Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights

Introduction: From the Margins to the Center—Women’s Rights, NGOs, and the United Nations

INTRODUCTION From the Margins to the Center—Women’s Rights, NGOs, and the United Nations On December 20, 1993, the UN General Assembly in New York adopted with unanimous consent the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women, condemning gender violence within both the private and the public spheres as a violation of human rights (United Nations 1993a; also reprinted as the appendix to this book). Only a year later, on September 13, 1994, at the UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, government delegates approved a program of action on population that placed women’s reproductive rights and health instead of demographic targets at the center of the management of population growth (United Nations 1994). Each of these events represented the culmination of a political process that had begun two decades earlier and that was initiated and driven primarily by the activities of international women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The inclusion of these issues on the UN’s agenda legitimizes women’s demand at the national and local levels. With the support of the international community, women’s organizations around the globe can now exert pressure on governments to follow through on their international commitments. In Brazil, for example, the government installed women-staffed police stations (Heise, Pitanguy, and Germain 1994, 31–33); in Senegal, numerous villages outlawed genital mutilation (Paringaux 2000); and in Rwanda, the national parliament recently passed a bill that prohibits gender-based violence and acknowledges 1 international instruments that grant women’s rights (UNIFEM 2006a). However, the achievements of international women’s NGOs are also puzzling. Until recently, the issues of violence against women and of reproductive rights and health were still perceived as exclusively domestic or rather private concerns. Why did these issues become international problems in the 1990s? In addition, there was little preexisting consensus among states as to what constitutes violence and whether or how much control a woman should have over her reproduction decisions. What for some presented a violation of rights constituted for others a custom or tradition. How did the involved actors develop a consensus? Moreover, contrary to environmental issues—where the inability of states to reach satisfactory outcomes through national actions is a catalyst for states to engage in collective action at the international level— such interdependence did not exist in the case of women’s rights. Finally, governments had to fear closer scrutiny of their domestic practices by declaring their support for the above-mentioned agreements. In the case of violence against women, the UN appointed a special rapporteur who monitors the problem and government responses around the world (UNCHR 1994).1 And in the case of reproductive rights and health, NGOs themselves established monitoring systems.2 How, why, and under what conditions did women’s NGOs then succeed in placing their issues front and center on the UN agenda? To answer these questions, I develop a theoretical framework that draws on both the agenda-setting and social movement literatures. Assuming that agenda setting is made up of various elements, including problems, solutions, participants, and opportunities, I explain the inclusion of violence against women and reproductive rights and health in the following way: Women’s organizations framed their issues in a strategic manner, seizing political opportunities in the broader institutional as well as international environments and taking advantage of the mobilizing structures they had at their disposal. With this theoretical framework, I seek to build a bridge between, on the one hand, rationalist approaches, which focus more on material power, strategic and calculating actors, and domestic politics, and, on the other, constructivist approaches, which emphasize intersubjective processes, norms and ideas, and the interaction between agents and structures. Individually rationalistic and constructivist approaches have difficulty accounting for the process whereby NGOs legitimized initially contested women’s issues. Conceiving of nonstate actors as epiphe2 Introduction nomenal, realists would attribute the changes in the international agenda and the inclusion of women’s issues to changes in the distribution of power following the end of the cold war. As the only remaining superpower, the United States can now realize its interest in a free market economy, democracy, and human rights in an unconstrained fashion (e.g., Waltz 1979; Krasner 1993; Mearsheimer 1994). Though the United States has indeed been a vocal proponent of women’s rights, realists cannot explain, without referring to nonrealist phenomena, why the United States perceived these issues as in...