In Praise of Description

Orford, Anne

doi:10.1017/s0922156512000301

Cited by 86 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The development of these rights cannot be read in isolation but needs to be analyzed as part of the wider social and political movements, ideologies, and religions (Finkle and McIntosh 2002). The aim of this article is to retrace the historical evolution of SRHR and to contribute to the understanding of SRHR as historical creations rather than timeless givens (Orford 2012). We have better chances of realizing SRHR if we have a clear understanding of past trends, of their evolution, and of the conditions under which the changes occurred.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Here to Stay: The Evolution of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in International Human Rights Law

Pizzarossa

2018

Laws

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Sexual and reproductive health and rights have increasingly been recognized in the international arena, but their evolution and the definition of their scope and content have not been received without controversy. From population control to human rights, from demographers’ competence to governmental prerogative, from couples’ rights to universal rights, this article will present an overview of the evolution of sexual and reproductive rights in the international arena. The development of these rights cannot be read in isolation but must be analyzed together with the broader landscape that hosts social and political movements, ideologies, religions, and revolutions. Understanding sexual and reproductive health and rights as historical creations, rather than timeless givens, enables us to devise historically informed instruments and policies that are more likely to succeed. This article contributes to the scholarly literature by providing an overview of past trends and of the conditions under which they occurred. Retracing the history of these rights enables us to clarify the scope of the state’s obligations to realize the right to sexual and reproductive health, to improve monitoring opportunities, and to ensure accountability for violations. This article explores these (and forthcoming) developments contributing to identify the existing obligations, the relevant actors, and the challenges that lie ahead.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Here to Stay: The Evolution of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in International Human Rights Law

Pizzarossa

2018

Laws

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“…In relation to all five of these points of contention, however, this paper will be, from this point onwards, less a work of telling than a work of doing-more specifically, a doing of description. Far from engaging in description as a prelude to critique, I share with others the conviction that description as such can be tremendously productive, as well as inordinately difficult (Orford, 2012). Certainly, description need not imply apology, for to describe is to transform-''to present again-the social [or in this instance, the legal] to all its participants, to perform it, to give it a form''.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Global governance through the pairing of list and algorithm

Johns

2015

Environ Plan D

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The work of global governance increasingly entails some pairing of list and algorithm. Across sectors as diverse as environmental conservation, migration, nuclear nonproliferation, humanitarian aid, counterterrorism, and more, the list-plus-algorithm is, it seems, displacing rival juridical forms on the global scale. This paper probes some implications of the proliferation of this conjunctive form of’law’. Beginning with a typology of some types of governance work that the list-plus-algorithm is called to do on the global plane, this paper tracks movements of knowledge from the arcane form of the list into an algorithmic mode, and back again. It considers, too, some difficulties with which these configurations of lawful authority may be associated and the repertoire of techniques that international lawyers typically use to address these. Among these, the endless championing of transparency will be the focus of particular critique. Precisely as the prospect of seeing definitively through these decision-making devices seems, for a range of reasons, almost impossible to achieve, preoccupations with transparency have intensified. But what else might be entailed in making ‘public’ the governance work of these list-plus-algorithms? This paper takes up this question by focusing attention on how lists-plus-algorithms bring peoples, places, and things into lawful relation.

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“…The difference is between, on the one hand, dark interpretations in which the political implications of governmentality and of biopolitical interventions is always already known in advance (they will always involve efforts to contain and subject people, and they will infringe on their freedom; they demand the exposure of naturalised processes or secret actions; they will in the final analysis be reducible to violence), and on the other hand, ethnographically inflected analyses of biosecurity that interpret dynamics of risk and security as indicative of the inherent indeterminacy of governing conduct (and that attend more closely to the distributions of power that different practices enable). The latter type of approach is, I would suggest, typical of what Orford (2012) has characterized as a style of descriptive analysis. It seeks to describe ‘what is to be seen’ in fields where issues of risk, insecurity, susceptibility and uncertainty are organizing principles.…”

Section: Problematizing Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

On the milieu of security

Barnett

2015

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Critical analysis of security presents processes of securitization as sinister threats to public values such as accountability, inclusion and transparency. By questioning some of the theoretical premises of this view of the milieu of security, it is argued that practices of securitization might be understood less as an assertive medium for the constitution of the social field and more as a responsive mode of problematization of the temporalities of concerted public action. The argument proceeds in stages. First, two ways in which publicness is figured in the critique of security are identified and the spatiality of securitization associated with them elaborated. Second, this view of the spatiality of securitization is then linked to two modes of temporality that apparently define the historical novelty of contemporary security practices. It is argued that uncovering the pernicious politics of security depends on identifying putative subject effects sought and achieved by programmes of rule. In contrast to this approach, an alternative inflection of the genealogical perspective on security is identified. This inflection seeks to diagnose problematizations to which security initiatives are a response, suggesting a reorientation of critical attention to investigating the reconfiguration of public life around various temporal registers of uncertainty, adjustment and repair. The article closes by arguing that the specific public values at stake in securitization should be given more credence.

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In Praise of Description

Cited by 86 publications

References 18 publications

Here to Stay: The Evolution of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in International Human Rights Law

Here to Stay: The Evolution of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in International Human Rights Law

Global governance through the pairing of list and algorithm

On the milieu of security

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