Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis

Preface

Preface The research for this book began with a set of simple questions. If basic needs such as food, housing, and health care were so central to human survival and dignity, why were they discredited for so long in the West? Why, after all these years, were nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) beginning to accept the validity of freedom from poverty as a basic human right? Does this new trend have the potential to change the practice of human rights and our approach to extreme poverty? Although existing studies regarding human rights and social movements provided some attempts to answer these questions, I was largely dissatisfied with the answers they suggested. Traditional human rights theory asserted that economic and social rights were inherently distinct from civil and political rights, a difference that resulted in their nonjusticiability or incompatibility with human rights methodologies. However, a number of human rights scholars dissented from the mainstream view, and I remained undecided entering my research. Constructivist theory argued that universalistic norms dealing in clear terms with vulnerable victims and physical harm were more likely to be effective; yet if these characteristics of subsistence rights remained constant, why did the historical acceptance of these rights vary? (Throughout the book, I use the term “subsistence rights” and “freedom from poverty” interchangeably , as a subset of all economic and social rights. See Chapter 1 for a more detailed definition.) Social movement theory explained that the political opportunity structure was hostile to subsistence rights in the West during the Cold War, but it was not immediately clear why subsistence rights advocacy has reemerged in the United States in a political environment that continues to be hostile. Finally, social movement theory suggested that issue framing is an important component of successful campaigns, but the details of how framing processes and contests operated in this case remained to be elaborated. So in 2003 I embarked on a journey engaging with dozens of NGOs, using participant observation, interviews, and reviews of primary and secondary 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd ix 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd ix 3/11/10 10:51:56 AM 3/11/10 10:51:56 AM x Preface documents. One of my first research sites was the inaugural conference of the International Network for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2003. This conference, attended by several hundred activists from all regions of the world, represented the launching of the first international network of NGOs specifically devoted to the fulfillment of economic and social rights. At this conference, it became clear to me that activists were speaking different languages about human rights, depending on what kind of organization they represented and how they sought to use the human rights framework. Although human rights practitioners often spoke of a gap between lawyers and grassroots activists within the movement, these different approaches were largely unspoken understandings rather than explicit ones. I later labeled these two languages, which implied different understandings about what human rights really are, as the moral and legal approaches to rights. Although there was some overlap between the languages, for the most part social justice groups and humanitarian organizations maintained a loose (if any) connection between human rights and international legal standards, while human rights organizations insisted that human rights are embedded within and defined precisely by those standards. These divergent approaches to defining human rights were linked to different ways that these organizations employed human rights to promote their strategic goals. Social justice NGOsusedhumanrightsinaccordancewithothermoraldiscourses(equality, justice, responsibility) to mobilize their activist networks, appeal to donors, or advocate for local, national, or international policy changes. Subsistence rights served as a way of reframing public debate about poverty by reconstituting the poor as active subjects, and by asserting that extreme poverty is an issue of justice and systemic failure rather than charity and individual failure. Humanitarian organizations used rights language to reorient and guide their own relief and development work. For them, freedom from poverty became translated into moral principles of participation and accountability, which led humanitarian organizations to reconsider how they address the structural causes of poverty, how they can become more politically engaged, and how they can help empower the poor to claim their own rights. Human rights organizations, in contrast, used human rights to hold states (and increasingly other actors) accountable to their explicit legal obligations. For them, subsistence rights were a set of international legal standards that could be used to guide the writing of national legislation, take a violator to court...