Human Rights and Politics: The Social Practices of Transnational Activism

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners of human rights activism emerging in the 1960s and 1970s frequently emphasize its principled and apolitical nature. This article challenges this view by offering evidence about the social practices of this type of global activism. Although information-based, cross-border mobilization represented by groups such as Amnesty International (AI) were non-ideological in nature, this type of organizing and its evolution expresses a significant expansion of political participation outside of elections. Limited to middle classes in the developed world during the Cold War, the expansion of human rights ‘talk’ into the development sector in the 1990s led to some efforts to explicitly politicize abject poverty. While much of the scholarship explaining or critiquing the actions of this sector tends to reify the movement as a unitary and coherent entity, the paper argues for taking seriously the significant variation in organizational forms and strategies.

Keywords: Transnationalism, human rights, NGOs, rights-based approaches