Global frameworks, local strategies: Women's rights, health, and the tobacco control movement in Argentina

ABSTRACT

The article examines how civil society organisations in Argentina used the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to frame the country's failure to enact strong national tobacco control legislation as a violation of women's rights in the late 2000s. We analyze this case study through the politics of scale, namely the social processes that produce, reproduce, and contest the boundaries of policies and socio-economic relations. This approach understands how multiple scales overlap and connect to obstruct or enhance the right to health in Latin America. In Argentina, the global organisation of tobacco companies, the reach of international financial institutions and the national dynamics of economic austerity and export-orientation promoted the local production and use of tobacco (leaf and cigarettes) and reproduced health inequalities in the country throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. Yet, the visible legacy of local and national human rights struggles in the adoption of international human rights treaties into Argentina's national constitution allowed the tobacco control movement to link the scale of women's bodies to the right to health through the use of CEDAW to change national legislation, tackling the social determinants of the tobacco epidemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of scale
• women’s health
• tobacco control
• international human rights law
• Argentina
• civil society
• CEDAW

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Lorraine Greaves and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Project GGH-84622) for their support in 2008 of our initial work on gender, globalization and tobacco control in Argentina. We thank the reviewers for their thoughtful feedback throughout the manuscript development process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).