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Chapter 4. Social Justice Organizations
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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4 Social Justice Organizations While the adoption of subsistence rights among traditional human rights organizations has been well publicized, the increasing incorporation of human rights rhetoric into the campaigns of social justice groups represents a quieter but equally significant trend.1 The importance of the social justice movement should not be surprising, as Neil Stammers argues, because “many of the key innovations in the socio-historical development of human rights were constructed and articulated, in the first instance, in the context of social movements seeking to challenge extant relations and structures of power.”2 Economic and social rights “are given meaning primarily through actual struggles around access to resources, demands for recognition and voice, and social justice.”3 Because the recent trend is unique in several important regards , social justice movements are the focus of this chapter’s analysis. After a brief discussion of basic concepts, I trace the development of this trend, explaining why social justice groups in the West, particularly in the United States,4 have increasingly integrated human rights into their public discourse and action strategies in the past decade. I then discuss how human rights have taken shape in organizational practice through the different interpretive lenses that the social justice movement applies to rights. Finally, I investigate the strategic and political implications of the moral approach to rights that predominates within the social justice movement. I analyze these implications from both sides of the human rights/social justice equation: What value does a human rights framework provide to a social movement’s efforts to combat extreme poverty? What does current social movement practice imply for our understanding of human rights? I argue that social justice organizations increasingly have adopted human 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 71 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 71 3/11/10 10:52:06 AM 3/11/10 10:52:06 AM 72 Chapter 4 rights language in their public campaigns against extreme poverty, but they tend to use human rights in limited contexts where it suits their strategic goals. The majority of social justice organizations interpret human rights in a broadly moralistic way that is synonymous with equality, justice, and dignity . They have used this moral approach to mobilize their constituencies and lobby public institutions, drawing on the strengths of human rights rhetoric to transform public discourse and cultural assumptions about poverty. Moral approaches to rights allow these groups to avoid some of the challenges inherent in a legal approach, yet by divorcing themselves from legal discourse and institutions, moral approaches contain their own set of challenges to making subsistence rights advocacy effective. Definitions I define the social justice movement as the sustained, collective efforts to combat extreme poverty through both institutional lobbying and extrainstitutional organizing. The movement includes lobbying groups, think tanks, academic institutes, labor unions, religious groups, indigenous groups, and influential individuals. While organizations that explicitly self-identify as human rights organizations would certainly be part of this broad movement, they have a distinct history and identity, therefore were the focus of the previous chapter. Social movements are not neatly bounded entities, but are ongoing phenomena whose activity ebbs and flows, and whose parameters are largely defined by the observer.5 Social movements are often comprised of heterogeneous groups with different and conflicting goals, which change throughout the course of a movement.6 Thus, language that describes social movements as unitary actors with fixed goals, a consistent repertoire of actions, and a single trajectory should be considered problematic. Nevertheless, the broad parameters of the social movement for economic and social justice have been defined, even if loosely. While definitions of social movements differ, Doug McAdam and David Snow note that most include sustained, organized collective action for social change that includes at least some “extrainstitutional protest.”7 This distinguishes social movement groups from humanitarian NGOs, whose primary or exclusive role tends to be service delivery or project implementation on a global scale.8 Activists themselves also make similar distinctions between human rights, social justice, and humanitarian organizations. For example, the International Net12771 -Freedom from Poverty.indd 72 12771-Freedom from Poverty.indd 72 3/11/10 10:52:06 AM 3/11/10 10:52:06 AM [3.91.176.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:20 GMT) 73 Social Justice Organizations work for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) distinguishes traditional human rights organizations from “social movements” or “grassroots social justice groups,” the latter typically being defined as more closely rooted in local communities.9 While...