. It is argued that the concept of power is a relatively neglected one in the study of rights-based approaches to development, especially the ways in which structures and relations of power can limit human rights advocacy. Therefore this book focuses on how local and national struggles for rights have been constrained by power relations and structural inequalities, as well as the extent to which civic action has been able to challenge, alter or transform such power structures, and simultaneously to enhance protection of people's basic human rights. Contributors examine and compare struggles to advance human rights by non-governmental actors in Cambodia, China, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The country case-studies analyse structures of power responsible for the negation and denial of human rights, as well as how rights-promoting organisations challenge such structures. Utilising a comparative approach, the book provides empirically grounded studies leading to new theoretical understanding of the interrelationships between human rights struggles, power and poverty reduction.

Human Rights, Power and Civic Action will be of interest to students and scholars of human rights politics, power, development, and governance.

1 Human rights, power and civic action

Theoretical considerations

Gordon Crawford and Bård A. Andreassen

This book examines the interrelationship between struggles for human rights and the dynamics of power. It focuses on how local and national struggles for rights by non-governmental actors have been constrained by power relations and structural inequalities, as well as the extent to which civic action has been able to challenge and transform such power structures at local and national levels. The setting of the analysis is human rights struggles in four countries in Africa (Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe) and two in Asia (Cambodia and China). The volume is comparative in nature and each country case study examines the interactions between non-governmental struggles for human rights and the dynamics of power in differing political contexts, ranging from relatively democratic to autocratic. The book thus provides a range of empirically grounded studies that are intended to lead to new understanding of the dynamics between human rights struggles, power relations and poverty reduction.

The last two decades have seen the linkage of human rights and international development and the rise of human rights-based approaches to development, and it is in this context that this book is situated. An essential component of human rights-based approaches is the advocacy of claims for rights by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other actors within civil society. Yet human rights-based approaches have also been endorsed by influential bilateral and multilateral development agencies, and significant amounts of financial and human resources have been expended on their promotion and implementation. It is our contention that a significant shortcoming of many human rights-based approaches has been their relative neglect of the dimension of power, with existing structures and relations of power often acting as constraints on popular struggles for the realization of rights. We claim that understanding the interrelationship between forms and uses of power and the securing of human rights is a gap in existing knowledge, and thus an objective of this study is to enhance understanding in this area.¹ Such an undertaking is vital, in our view, if human rights-based approaches are not to become another failed development strategy.

This introductory chapter outlines the theoretical framework and the research design. It proceeds in four main sections. In the first three sections, we introduce the key concepts and their interactions: the nexus of human rights and development; power as a multidimensional phenomenon; and theories of collective action and social mobilization as a means of securing rights. Finally, in section four, an outline of the research methodology and the rationale for country selection is provided.

1 Human rights and development

Rise of rights

For a long time human rights and international development ‘lived in splendid isolation’ (Uvin 2004: 1), remaining within the respective academic domains of lawyers and development studies specialists, notably economists. In the mid to late 1990s, however, a convergence of human rights norms and strategic thinking about development occurred, and human rights-based approaches to development emerged in which the objective of development became the realization of human rights (Uvin 2004, ch. 6; Gready and Ensor 2005). Often referred to simply as rights-based approaches, the ‘rise of rights’ within international development has been well documented (Eyben 2003; Molyneux and Lazar 2003, ch. 1; Uvin 2004), inclusive of the historical and contextual factors that accounted for the emergence of ‘rights-based development’ (Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi 2005: 11–14; Gready and Ensor 2005: 14–28; Mitlin and Hickey 2009: 3–8). By the late 1990s and early 2000s, human rights-based approaches were being adopted enthusiastically by many international development NGOs, notably ActionAid, Save the Children, Oxfam and Care International, as well as by a number of official governmental and intergovernmental development agencies, for instance the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi 2004: 1425–1430; Piron 2005; Darrow and Tomas 2005: 480–481). In addition, human rights-based approaches have been adopted by local NGOs and social movements (Miller 2010: 916).

Human rights-based approaches to development: definitions and meanings

Perhaps because of their adoption by such a wide range of organizations, the definition and understanding of a (human) rights-based approach to development has varied considerably, implying significantly different practices.² There is agreement that a rights-based approach involves a shift away from a basic needs approach and from the welfare and charity models that dominated international development discourse for decades, with three key implications. First, people living in poverty become citizens with rights rather than beneficiaries with needs. Second, rights imply obligations, with the state as primary duty-bearer in meeting such obligations to its citizens. Third, there is a degree of consensus that the participation of the poor is important to ensure that their ‘voice’ is heard (Moser 2005: 35). It is also commonly perceived that a rights-based approach takes the international human rights framework, notably the UN system, as its legal basis. But even this brings us into somewhat controversial waters, with the specific adoption of a rights-based approach rather than a human rights-based approach ‘sometimes [implying] a certain distance from the international human rights system’ (Piron 2005: 23–24), not simply a convenient shorthand.³ Differences here pertain to the distinction between legalistic and empowerment approaches (Piron 2003: 7; 2005: 23–24). Legalistic approaches base their claims for rights on existing legal frameworks, particularly the international human rights framework as well as national constitutions and laws (Piron 2003: 7).⁴ In contrast, some advocates of rights-based approaches adopt a more constructivist approach to what constitutes ‘rights’, and use the language of rights to inspire and mobilize marginalized and deprived groups to claim rights (Piron 2005: 23), inclusive of those that do not yet have a legal basis. As Plummer (2006: 152) points out, ‘a group with no rights at one point in time can assemble them at a later point’, giving the example of lesbian and gay rights which ‘fifty years ago … were hardly recognized anywhere in the world’ (ibid.). During the last half-century sexual rights have been gained in some countries through claims and struggles by lesbian and gay movements in heavily contested processes. From such a perspective, rights-based approaches are potentially associated with the empowerment of poor and marginalized peoples, including the use of rights language to inspire struggles for new rights (Piron 2003: 7). In the six country case studies here, this research examines a range of civic actors and NGOs, inclusive of some that are legalistic in their approach and others that focus on an empowerment approach. What is particularly distinctive about this research, however, is that it focuses on structures and relations of dominant power as a constraint on and an obstacle to the realization of rights, aside from whether a legalistic or empowerment approach is adopted. Our starting proposition is that claims for rights are frequently contested by powerful actors, be they claims for legally established rights or claims for the creation of new rights.

Rights and power

This distinction between legalistic and empowerment approaches also links to the debate about whether or not rights-based approaches represent a progressive and radical turn in development discourse and practice. For the official agencies, rights-based approaches were generally not perceived as threatening or challenging their espousal of dominant neo-liberalism, with human rights seen as compatible with market economies and liberal democratic polities (Hickey and Mitlin 2009: 7). Yet for some international NGOs, rights-based approaches address the denial of rights to the poorest and most marginalized of global citizens, especially through encouragement of their active participation in claiming and advocating for their rights (for example, see ActionAid 2008: 7). Two important contributions to academic literature on rights-based approaches have both focused on their potential for progressive development, as well as their ‘pitfalls’ (Hickey and Mitlin 2009: 211–212) and ‘challenges’ (Gready 2008: 745).⁵

In this book we argue that this potential for a more progressive and radical approach is partly dependent on an understanding of structures and relations of power, which constitute a significant challenge to the realization of rights. While we recognize that the literature on rights-based approaches has addressed power dynamics to some extent, at the same time we argue that there has been insufficient focus on how existent structures and relations of power represent constraints on the realization of rights. Even empowerment approaches have largely neglected a close analysis and understanding of the roles, functions and impact of power and of structural causes of poverty.⁶ Indeed, the trajectory of the concept of empowerment from a multifaceted process of political and social transformation that challenged existing structures of power, notably in the area of gender relations, to a depoliticized, mainstreamed and relatively innocuous buzzword, has been outlined convincingly by Batliwala (2007a). As she puts it, the ‘critical operating concept within empowerment was power’ (2007a: 559) but its taming and depoliticization has involved ‘taking the power out of empowerment’. Therefore, in our view, an understanding of the interrelationship between struggles for rights and forms and uses of power is crucial to an understanding of their relative success or failure. These issues are addressed in more detail below.

Of course we are not the first to focus on this issue. The significance of structures and relations of power to the claiming and securing of rights has been noted in particular by researchers at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. Issues of power have been a theme in IDS publications on rights-based approaches, notably in the IDS Bulletin on ‘Developing Rights?’ published in 2005. In their introductory article, Pettit and Wheeler critiqued the emphasis on empowerment in much of rights-based development analysis, while structures of power were neglected, a position with which we are sympathetic. They bemoaned that ‘political aspects and power relationships … are often edited out of development discourse’ and stated that:

the trend of promoting ‘empowerment’ focuses in most cases on changing the abilities of particular individuals to be more able to control their lives. One of the critiques of the use of empowerment in development programmes is that it tends to focus on the powers of individuals to do something differently, but fails to address the structural causes of marginalisation and the power relations that perpetuate those. The assumption is that one sector of society can be empowered without necessarily challenging the power of other sectors, or questioning the norms and values that uphold that power.

