How do transnational ideas such as human rights approaches to violence against women become meaningful in local social settings? How do they move across the gap between a cosmopolitan awareness of human rights and local sociocultural understandings of gender and family? Intermediaries such as community leaders, nongovernmental organization participants, and social movement activists play a critical role in translating ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up. These are people who understand both the worlds of transnational human rights and local cultural practices and who can look both ways. They are powerful in that they serve as knowledge brokers between culturally distinct social worlds, but they are also vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by states and communities. In this article, I theorize the process of translation and argue that anthropological analysis of translators helps to explain how human rights ideas and interventions circulate around the world and transform social life.

/pdf/transnational-human-rights-and-local-activism-mapping-the-28v1kw84kx.pdf

Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle

Over the past four decades, violence against women (VAW) has come to be seen as a violation of human rights and an important concern for social policy. Yet government action remains uneven. Some countries have adopted comprehensive policies to combat VAW, whereas others have been slow to address the problem. Using an original dataset of social movements and VAW policies in 70 countries over four decades, we show that feminist mobilization in civil society—not intra-legislative political phenomena such as leftist parties or women in government or economic factors like national wealth—accounts for variation in policy development. In addition, we demonstrate that autonomous movements produce an enduring impact on VAW policy through the institutionalization of feminist ideas in international norms. This study brings national and global civil society into large-n explanations of social policy, arguing that analysis of civil society in general—and of social movements in particular—is critical to understanding progressive social policy change.

/pdf/the-civic-origins-of-progressive-policy-change-combating-19suq66po3.pdf

The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change: Combating Violence against Women in Global Perspective, 1975–2005

Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.

http://fcthighcourtelibrary.com/maitama/library/ebooks/eb10/Practice%20of%20human%20rights.pdf

The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines—comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law—have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism—the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space—are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practic...

/pdf/global-legal-pluralism-pqrxcpq4wu.pdf

Global Legal Pluralism

International law has enjoyed a recent renaissance as an important subfield of study within international relations. Two trends are evident in the recent literature. First, the obsession with theoretical labels is on the decline. Second, empirical, especially quantitative, work is burgeoning. This article reviews the literature in four issues areas—security, war, and peace; international trade; protection of the environment; and human rights—and concludes we have a much stronger basis for assessing claims about compliance and violation now than was the case only a few years ago. Still, the literature suffers from a few weaknesses, including problems of selection and endogeneity of treaties themselves and an enduring state-centric focus, despite the fact that researchers recognize that nonstate and substate actors influence treaty behavior. Nonetheless, the quality and quantity of new work demonstrates that international law has regained an important place in the study of international politics.

/pdf/treaty-compliance-and-violation-3k7ssm7kbv.pdf

Treaty Compliance and Violation

ity between and within each country, the former allows the rich in both poor and rich countries to “intermingle” in the calculation of global inequality, which is then fully decomposable into the between and within country components. What the survey data show is that global inequality first increased between 1988 and 1993 and then decreased from 1993 to 1998, reflecting the stagnation of poor rural areas of China and India in the first period, and the slight catching up of poor rural areas in the second period. Furthermore, Milanovic shows that previous attempts at capturing this type of inequality reach conflicting conclusions regarding the trend, which in turn reflect different assumptions and data sources, most of which bias the calculated results downward. The final section discusses the future of global inequality, and what can be done to redress it. Where previous studies express confidence in a declining global inequality trend, Milanovic is less confident, suggesting that we can be certain only that inequality is high. Furthermore, since the trend depends heavily on the performance of one country— China, predictions about future trends are speculative at best. Milanovic is certain about two things. First, global inequality is immoral. Second, redistribution is possible and would be both moral and efficient to the development of humanity as a whole.

Stacy K. McGoldrick

Papers

Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice: