Uprooting the curious grapevine? The transformative potential of reverse standard-setting in the field of human rights

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the top-down nature of human rights norm-setting has been problematized by scholars and practitioners who — inspired by actor-oriented perspectives on human rights — started to explore the potential role of rights users in the further development of human rights norms at the global level. Based on fieldwork with community-based organizations in Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I argue that the empowering potential of this exercise could be amplified by complementing actor-oriented analyses with a sociostructural analysis of how institutionalized power relations shape the potential for reverse standard-setting. Drawing on new empirical material, I propose a more nuanced way to think about reverse standard-setting and identify four issues that require the combination of an actor-oriented analysis and sociostructural analysis: access, influence, avenues for information sharing, and discursive incompatibilities. In doing so, I seek to increase the analytical rigor, practical relevance, and empowering potential of reverse standard-setting.

Notes on contributor

Tine Destrooper (PhD) is the Managing Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University's School of Law. She obtained her doctoral degree from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Law and Development Research Group at the University of Antwerp and at The Hague School for Governance and Global Affairs. Her works look at the mobilizing potential of human rights norms and explore intersectionalities between gender, inequality, and social and economic rights.

Notes

1. Similar evolutions can be witnessed in other fields of study, as is exemplified by the work of Amitav Acharya (Acharya and Buzan 2010; Acharya 2013) on non-Western ideas in international relations.

2. This is not to argue that this framework is the most significant one in local struggles per se, but it does offer real protection and legitimacy. My argument is also not that the most important goal of local rights users should be to have their voices heard in international forums, nor that only access to institutionalized human rights bodies is important for the empowerment of rights users. I acknowledge that there are a multitude of ways in which rights users can trigger societal change from below, bypassing the global, regional, or even national level. Neither do I assume a certain linearity whereby local struggles, if they are successful become globalized, and whereby local struggles that only take place at the local level are considered ill conceived. What I argue is that there are rights users engaged in local struggles who also have an interest in shaping international norm development, and that these struggles should not be overlooked if the goal is to arrive at more inclusive global human rights norms.

3. I use the notion of “place-based” rather than “local” to underline that, even if a concrete struggle is tied to a specific geographical location, its proponents are not encapsulated in that locality and may have networks with actors in other localities or at other levels that can influence their concrete struggle.

4. Also see An-Na'im (1992) for an elaboration on how existing human rights standards should be open to revision and reformulation on the basis of rights users' concrete realities. Gómez Isa (2014) applied this multidirectional actor-oriented approach to analyze the dynamics of a case brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where indigenous peoples from Colombia have engaged with the existing human rights discourse, appropriated it in ways that resonated both locally and regionally to defend their claims and later sought to enrich this human rights discourse at the regional level with new proposals and ideas based on their own experience with the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

5. Brems (2001) specifies that there is no room for relativism in the case of gross human rights violations that attack the core of human rights, and that the idea of inclusivity accommodates variation as long as this does not undermine the essence of the human rights norms.

6. See Stammers (1999) on the role social movements can play in this process.

7. Concerns about funding in the past few years have led Kaqla to narrow its programs and to bring it more in line with the mainstream discourse on women's rights. This affected not only Kaqla's potential to speak to the realities of its constituency but also had tangible effects on organizational dynamics in the sense that it led several women to leave the organization and caused internal disagreements between those who favored an approach firmly rooted in local realities and those willing to cater more explicitly to the expectation of international donors.

8. Work by An-Na'im (1992) suggests that the work Kaqla is doing on complementarity could also be relevant well beyond the local, national, or regional contexts, for example, for women in Muslim societies. I do not argue here that upstreaming their work to global norm-setters is likely to have a greater societal impact in their own communities in the medium term. But it is nevertheless important to consider this level, partly because of the pragmatic reason that the organization is highly dependent on funding by international organizations and, more substantially, because of the protection that the human rights framework can offer if activists perceive it as locally relevant.

9. Global/local social theoretical literature is voluminous with endless debates revolving around how these spheres relate to each other in terms of, for example, power or ontological priority (for an overview, see Goodale 2007).

10. If we are interested in making the existing international human rights architecture more locally relevant on the basis of rights holders' voices, finding a shared language is required. Because of the legitimacy ascribed to the human rights framework as compared to other discursive frames, rights users who employ a discourse that may be the homeomorphic equivalent of human rights often translate their goals into a language that is understood at the national, regional, and global levels if they want to be heard (Coomans et al. 2009).

11. Hannertz describes this as the “unfree flows of meaning” that continue to exist despite the increasingly networked structure of social life and legal domain (1992: 100).

12. For more nuanced analyses, see, for example, Vandenbogaerde (2015) and Gómez Isa (2014).

13. That such a network analysis is aspirational rather than empirical is illustrated by Vandenbogaerde (2015), who analyzes the difficulty rights holders have putting issues on the agenda of the Human Rights Council.

14. Several scholars have made attempts to conceptualize the relationship between the local and global realms in more nuanced ways. Goodale (2007: 14), for example, challenges the spatial-theoretical binary of global versus local by invoking the notion of inbetweenness. This notion seeks to shed light on all the different realms that exist between these two extremes of the continuum that “local” and “global” are, and can be useful in conceptualizing how, with their position along this continuum, actors' access, influence, and power shift. However, his argument does not address the questions about how actors along this continuum can interact in multidimensional ways.

15. In the field of development, we see a similar evolution in which the idea of bottom-up approaches gained momentum in the last two decades, giving a sense of legitimacy to interventions without requiring structural changes (Leal 2007). As a consequence, today, individual agents have become the main object of analysis, and attention to political structures has diminished (Mohan and Stokke 2000). The attempt to put actors at the forefront thus, inadvertently, led to a depoliticization in the field of development, partly because there was no sound theorization regarding the mechanisms that could lead to organizational change, partly because there was little attention to the sociopolitical processes that stalled development. It is not unthinkable that the increased concern with inclusive approaches in the field of human rights could become a replica of this dynamic. When human rights treaties and declarations are considered legitimate because they are rooted in broad participation of rights users — rather than because of their capacity to speak to the substance of what is needed to protect human dignity or their potential to address the systemic political and economic factors that produce and perpetuate inequality — we should ensure, as scholars, that we assess this participation accurately, in order to avoid rights holders buying into a process that depoliticizes human rights struggles and that does not serve their strategic interests (see also Molyneux and Lazar 2003).