Towards a Study of Human Rights Practitioners

Redhead, Robin; Turnbull, Nick

doi:10.1007/s12142-010-0180-9

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Redhead and Turnbull argue for the importance of studying human rights practitioners, to seek out how ‘they engage with human rights, how they employ its terminology and how these actions redefine human rights itself’ (2011: 177). The model of a humanitarian arena concurs with this position and adds to it by also according importance to aid recipients as social actors.…”

Section: Social Negotiation Of a Plurality Of Rights In Humanitarian Arenasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing Rights and Wrongs in Humanitarian Action: Contributions from a Sociology of Praxis

Hilhorst

Jansen

2012

Sociology

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Sociology 46(5) 891 -905Abstract Human rights entered the language and practice of humanitarian aid in the mid-1990s, and since then they have worked in parallel, complemented or competed with traditional frameworks ordering humanitarianism, including humanitarian principles, refugee law, and inter-agency standards. This article positions the study of rights within a sociology of praxis. It starts from a premise that interpretation and realisation of international norms depends on actors' social negotiation. We seek to contribute to the sociology of rights with insights from legal pluralism and to analyse human rights as a semi-autonomous field in a multiplicity of normative frameworks. Based on cumulative research into humanitarian aid in disaster response, refugee care and protracted crises, the article explores how humanitarian agencies evoke different normative frameworks to legitimate their presence and programmes. How aid is shaped through the 'rights speak' of aid workers and recipients alike is illuminated by cases of programmes promoting women's rights against sexual abuse from Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

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Section: Social Negotiation Of a Plurality Of Rights In Humanitarian Arenasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing Rights and Wrongs in Humanitarian Action: Contributions from a Sociology of Praxis

Hilhorst

Jansen

2012

Sociology

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Practising Human Rights

López

2018

Human Rights as Political Imaginary

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Philosophers, Activists, and Radicals: A Story of Human Rights and Other Scandals

Hoover

Heredia

2010

Hum Rights Rev

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This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an initial attempt to understand and theorize human rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Permanent repository linkAttempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice -taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy.

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Towards a Study of Human Rights Practitioners

Cited by 5 publications

References 18 publications

Constructing Rights and Wrongs in Humanitarian Action: Contributions from a Sociology of Praxis

Constructing Rights and Wrongs in Humanitarian Action: Contributions from a Sociology of Praxis

Practising Human Rights

Philosophers, Activists, and Radicals: A Story of Human Rights and Other Scandals

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