Human Rights and Social Movements (English, Neil Stammers)

Product description Review Select Guide Rating About the Author Neil Stammers is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of Civil Liberties in Britain During the Second World War (1983), and co-editor of Global Activism, Global Media (Pluto Press, 2005). Neil Stammers is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of Civil Liberties in Britain During the Second World War (1983), and co-editor of Global Activism, Global Media (Pluto Press, 2005). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Human Rights and Social MovementsBy Neil StammersPluto PressCopyright © 2009 Neil StammersAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-7453-2911-6ContentsList of Figures, Acknowledgements, List of Acronyms and Abbreviations, Introduction, 1 Getting Beyond the Hall of Mirrors, 2 The 'Sociality' of Natural Rights, 3 The Lost Nineteenth Century, 4 The Paradox of Institutionalisation, 5 New Movements? Old Wrongs?, 6 Expressive and Instrumental Dimensions of Movement Activism, 7 Analyses of Globalisation and Human Rights, 8 Renewing the Challenge to Power, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1GETTING BEYOND THE HALL OF MIRRORSTo explore the significance of the relationship between social movements and human rights it is necessary to embark on a journey that traverses territory perhaps unfamiliar to some working in the field of human rights. It takes us beyond the specialist literature to draw from a range of academic disciplines and to re-examine some fundamental questions underpinning all forms of social analysis. The journey also requires some willingness to acknowledge and engage with complexity and ambiguity. The regurgitation of familiar assumptions and arguments – no matter how authoritative, established or theoretically well-honed – will not do. In particular, simplistic claims that human rights are necessarily and entirely either 'good' or 'bad' only serve to confuse and distort the debate about the origins, potential and limits of human rights. Yet much work that specifically focuses on human rights implicitly or explicitly tends towards one of these polar positions. I will use the terms 'uncritical proponents' and 'uncritical critics', sometimes shortened simply to 'proponents' and 'critics', as a way of referring to work that exhibits such tendencies. To understand why the literature on human rights is shaped in the way it is, we have to examine the ways in which assumptions and positions underlying much of that work are themselves patterned. To do this, I employ the metaphor of a hall of mirrors. My argument is that this underlying patterning has effectively hidden the link between human rights and social movements, so much so that understandings of human rights drawn from this literature are typically and systematically distorted.While it may be relatively easy to demonstrate how the link between human rights and social movements has been obscured, to then go on to assess this link requires us to engage with specific approaches to social analysis. While these approaches are now well-recognised and well-respected within the social sciences generally, they have rarely been applied to the study of human rights. Thus to make these explicit and transparent, the second part of this chapter begins by looking at three of them: the relationship between actors, structures, agency and power; the nature of social change and social transformation, and the configuration of the relations between the social, the political, the economic and the cultural. Having set out my stall on these topics, I then look at the concept of social movements and explore how social movements impact on historical and social change. My argument here is that social movements can be innovative and creative and that, historically, ideas and practices in respect of human rights have been persistent and important constructions arising from the creative praxis of social movements.The Hall of MirrorsBy suggesting that we can get beyond the hall of mirrors, I am not claiming that the authentic version of human rights will then somehow be magically revealed. Clearly, ideas and practices in respect of human rights do not just emanate from social movements praxis and there is no doubting that the scholarly literature has provided and developed many crucial insights in our understandings of human rights. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that we will find another story of human rights: one that is no less authentic and one which, moreover, provides us with ways to develop a new analytic framework through which the potentials and limits of human rights can be critically reassessed.The sort of hall of mirrors I am talking about here is the type found at funfairs and carnivals: those that produce distorted, often grotesque, reflections of their subject matter. By the hall, I mean the entire range of contemporary social