'It's Not All About You: Alternative Routes to Norms Change'
34 Pages Posted: 12 Aug 2014 Last revised: 19 Aug 2014
Date Written: August 11, 2014
Abstract
The story of norms evolution dominant in international relations and social movement scholarship has tended to weight the power of persuasion in favor of industrialized/Western states over underdeveloped/non-Western ones. It has also assumed that advocates are active across borders, moving ideas from the centers of normative (and financial and political) power in New York or Geneva on "down" to the sites of norms violation someplace else. But what if people in those places either dismissed, ignored, or simply rose above existing human rights frameworks to forge new norms and new modes of implementing rights on their own? And what if their actions ultimately enhanced (rather than detracted from) the mainstream human rights canon? This paper takes that possibility seriously. I use original ethnographic data on a decade-long "Right to Food Campaign" in India to demonstrate how non-Western human rights advocates are offering radical new legal interpretations of economic rights and creative new modes of progressive implementation of rights that stand to expand the existing theoretical and practical frameworks for rights implementation -- but that come from the opposite direction of that predicted by dominant explanations of norms evolution. The absence of engagement with international human rights advocacy in the Right to Food campaign thus stands to contribute a new causal pattern to the norms evolution literature: namely, the form of progressive backlash.
Keywords: economic rights, right to food, India
JEL Classification: K33, A13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation