Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics

Part II. The Debate Continues: Critics and New Mechanisms

Part II The Debate Continues: Critics and New Mechanisms The l970s brought together a new set of historical conjunctures that challenged the principles and practices of human rights advocacy around the globe. They added different voices and arguments to the existing debates about how best to protect and enhance human dignity in society. In part, these trends reflected much longer histories—of feminist internationalism, union and labor mobilizations across borders, reformers in both industrialized and colonial settings committed to economic development and social welfare, and ethno-religious community linkages. These networks had started to redraw societal relationships along transnational lines early in the twentieth century. They represented continuities in historical developments, capturing the presence of highly mobilized social groups with defined reform agendas. Yet, many of these groups found their voices marginalized in the processes of consolidating state power and sovereignty after World War II. Under the immediate pressures of postwar financial and political reconstruction as well as the struggles for national liberation, their own platforms for reform had been effectively postponed. If increasingly closed out of political and public life, their advocates nonetheless sustained their day-to-day patterns of mobilizations at the local, regional, and national levels. And, at the macro level, many international NGOs, representing the wider cross-border coalitions for change that continued into the postwar era, established close working ties with the new U.N. organs involved in human rights oversight, from the General Assembly to the Economic and Social Council to the Human Rights Commission to the Commission on the Status of Women. Reflecting grassroots per- 142 Part II spectives, they sought to move debates beyond the dominant discourses, which had framed violations principally in terms of the state’s abuse of individual rights. That alternative notions about the preconditions for genuine human dignity coexisted with an emerging orthodoxy should come as no surprise . As Part I showed, many complex strands of struggle came together in the three iconic human rights movements that ultimately helped underpin the reigning perspectives. In South Africa, the overarching goal of the demise of apartheid and the victory of the ANC ‘‘led to the subordination of local struggles in the name of unity against the common enemy.’’1 These initiatives had given way temporarily to the vocal national priority of democratic inclusion. Similarly, the views of Gladys Tsolo in the late l970s reflected a tension—and one duplicated in many anticolonial struggles—over the place of women’s rights in the shared goals of national liberation and racial justice. Yet women’s voices, so essential in the long decades of anticolonial movements, became marginalized in the power hierarchies of the newly emerging nation-states of the globe. With searing commentary, Elizabeth Thompson wrote of a ‘‘national [gender] pact’’ between the nationalist elites and religious authorities that took women’s challenges to the patriarchal family order and its personal status laws off the official agenda of nation-building after independence.2 The construction of the political order reinforced the masculine character of postcolonial regimes. Discontent continued to seethe in post–World War II societies. By the l970s, these alternative sources of mobilization in virtually all regions of the globe were beginning to coalesce into new, broad-based human rights coalitions pursuing their own agendas. Working within the existing human rights framework, they advanced ideas about women’s human rights and defended, in another line of argument, fundamental rights to economic and social development, including broad access to education, health care, decent housing, food, and social security. These alternative perspectives launched a serious critique of the human rights system’s claim to universality. For the women’s organizations among them, it meant a gradual shift from the vision of sex equality enshrined in human rights instruments to new understandings of gender vulnerability—vulnerability that indeed differentiated the experiences of women from men. This turned attention to family life, a hitherto hidden arena of violations. For the advocates of development, it meant confronting the grave human costs of the inequalities of the world economic order, which remained deeply entrenched in the postwar world. Seeing economic development as a collective international responsibility, proponents supported a new generation of ‘‘solidarity’’ rights, which linked state economic and human The Debate Continues 143 social development together. It shifted focus from the liberties of the individual within the state to collective responsibilities as the basis of social cohesion and solidarity...