(Pettit and Wheeler 2005: 6)

In referring to the studies in this particular issue of the IDS Bulletin, they noted that:

What these studies also reveal is the intensely political nature of rights struggles in situations of high levels of poverty and inequality and of the importance of analysing and confronting deeply embedded power relations and structural barriers on the road to securing rights.

(2005: 5, emphasis added)

The understanding here is that claiming rights is a political process, not a technical or legal one, that rights are often negated and denied in the first place by structural inequalities and dominant power relations, and that realizing rights is thus dependent on addressing and challenging those same structural inequalities and power relations in ways that shift the distribution of power in society in favour of relatively poor and marginalized groups. In such ways, struggles for rights are intricately bound up with the dynamics of power, with the potential, if successful, to contribute to broader processes of social change in which the balance of power between different social forces is altered in favour of those less powerful. Such an understanding strongly influenced the starting point of this research. Despite the useful studies contained in the IDS Bulletin on ‘Developing Rights?’ it was our view that systematic empirical research into the close interrelationship between struggles for rights and the dynamics of power has remained limited, inclusive of the ways in which structural inequalities and dominant power constitute obstacles and constraints to securing rights.⁷ This was a strong motivating factor in undertaking this collaborative research project. Nevertheless, bringing power to the centre of analysis is not straightforward and the next section examines the difficult concept of power.

2 Power: a multidimensional phenomenon

Power is one of those complex and contested concepts in the social sciences. For many years, it has exercised the minds of key social theorists working from radically different perspectives in different disciplines, although primarily in sociology and political philosophy. For example: Marx and Marxists, such as Althusser (1969) and Poulantzas (1978); the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons (1951; 1967); Antony Giddens (1984) and the theory of structuration; Michael Mann (1986; 1993), who explored the history of power from the earliest societies onwards; Hannah Arendt (1970), who examined power and political violence; and Michel Foucault (1980), who looked at issues of power and knowledge and was a forerunner of a post-modern approach to power.

Without undertaking a comprehensive review of the power literature, two aspects are particularly pertinent to our research. The first is Steven Lukes’ (1974, 2005) classic work on the three dimensions of power – visible, hidden and invisible. The second is the four-fold typology of power that is frequently referred to in the development studies literature: ‘power over’, ‘power to’, ‘power with’ and ‘power within’.

Before examining these two aspects, however, it is necessary to highlight the key distinction between negative and positive power. On the one hand, negative power is seen as coercion and a constraint, exercised by those in positions of authority and most commonly associated with the power of the state, and referred to here as coercive power. On the other hand, positive power entails the capacity and capability of different actors, and is closely related to the enhancement of such qualities through processes of empowerment, notably of less powerful and more marginal citizens. In the following discussions, ‘power over’ refers to negative power and concerns structures and relations of coercive power, whereas the other three are all types of positive power where the capacity and agency of less powerful actors are enhanced. In identifying the three dimensions of power, however, Lukes (1974, 2005) focused solely on ‘power over’.

Lukes and the three dimensions of power

Lukes (1974, 2005) outlined his famous three dimensions of power, interpreted as ‘visible power’, ‘hidden power’ and ‘invisible/internalised power’. The first dimension, ‘visible power’, is associated with the work of Robert A. Dahl (1957) and is where ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not do otherwise’ (Lukes 2005: 16); it applies to political decision-making where there is an actual, and thus observable, conflict of interests, at times expressed as differing policy preferences (ibid.: 18), but could also refer to different social class interests. The second dimension, ‘hidden power’, is associated with the work of Bachrach and Baratz (1970) and extends the scope of power to control over ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Human rights, power and civic action: theoretical considerations
• 2 Rights claiming and rights making in Zimbabwe: a study of three human rights NGOs
• 3 Kenya: civic action from confrontation to collaboration?
• 4 Ghana: struggles for rights in a democratizing context
• 5 South Africa: from struggle to idealism and back again
• 6 China: NGOs and human rights in action
• 7 Cambodia: civil society, power and stalled democracy
• 8 Power, human rights and civic action: conclusions
• Index