REVIEW of WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalizing Age
Senthorun Raj, "Women's Human
Rights," Australian Feminist Studies 28.77 (2013): 327-329
Internationally, the pursuit of gender justice and women's
rights in the context of human rights advocacy has been a fraught political,
legal and cultural project. Exploring the development of transnational feminist
advocacy in the context of a number of international legal developments, Niamh
Reilly's Women's Human Rights (2009) urges us to consider the transformative
potential of cosmopolitan feminism in securing an end to violence, inequality
and discrimination against women around the world.
Reilly's ‘global’ political project begins by identifying a central problematic
in furthering women's human rights: can universal human rights norms be
mobilised in non-oppressive or exclusionary ways? (4) She begins by charting the
largely neoliberal institutional development of human rights discourse in global
governance. For Reilly, the cleaving of civil and political rights from
economic, social and cultural rights reflected the preference for an
individualist rather than institutional approach. That is, much of western
Europe and North America preferred a human rights model built on state
‘restraint’ (i.e. allowing free speech) rather than one that mandates ‘positive’
or resource-intensive obligations (i.e. provision of health care). This
conceptual division was subtended by a focus on human rights accountability
solely in the public sphere (25–29). Considered together, her work identifies
that the public/private and individual/institutional divides worked to exclude
women from human rights discourse, since most of their experiences of injustice
occurred in domestic contexts, exacerbated by a lack of institutional support
(33).
Reilly's first two chapters challenge these historical limits by bringing
cosmopolitan feminist theory and activism into conversation with international
human rights law. Rather than disavowing universal human rights as an intrusive
or neocolonial project with respect to individual states, Reilly argues that the
relationship between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’ ought to be
‘understood as an ongoing, multilevel process of negotiation, and not a fixed
and polarised binary’ (36). While noting the changing subject positions within
transnational advocacy for ‘women's human rights’, she suggests that the
emerging solidarities between activists in various socio-geographic locations
evince the potential for advancing a feminist project that can bridge the
connections between the global and local (8). Cosmopolitan feminism, therefore,
is not confined to a strictly legal project. Rather, her recurring references to
grassroots activists, international non-government organisations, United Nations
forums and academics remind us that a normative approach for progressing or
defending women's human rights requires multifaceted engagements.
By outlining the development of a number of international legal instruments
supporting women's rights, Reilly invites us to (re)consider the extent to which
a global human rights paradigm can be characterised as an ethnocentric
neoliberal imposition. Starting with the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women 1979 (CEDAW), developed during the UN
Decade for Women, Reilly commends the radical push in the 1970s to move beyond
formal legal equality and redress the structural inequalities that inhibit
women's dignity. In particular, she emphasises that this document was the first
of its kind proscribing discrimination in areas of both public and private life,
noting that states were accountable for condoning the actions of non-state
actors in the perpetration of violence against women (60–61). Specifically, the
convention draws attention to gendered dimensions of social life that enable
sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, sexual harassment and domestic violence.
Moving to the World Conference in Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, Reilly
illustrates the broad collaborations facilitated in preparation of the event:
regional meetings in Tunis, Costa Rica and Thailand; sub-regional forums held by
the Women in Law and Development in Africa; and a ‘strategic planning’ session
run by the US-based Center for Women's Global Leadership. Effectively, these
coalitions traversed the rudimentary North–South divisions, human rights NGOs,
grassroots women's networks and UN agencies (74). Reilly reminds us that
dismissing such political projects as ‘Western’ in orientation erases the
cross-cultural genesis of the global campaign for women's human rights. Even
though Reilly's point is astute, her considerable emphasis on international
institutional dialogues (particularly those related to UN bodies) limits her
ability to canvass some of the more disparate forms of the ‘bottom-up’
advocacy/activism she is interested in progressing. Indeed, how these grassroots
conversations were enabled in their local contexts is not comprehensively
discussed in her previous chapters.
Reilly's final three chapters explore a number of transnational feminist
advocacy projects and the progress/limits associated with them. This section of
the book covers the challenges that arise from acknowledging the systemic
history of violence while refusing to cast women as perpetual victims. While the
recognition of women's vulnerability to sexual violence in conflict and the
establishment of tribunals to prosecute it as a crime against humanity was a
momentous step forward in international criminal law, little progress has been
made at local levels to facilitate the participation of women in post-conflict
transitions. Primarily, the resurgence of patriarchal traditionalism coerces
women to resile from exercising political agency and urges them to occupy more
subordinate roles (114).
Moreover, Reilly notes that there has been disjuncture between humanitarian and
rights-based approaches to issues of gender social justice. While development
narratives recognise the material conditions that impact on the lives of women,
they rely on a humanitarian ethic that often sees women as passive recipients of
paternalist protection (122). Correspondingly, rights-based rhetoric emphasises
the need for individual agency, but the neoliberal underpinning often obscures
the structural impediments to the exercise of such agency (125). In responding
to the limits and possibilities of both approaches, Reilly stresses the need for
a fused human rights development paradigm. For example, this could include
recognising the obligations on states to provide access to quality health care
while removing legislative impositions on women seeking to exercise their
reproductive autonomy (130–138).
Despite the promising policy advances that have been made at the UN, Reilly
highlights that progress on women's human rights has been stymied by the rise of
‘fundamentalisms’. Cautioning against an orientalising politics that castigates
the ‘Third World’ for its ‘traditional values’, she notes that religion remains
a key locus for inhibiting the sexual and reproductive autonomy of women (144).
Instead of subscribing to a ‘Western’ liberation narrative or conceding a
culturally relativist respect, Reilly gestures to a local feminist praxis that
contests such fundamentalisms. Drawing on the advocacy work of the organisation
Women Living Under Muslim Laws, for example, she notes that instead of accepting
a homogenising claim of culture or identity, such an organisation works within
the local scriptural and ideological context to critically challenge attempts to
silence women (142–143). Embracing a critical sensitivity to local situations
while advancing transnational commitments to women's human rights is crucial.
Despite the analytic appeal of such an ethic, Reilly does not fully elaborate on
the discursive or ethical conditions that are necessary to define these
‘universal’ commitments.
Reilly's wide-ranging attempt to combine institutional, activist and historical
analysis of transnational feminist advocacy and women's human rights is
admirable. However, at times, the breadth of its coverage limits the depth of
analysis that the author is able to undertake. Despite this, Women's Human
Rights is a concise text that generates a number of important conversations
about the possibilities and challenges in pursuing a feminist vision of human
rights.
Reviewer: Senthorun Raj,
University of Sydney
© 2013 Senthorun Raj
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