‘Bringing coals to Newcastle’? Human rights,civil rights and social movements in New York City

In this article we examine the encounter between global human rights ideas and domestic discourses of civil rights and social justice, focusing on processes of translation and adaptation of women's human rights in two ethnographic sites in New York City. The first site is a citywide coalition working for the adoption of a New York City human rights ordinance. The second site is an advocacy organization working on domestic violence issues. We find that the local adoption of human rights in New York City – the ‘domestication’ of human rights – takes place in two central sites: law and social movement. We further find that the process of translation takes place unevenly in the two sites, and it is driven primarily by the actors, mechanisms and technologies in the social movement arena. Overall, we witness the emergence of a domestic human rights movement as a new counter‐hegemonic space, characterized by multiplicity in meanings, ideological heterogeneity and ambivalence from those engaged in its construction.     

Indigenous internationalism: native rights and the UN

Abstract

Since 1982, with the creation of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the UN has taken steps toward addressing the violations of indigenous human rights around the globe that have characterized the colonization of indigenous peoples by western nations since the 15th century. This article explores the question of whether actions taken by the WGIP and other UN bodies promise to relieve this legacy; or whether the UN, as the proper overseer of international law concerning human rights today, continues that legacy in revised form, as some analysts have claimed. A brief overview of positions taken by key figures in the history of international law concerning indigenous peoples since the early 16th century provides a background against which to compare the work of the UN. My conclusion is that while the UN has in some ways sustained the inherited order of neglect of indigenous rights, it has, more importantly, created openings which make it possible for indigenous peoples to assert their claims. While this is not a story of continuous progress, it does suggest that there is reason to respect the UN's efforts in this relentlessly neglected area of human rights.     

Bringing about the global movement for the rights of nature: sites and practices for intelligibility

Legal scholars, environmental organizations, indigenous groups and activists from around the world are energizing an emergent global movement on the rights of nature. To face the environmental crisis, these heterogeneous actors are coming together to reconceptualize nature as a legal subject. In this article, I examine Democracy Schools and Awakening the Dreamer Symposia (ADS) to establish where and how this emergent movement is being organized. The meaning structures, knowledge stocks and identity cues that characterize it are made intelligible to potential adherents through these seminars and workshops. Interpretive analysis reveals that Democracy Schools and ADSs are distinctively mobile and replicable infrastructures. The concept of ‘stagings' was developed to help examine cultural and spatial dynamics in heterogeneous and extensive collective action.     

An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan: a global justice network (GJN) perspective

Using a global justice network (GJN) approach, in this article I examine the localization of a transnational network for homeworker rights. Based on my field research undertaken in Pakistan between January 2015 and December 2017, I compare different organizing approaches to establish how a politics of vulnerability may be transformed into a politics of voice and mobility. I found that, from the vantage point of the homeworker, the process of organizing rather than the results achieved is what really matters. In the case of Pakistan, union‐style organizing by the Home‐worker Federation, which is mindful of gender and class hierarchies, enhances the homeworkers’ voice, agency and mobility, while also building translocal labour solidarities. Conversely, an NGO‐led national network, with its top–down approach, perpetuates the very hierarchies it was mission bound to dismantle, thus forcing the women to stay spatially imprisoned. Without arguing that one institutional form is superior to the other, I demonstrate that for a GJN to articulate diverse local and global struggles it must be mindful of the hierarchies and boundaries that isolate and silence marginalized workers. It must also genuinely include the grassroots in the production and transference of knowledge.     

Swallowed futures,indigestible pasts Post-apocalyptic narratives of rights in Kleist and Doctorow

Abstract

Previous analyses of the intertextual relations between Heinrich von Kleist's 'Michael Kohlhaas' (1810–11) and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1976[1975]) have focused on adaptation, assessing the changes made to the original. By contrast, this article focuses on what motivates the choice of Kleist's novella as an intertext in the first place and argues for a different, narrative logic binding the two. Both texts fixate with great ambivalence on the potential for transcending pervasive difference in the general and common, and they are both post-apocalyptic responses, alternately tragic and ironic visions of transcended difference. Together, the two tell a story of the discursive formation and deformation of the idea of universal human rights – a story that suspends the discourse of human rights between two traumatic moments of articulation and violence (in the late 18th century and the mid-20th century, respectively) that animate, yet remain inaccessible to each text.     

Scale,networks, and information strategies: exploring indigenous peoples' refusal of a protected area in Suriname

In this article, we examine the response of three indigenous communities in western Suriname to the proposed establishment of a protected area on their traditional lands. In particular, we focus on how the transnational, national and sub‐national networks associated with indigenous rights and protected areas influenced the decision the communities made to reject the protected area. Central to the analysis are the concepts of scale, networks and information; we explore how a national indigenous rights organization used scale and networks to relay information strategically and empower communities in their decision‐making. However, while scale was an empowering political tool, it has also served to disempower indigenous peoples in Suriname through the continuing importance of the state in protected area implementation and legal claims to lands and resources.     

Identification with the Human Species: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century

The unanticipated proliferation of ethnicconflicts, after the collapse of the Soviet Union andEastern European satellites, poses a perplexingquestion: Can human beings develop an identificationwith more inclusive social units than ethnic/racialgroupings and nation-states? A concentric circle modelis presented of multiple identities, from the self tothe human species. Achieving an identification with the human species — a substantialchallenge for the twenty-first century — wouldhave profound implications for the incidence andresolution of interethnic and internationalconflicts.     

Translating women's human rights in a globalizing world: the spiral process in reducing gender injustice in Baroda,India

In this article we analyse the translation of global women's rights ideas in a local context, based on an ethnographic study of three women's organizations from Baroda, Gujarat state, India. On a macro‐level, the local social and cultural norms, the development context, and the nature and role of the state strongly shaped the translation process. Micro processes of translation depend on the organization's core activity, the actors who direct the translation and where they are culturally anchored. Translation involves meaning‐making, which consists of several simultaneous processes, including recuperation, hybridization, simplification and compartmentalization. The direction of the translation process is not linear, but resembles a spiral with ideas moving from global to local to global. Lastly, there are different types of translators, including converters, generators, conveyers, adaptors and transformers.     

Vernacularization on the ground: local uses of global women's rights in Peru,China, India and the United States

The articles published in this special journal issue examine how global ideas about women's rights actually get used in four contexts – China, India, Peru and the United States. Our findings result from collaborative research conducted by teams in each country. We call the process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and strategies vernacularization. In each country, vernacularization differed depending on the contents of the global women's rights packages at play, the work of vernacularizers and the different social positions they occupy, how human rights ideas are framed, the channels and technologies of transmission, and the local geographies of history and culture within which circulation and vernacularization take place. We find that vernacularization is a widespread practice that takes different forms in different kinds of organizations and in different cultural and historical contexts. Ongoing tensions between global and national rights ideas are quite common. Finally, our work brings to light two dilemmas in the way human rights are appropriated and used – a resonance dilemma and an advocacy dilemma – both arising from the disparity between human rights as law and human rights as a social movement.     

'More Than Just a Hill of Beans': Contested Landscapes in John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War

Abstract

The American Southwest is often considered to be a harsh and unforgiving environment, yet it remains an area where indigenous communities have lived for centuries and since being opened up as a tourist destination in the late nineteenth century has witnessed an incredible growth of major urban conurbations. It is a fragile environment coming under increasing pressure and nowhere is this more apparent than in the competition for scarce water resources. Water issues remain high on the political agenda and the threat to small scale acequia farming is under intense pressure from larger agribusiness. This essay, which adopts an ecocritical perspective, revisits John Nichols' 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War , analysing his literary strategies as he explores the ramifications of differing interpretations of land use on the contested landscapes of New Mexico.