From the Center to the Margins: The Radicalization of Human Rights in the United States

What can human rights tell us about power?

Throughout the winter of 2002-03, women in the United States participated with women around the globe in a multitude of mobilizations, virtual and embodied, that attempted to avert the U.S. military assault on Iraq. Shortly after the invasion began, NEWSA's conference provided an opportunity to bring together community educators, organizers, activists, and law professors versed in everyday use and explication of human rights. This was not a non-sequitur. Rather it clarified the question we had wanted to ask all along: can human rights help us restore a healthy balance of power in the world? Does it have some special leverage for transforming a multitude of mobilizations and projects into a sustainable "other" world? Because NEWSA has been explicitly addressing concerns of racism and classism in the academy and in New England society at large since its inception, we wondered if the tools of human rights—so many of which have been created by people of the global south—might help us move forward in some sort of cobbled commonality.

While there has existed for some time a lively feminist criticism, primarily among political philosophers and legal scholars, contributing theoretically to the elaboration and refinement of human rights, what have been rarer are narratives coming out of practice such as those collected here. These alert us not so much to the potential pitfalls of working with the human rights framework but to its possibilities for "infusing the spaces we are already in with citizen participation"(Bhattacharjee, in this volume). Aside from a case study of San Francisco's CEDAW ordinance (Waldorf 1999), the stories of local transformation that have been most available have tended to come from abroad, reinforcing the false sense that "civil rights applies to 'us' and human rights to 'them'" (Thomas and Dharmaraj 2000). From the applications described above, it seems clear that improvisation and innovation in the interpretation of human rights law can and does happen whenever new constituencies—battered moms, the homeless, women of color with HIV/AIDS, genocide survivors—appropriate and inhabit the texts of human rights.

Addressing this human rights imperative to attend to the local, Charlotte Bunch wrote in the fall of 2002 that "Often what American feminists must do to help women elsewhere is not to focus on their governments but to work to change ours so that U.S. policies and corporate forces based here stop harming women elsewhere." When women meet in international forums, talk often turns to the necessity for taking local responsibility for holding one's own government accountable, as Leslie Hill reports above happened for South African women working as anti-apartheid activists. This is true even in those international meetings that acknowledge that governments are making "fewer and fewer decisions with respect to critical issues for women" (Symington 2002, 3).

Responding to the imperative to act locally, human rights movements, as Barbara Schulman states here, have "spawned an elaborate system of legal tools and monitoring bodies designed to enable ordinary people to hold our governments accountable for respecting, protecting and fulfilling" these rights. In the United States, during the summer of 2003, state and local, perhaps even the federal, governments are on their way to fiscal bankruptcy—yet human rights demands that they do more. The positive feedback loop facilitated by a human rights framework suggests one possible way of working ourselves out of this zero-sum bind by building a public agenda focused on promoting "the inherent human dignity" of all persons through the realization of Franklin Roosevelt's famous four freedoms: freedom of belief and speech; freedom from want and fear (Glendon 2001, xviii).

When a community adopts and refines a human rights analysis of the harms they have suffered, Andrea Smith asserts above that it creates spaces for collective and connected healing...